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["Erdman, James" <ErdmanJ@uwstout.edu>]

Hello

What we have been doing for the last few years to store apples is to use our picnic ice chests.  The first year that we tried it, it was going to be temporary.  We have a half-dozen or so bearing apple trees, strictly for our own use, and after sorting through the apples and making cider we usually have a few bushels of nice apples of storage varieties that we would put in large plastic bags and then into old plastic milk crates, the cubical kind.  The problem that I felt we had with this system was that it was hard to cool the apples quickly after picking and sorting them, as we didn’t have enough refrigerator space to do that.  For many years I would stack the crates of apples under the overhang of the milk house or the garage, moving them inside during the day, so that they would cool off overnight and then not warm up too much in the daytime. 

 

Then I decided that I should try  putting them in our picnic coolers, which are fairly good sized.  And then I bought a few more coolers/ ice chests at garage sales, and I had enough coolers/chests to hold most of the apples I wanted to store to eat fresh over the winter.  We found that opening the ice chest of apples at night to take advantage of the cooler night air, and closing them up during the day and keeping them out of the sun, cooled the apples fairly quickly, especially if we had also washed them in fresh cold well water, and that they didn’t warm up much if the lid was closed on the ice chest during the day.  We had intended to move them to the basement root cellar later in the fall, but instead moved them in to the garage when it got below freezing outside.  By the time it was too cold in the garage, we had consumed some of them so there were fewer chests of fruit to move, and we moved them into the entry way of the house.  This has worked well for us.  By this time of year, the supply of apples is down to one or two chests and I sort them again and move them to the spare refrigerator that we use seasonally, in the end of the garage.  Last year there were a few Northwestern Greenings left in mid-June, and there might be some that late again this year.  I ate all of the more appealing apples already, so I’m not sure how long other varieties  would store.  The apples we stored included Regent,  Newtosh,  Sweet 16, Melrose, others I forget at the moment, and some others not identified from friends.

 

The thing that I think made a lot of difference in using this method to store apples is using a cheap remote reading thermometer to monitor the temperatures of the apples in the ice chests without having to open the ice chest.  I have been trying out a couple of kinds of wired and wireless thermometers, and like the idea of the wireless ones that also record the high and low temps.

 

We are also using the same system to store our carrots, cabbage, and kohlrabi, with good success—we are still eating last year’s carrots, and finished the cabbage not long ago.

 

Jim, in Menomonie, WI,  cold side of zone 4

 

From: nafex-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:nafex-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Mark Dorogi
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:57 PM
To: 'North American Fruit Explorers'
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Thinning

 

My understanding regarding apple storage is that you want the temperature at or slightly above freezing and the humidity near 100%.  I stored some last fall in the drawer in the bottom of the fridge, sealed in ziplock bags to keep the moisture in.  They kept quite well.

 

But that was only 20 or 30 apples, so you are right.  What would I do if I got 500 good apples?  Go out and get a couple used fridges?  Well, maybe one big fridge in the garage would work. It wouldn’t have to run that much in the cool/cold weather, but it would keep the apples cold during any warm spells (storage life goes down rapidly as the temperature goes up).  I’m not sure if the humidity level would be right, but I suppose that could be managed. 

 

I wondered if one of the local friendly small supermarkets had a walk-in cooler where I could trade a few apples for some storage space…

 

 

Mark

SE Michigan