Overwintering carrots?

First I don't have a proper root cellar or any way to make one. I have used wooden crates and wood baskets. I have tried newspaper strips, wood shavings, and also sand. None of them seem to work. All of them the carrots either rot or dry into rope fibers.

So, how do you overwinter your carrots?

TIA

How many carrots are we talking? For smaller amounts, I've kept them in my fridge for months at a time. One year I packed all the drawers in my fridge with carrots. I put a damp towel on the bottom, filled the drawer with carrots, and put another damp towel on top. The towels slowly dried out,  so from time to time I'd spray the top towel with water. The last of the carrots were a little hairy, but still crisp.

We scrub our carrots very thoroughly, tip and tail them, and store in plastic bags in the fridge with paper towels to sop up excess moisture. The paper towels need to be changed a couple of times, but the old ones dry out and are usable for cleaning. Our carrots keep for a whole year -- we're using the last of them for soup while eating new ones fresh from the garden.

That may not be perfectly permie, but the quality is incomparible. It's way better than relying on taste-free carrots ("tent pegs") trucked in from 1,500 miles away.

Another way is to leave them in the ground, mulched heavily with hay/straw.  

Homesteaders I know will dig half their carrots for use in the late fall and early winter.  They'll do this by going down their long bed of carrots and digging up blocks of them.  So in a 40' bed they might leave the first 4', dig the next 3', leave the next 4', dig the next 3' and so on.  Cover it with lots of insulation and put a flag so they can find it in the snow.  When they need more carrots in January, dig up the first 4' section of carrots.  By disturbing the straw, frost will be able to get into the ground (even if they perfectly reinsulate it).  But that frost won't cross the 3' area where they dug in the fall.  So the next 4' section of carrots is safe till they need another batch in Feb.

I put mine in a bucket of sand/dirt and in a cold room. That seems to be working for both carrots and beets.

I piled mulch high on one of my garden beds and can still dig dirt from under the mulch.
So maybe I could leave more in the ground over winter.
I think what has destroyed them before when leaving them in the ground with a bunch of mulch,
was freezing then thawing a few times during the winter.

Mike Haasl wrote:Another way is to leave them in the ground, mulched heavily with hay/straw.  

I've hear of that. I believe it would work well in areas with milder winters than ours.

What’s your climate like? You may be able to leave them in the ground.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Mike Haasl wrote:Another way is to leave them in the ground, mulched heavily with hay/straw.  

I've hear of that. I believe it would work well in areas with milder winters than ours.

It's here in zone 4a.  -30F usually once a winter...

We get a couple -20s, or -25 or a rare -30Fs per winter.
I've left a small patch in the ground, covered in mulch, for the last couple years.
Just so I'd have some fresh ones in the spring.
One winter I didn't cover them with mulch and they rotted.
Haven't thought about harvesting them through the winter, until recently.

Bethany Brown wrote:What’s your climate like? You may be able to leave them in the ground.

I doubt it, though I suppose I could experiment with a small patch. It would take a helluva deep and wide insulation pile. We get sustained periods of -20C, dipping down to -30C or even -40C. Nominal frost line is 6 ft /2m deep. The ground is frozen solid from November through the end of March.

Where I live in the Indian Himalayas, with pretty cold winters (6 weeks of pond hockey), the traditional root storage method was to dig a hole in the garden every year, deep enough so the sacks of roots could be kept below the frost line, which at my location is about 3 feet. So you lower in sacks of potatoes, carrots, radishes or rutabagas, and cover them back over with soil. Or use sacks of sawdust for part of the covering so that it will be easier to lift out. They keep very well this way. Beets would also keep fine, but the yummiest local root veg, turnips, sadly don't last past about New Years in most cases.

The soil under the garden stays at a good humidity, and well... roots like being in soil, don't they? Of course this won't work into springtime when the ground warms up and the garden is needed for growing new things.

Rebecca Norman wrote:Where I live in the Indian Himalayas, with pretty cold winters (6 weeks of pond hockey), the traditional root storage method was to dig a hole in the garden every year, deep enough so the sacks of roots could be kept below the frost line, which at my location is about 3 feet. So you lower in sacks of potatoes, carrots, radishes or rutabagas, and cover them back over with soil. .

