North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Mauch1@aol.com]

Thanks for the information, I believe it will be useful.

One other thought I had:
Could I wall off and insulate a part of my basement and install a room air 
conditioner to cool off that room?  I probably would need to run some sort of 
humidifier as well.  The AC exhaust would go into the rest of the basement.  
Any thoughts on the viability of this?  It would probably challenge my 
construction and technical skills.

Chris Mauchline
SE PA, zone 6

>Small-scale ground temperature storage can reportedly be crafted by using a 
>clay drain pipe and
>sinking it in the ground.  You could probably also get the same effect by 
>cutting holes in the
>bottom of a trash can and sinking it into the ground.
>
>I used to rent a large root cellar for $15/month.  I was never able to use 
>it to its full
>potential, unfortunately.  Through experience with it I saw a few guidelines 
>for unrefrigerated
>storage large or small:
>1] ventilate to outside air
>2] holes plugged so mice don't get in [aluminum foil crushed in hand worked 
>well]
>3] best if apples don't touch each other  [e.g. a tray is good]
>4] humidity is necessary - like 95% - a dirt bottom will probably supply 
>this.
>5] you will get as many months as the apple variety's storage characteristic 
>allows.  [e.g. you
>won't get 5 months out of Delicious or Gala]
>6] to gauge the success of your unrefrigerated storage method, use a variety 
>that really is a
>storage variety - e.g. Northern Spy - don't gauge it by the success of 
>varieties that are said
>to be storage varieties but aren't such great storers really - e.g. Golden 
>Russet and even
>Baldwin.
>7] anything that has enough ground contact will never freeze in U.S. 
>latitudes.
>8] take an inventory.  you may not be growing any varieties at all that are 
>real storers.  Lots
>of varieties will keep a month, which is great, but if you want to pull 
>apples out of storage
>when prices are high, in February, they won't be Galas or Delicious etc.   
>You've got to have
>access to real storage varieties to pull prime marketable fruit out of 
>storage in February.
>9]  Think your harvest times out.  When Gala ripens, it isn't cold.  What 
>difference does it
>make if Gala stores perfect for 2 months?  Say its ripe September 1.  Two 
>months later is
>November 1, the ripen date for one of the Golden Delicious strains Stark 
>Bros. used to sell [or
>may still sell].  Why haul Gala to storage [and it isn't even cold enough 
>then for
>unrefrigerated storage] to pull it out 2 months later, when you could have 
>picked Golden
>Delicious right then on November 1, and not bothered to haul it to storage?  
>So you need a
>late-ripening-sure-storage variety [and I mean verified, not "I heard it 
>stores" or "it keeps
>well in the refrigerator."]
>10] Don't ever compare ground storage to the commercial high-energy-input 
>storage practiced
>commercially.  They pull varieties out of storage that aren't storage 
>varieties at all [like
>Delicious and Macintosh strains, for example]  You're not commercial and you 
>don't want to be,
>and you can't do as they do and get away with using nonstoring varieties.
>11] Also don't compare storage in a refrigerator to root cellar storage.
>
>Isn't it amazing what apples cost in the supermarket in January?  It's a 
>challenge with a
>possible hefty payoff if you can pull quality apples out of storage in 
>January, if you can get
>the right variety into the right storage and pull quality apples out.  And 
>you can, too, but it
>isn't as easy as it looks.  It wasn't worth my time to spray my own apples 
>and store them
>myself.  It wasn't an efficient use of my time and I didn't enjoy spraying.  
>I never hooked up
>with the right supplier of grown apples, so I stopped storing in root 
>cellar.  If I'd had the
>right source of Northern Spy I'd have kept storing and would have tried to 
>sell during January
>and February and March.
>Charlie Paradise
>Masachusetts/zone 5
>
>