all is safely gathered in...

A corner of the garage that is part of our winter food store.

Potatoes (Nicola and Kestrel) are bagged (reused paper sacks).
Summer and winter onions have been dried in the greenhouse and are now easily to hand.

As we collect our apples we store them in reused plastic trays.

The freezer is full to bursting with sweetcorn, beetroot, raspberries, blackberries, green beans, calabrese, peas, asparagus ...... it goes on!

The cupboards are filled with jams and pickles.

Dried peas are in jars and we wait now for the beans to dry so that they can be stored too.

There is a programme on television called 'Land Girls' about women who worked on the land during the second world war. Although we don't have rationing, those land girls would certainly feel at home with us!

my own superstore?

One day you realise that your kitchen is not only tired, it's exhausted!!!!!!!!

...And then you begin to think about making a few changes and then...... and then....

Our centrally heated and modern home has no place for the storage of the food we grow in our garden and allotment. Then, in my mind I've overlept my difficulties storing food by knocking a door through from the kitchen into the garage and converting the garage into a place for storing food: my own superstore!

And in my fever I had reused kitchen cabinets, worktops and sink. Walls had been freshly whitewashed and floor painted and the up-and-over door insulated to regulate temperature.

There is a place to wash vegetables brought from the allotment rather than bringing mud into the house. I am storing home-made preserves and jams in jars made from seasonal surplus onions or apples or soft fruits.

I had increased freezer space so that we had proper room for homemade bread, vegetables and soft fruit grown ourselves as well as surplus apples pressed and their juice frozen.

Sacks of stored own grown potatoes.

Boxes of our own grown stored dessert and cooking apples.

Bags of stored shallots and strings of red and white onions and garlic.

Pumpkins and squashes hanging in bags.

And a new plan for 2009 - a reused fridge to store home made cheese.

As well as seed potatoes, onion and shallot sets ready for next season's planting.

Am I turning into a Hobbit????????!!!!!!!!

cellar

Nowadays, we are rightly encouraged to make sure that our houses are insulated to conserve energy. New homes have high standards of thermal efficiency and in future, these standards will be higher still.

But, as we become more aware of our impact on our environment, we need to look more closely at what we want our homes to do. Do modern homes meet our environmental needs?

There has been a phenomenal interest in growing our own fruit and vegetables over the past few years. Not only does this provide us with healthy exercise, it provides us with high quality fresh food that has been grown on our doorstep. This is not a fad, but a change in lifestyle that will persist.

But home-produced food is awkward: it comes in gluts. It can’t be eaten at one sitting and so we need give thought to how we store surpluses. Our modern reaction is to freeze. So, our freezers become chock full of beans, broccoli, and blackberries. But freezing isn’t always the best option for storing. This year’s apple harvest was exceptional, but freezing all those apples is not practicable or appropriate. Carrots can be frozen, but storage in clamps or peat would work as well. To make the best of it, we must learn from our forebears.

This brings me back to my question about house design. Modern houses take little account of the need for food storage. In our first home, a 1930’s house, we had a cellar that had a constant temperature of 50 degrees F. It had a slab for cool meat storage and gave lots of opportunities for cool storage of fruit and vegetables. It was a fantastic conditioner of home brewed beer too!

Our modern home and garden doesn’t give us the same opportunities. Garages and sheds become too warm in summer and too cold in winter. Our small gardens don’t easily give us space for the root cellars that are common in North America. Our kitchens do not always have storage space for a years worth of preserves and conserves.

The answer is simple. Let’s return to designing homes that take account of our need to save food: our own superstore.