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While much of the food we grow in home gardens can be stored by freezing--a delightful wonder we take too much for granted--some, notably including fruits, do not freeze well owing to the inevitable loss of texture: no one wants a soggy, mushy apple. Fortunately, many of our favorite fruits can be kept for quite a while, meaning a few to many months, by storing in conditions easily achieved: a temperature of about 30° to not over 36° and high humidity (ideally 90%).
Another consideration when storing fruits and vegetables is which ones emit ethylene gas, something that many do, and which ones are affected by ethylene. (That's why it's hard to store, say, apples and potatoes in the same root cellar--the gas from one affects the other.) The table further below lists fruits, and some vegetables, that are ethylene-compatible and so can all be stored together.
A simple, low-cost storage method is to purchase an old but functioning refrigerator--the bigger the better if we're growing a lot of fruit--and stick it out in the garage or some such place. Buy a decent refrigerator thermomemeter, an inexpensive purchase at any hardware store. Set the refrigerator to maximum cool (refrigerators usually run in the middle to upper 30s at "medium" settings), let it go for a day or so, and check the temperature (be quick or the thermometer reading will literally go up before your eyes). Adjust up if necessary and wait again. When it's running at 30° or 31°, you're set--almost. Two further complications are that: one, some refrigerators tend to "drive down" the temperature if they are not opened over a period of time, so look into that refrigerator every few days; and two, the temperature will not be uniform throughout the storage area--the bottom of will tend to be colder than the top--so put a tiny battery-operated fan somewhere in the middle of everything, and every time you do your eyeball check make sure it's still running (if it quits, change the batteries). The fan will help even out temperature differences and also promote air circulation.
(You could also try a small plug-in fan with an extension cord running out through a tiny slit in the door seal.)
To give you an idea of volumes needed, for apples, one cubic foot of refrigerator will hold about 0.6 bushel. (It will actually hold 0.8 bushel, but we need to leave space for air circulation.) The way to go about placing fruit in such a refrigerator is to use the available shelves so that there is some air space distributed around all the apples.
Relative humidity in refrigerators is quite low, particularly in "frost-free" types. It is thus vital that the fruit (or vegetables) first be placed in plastic bags. The bags should have some holes or perforations for air circulation, to avoid excess moisture build-up and to allow gas exchange (that is, to vent the ethylene). It wouldn't hurt to place a bowl of water somewhere inside, though it might freeze; replace it every time you check the refrigerator.
Here is a list of the fruits and vegetables you can store together this way (we're not even sure what some of those are, but they're all on the list):
If you find this site interesting or useful, please link to it on your site by cutting and pasting this HTML:
The <a href="http://growingtaste.com/"><b>Growing Taste</b></a> Vegetable-Gardening Site
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