I keep a detailed garden journal, and I’ve used the same notebook for years. In the back of the notebook, I maintain space for a list of ideas that I think I might try someday. One such note caught my eye this year. The note reads: “Makeshift root cellar- bury a 5 gallon bucket up to its rim. Fill with carrots, top with plastic, cover with hay.” Unfortunately, past me did not leave a citation, so I can’t trace the lineage of this idea and provide proper attribution. But, I think it’s going to work. I have previously enjoyed great success storing carrots packed in buckets of damp sand in an unheated attached garage. I no longer have that garage and I didn’t grow carrots this year, but I did grow a great abundance of sunchokes. I decided to test this idea on them.

I considered a number of factors when deciding where to locate these buckets, as I hope to use them for many years. Digging the hole is not a massive effort, but it is a non-trivial amount of work, and I prefer not to re-do it every year. I wanted a location that would be easy to access, protected from most animal predators, and one that would not reduce my available gardening space during the growing season. I eventually decided to bury them right in the garden, with one bucket between each pair of raised beds. I don’t think the buried bucket will impede passage between beds as long as the lid is on.

A note about buckets. There’s a restaurant chain called Firehouse Subs. If you live near one of these places, you can get a wonderful recycled bucket complete with lid from them. They use 5 gallon plastic buckets to store their pickles, and when the pickles are all eaten, they sell the bucket and the lid for a low price, and you get to rescue a discarded item from the waste stream. Win-win.

All-in-all, I burried four buckets and layered them all full of sunchokes and damp sand. That’s three buckets of sunchokes for eating, and one bucket of sunchokes for replanting in the spring. I look forward to enjoying this healthy, delicious, native plant root vegetable all winter long. As always, I’ll keep detailed notes and let you know how this goes!