Making A Clamp

Making a clamp is something to think about doing at this time of year. I make them to keep my beets, carrots and parsnips in during the course of the winter. Whenever want to eat some of those veggies, I just go to the lottie and dig some up.

I started thinking about making my clamp again when Biita told of her Victorian method of saving crops. (Of course packing in sand is not exclusively Victorian). It is probably the storage method of choice in really wet and extreme-freeze climate zones; however, here it's not so wet and not too cold.
Many products can be stored in a clamp during the winter, such as carrots,
beetroot, onions, apples, pears, turnips, potatoes and even roots from dahlia's and gladioli.

This is how I do it:

On the pictures you can see how we built a clamp for beetroots (beets). Should the leaves of the beetroots be taken off or not? Some say yes and others say no
because it can cause the beetroots to bleed. Still others say that they won't bleed if you twist the green off instead of cutting. We chose the middle way
and cut the stems off near the leaves, leaving quite long stems on the beetroots.

Get everything organized before beginning.

(1) First we dug a round hole approximately 30cm deep but square would be fine too.

(2) On the bottom goes a layer of straw but since we didn't have straw we used a pile of dry twigs.

(3) On this, we piled-up the beetroots in a pyramid shape. This pyramid can be half as high as the diameter of the hole so with a hole of 1m diameter, the pile can be 50cm high.

Here is a closer look.

(4) After that, we covered the beets with a 15cm layer of twigs. *Some folks prefer to use straw for this as well.

(5) Then a layer of soil, again 15cm thick. It would be good to make a ventilation hole in the middle and fill it in with straw. We simply stick a bamboo cane in there and remove it from time to time to let the clamp breathe.
(6) Finally we dug a trench around the clamp for proper drainage and the job was finished.

 

That is neat, but it stays way too wet for that in Louisiana. What else are you storing like this?

 

Hiyah C'belle.
I also store parsnips and carrots like this.

 

Looks like a light version of the earth cellars people used to make around here. Great tip!

 

That is so neat Sjored .It wouldn't work here either.

 

Very cool! Thats what used to be done here, but like Droopy said it was an earth cellar. We have an earth cellar, and thats where i do my storing for the winter. Its attached to uncles house. We have to have them inside a room, if we didn't we would never be able to find them again or get to them, from the freezing earth and snow.

But i got to thinking (oh no!) I think that could work in warmer climates. Heres why. Our summers up here are probably what the south would call winter, (southern North America) When i dig down far enough in the earth, its cold! But all that top soil is so hot. So if they dug down deeper than what is shown and insultated just like you show, i bet it would work. No matter what the weather is.

 

Thanks Eileen. I hope that you get lots and lots of stuff to store-away. Clamping is practical, but also lots of fun. We never have even one spoiled veg in the clamps.

Well Biita...that clamping method may be a bit old-fashioned, but it is what we have to do because there is no cool storage in our flat. When the freezer is full, it's the only method left open to us.

 

That is very close to the root cellars that most people had here until they got away from gardening a lot. I remember storing onions, potatoes, canned goods, and a lot of other vegetables in those when I was growing up.