Rebecca, how do you manage to fetch root vegetables from that pit? Dig it open every two weeks???

Yes, I guess so. Pull some root veggies out and then keep and use them for a few weeks. I also realized after I posted, that because this is a desert, the topsoil doesn't freeze hard unless you water it (a mistake I made the first time I tried this method).

We have for many years now overwintered our carrots by placing them under a foot or two of straw mulch, placing the mulch over the carrot rows and off to the sides to prevent frost from creeping in from the sides.
In the fall around first frost we dig several bushels, wash them, and place them in bushel baskets filled with straw in our root cellar.
The remaining carrots under the straw mulch are dug up periodically through the winter.
We haven't found a satisfactory way to store carrots throughout the entire winter indoors as ours also either tend to mold or get rubbery and dry up.

We're in Minnesota and the winners get to minus 40° Fahrenheit and we have successfully overwintered them under this mulch, we have had problems with rodents looking for an easy meal eating a good percentage of the carrots.
By overwintering them in this manner you also have seed stock that will readily sprout the next spring and provide a good crop of carrot seeds.
In the accompanying picture we had to snowshoe to the garden and dig the carrots up from under 2 ft of snow and the mulch, as you can see they did quite well. They were dug on January 15th.

Rebecca Norman wrote:...root storage method was to dig a hole in the garden every year, deep enough so the sacks of roots could be kept below the frost line...

Aaugh!  I've been hand-digging to make a root cellar but I didn't even think of just doing the same thing for food storage that I already do to overwinter some corms and tubers.  A few minutes with a shovel in my dry garden, bury a bucket with wire mesh on top for varmints, ignore until next year.  It's not like I have apples or anything.

Are those gunny sacks or the woven poly kind?

Just got back from digging another fresh batch of carrots out of the garden. Was a little more like work this time, as I had to dig through two and a half feet of hard snow just to get down to the straw. I needed a snow shovel, a spade shovel,and a pitchfork , however as you can see my efforts were well rewarded.  Us folks up here in Minnesota are wondering if this winter is ever going to end.  Well that's living in Minnesota, we embrace diversity!!

Cool stuff, Rich. Thanks for posting.

I'm going to dig into the middle of my slow compost / woodchip pile and see if the ground below is frozen or not. There's a massive snowbank on top --  I put it there myself, clearing the adjacent path and watering the adjacent apple trees.

We already have a proven system, of course, and we'll stick with it. But I need to know what's down there!

Douglas, so what did you find under your compost wood chip pile? I'm guessing the ground wasn't frozen.

I haven't gotten into it yet. Spring is slow in coming this year and it still freezes hard every night -- meaning the top of the slow compost pile is a rock hard block of ice requiring a pick to get into. That's a lot of effort better spent elsewhere. I'm curious, but I'll wait a bit.

Still digging carrots fresh out of the garden from last fall. Dug up about 5 lb yesterday the 23rd of April.
If we're lucky we might make it full circle, till we're eating carrot thinning from this year's garden.

I have been digging holes and removing stumps, and anywhere there was moisture I have to swing a pick to chop out a few inches of hard frozen soil.

I will open up the chip/compost pile shortly. We'll see. It would be a great risk to put the effort of growing into an uncontrolled space. But we'll see.

Meanwhile we brought an giant cooler of very nice carrots to neighbours who appreciate them. They are amazed that this is possible, and asking how to do this. Carrots harvested in September last year, and ready to munch out of the bag.

OVER -WINTERING "CARROTS" ?
Well not exactly. Went up to the garden to start this year's preparations, and found these. These "parsnips" were volunteer seeds from our 2021 seed parsnips. We left them where they were, gardening around them throughout 2022, and they came up this spring all bushy and green. Well onions were going in that area this year, so we had to dig some of them up and they will be steamed for supper.
For anyone unfamiliar with parsnips they are the easiest root crop to grow perennially. The seeds will literally fall on the ground and take root, they don't need any special care at all and will do fine all by themselves. They will overwinter without any cover even to temperatures below minus 40 f. Then they will vigorously come up the following year, and if you dig them up before they put out seed stalks, you can have an early spring vegetable on your table. Leave them in the ground and you'll soon have more seeds than you know what to do with. Such is the cycle of the parsnip !