Food storage in the basement

Hi dere, and welcome to da basement, eh!

I haven't written anything homesteading related in probably a month, so I decided to write about my food storage arrangements in my basement. I had to set up a place to store the food and produce from the garden a few years ago, and it keeps evolving as the need requires. I store my canned foods in one place in the basement and the potatoes and carrots in another area.

First the canned food area. When I moved into the house, there was a small room in the middle of the basement that had a couple shelves on one wall. That room got cleaned out and rearranged a bit to store stuff in. Last summer, we decided that we needed more food storage space in the basement due to a lack of space upstairs. We cleaned out the room again and put a lot of the jars of food on the shelves. I also have a couple of buckets with airtight lids for storing dry goods like pasta and rice. This is what the little room looks like.

The other room is what I call the "cold room". I built this in the far corner of the basement to take advantage of the cold basement wall in the winter. The room is about 3 and a half feet by 4 and a half feet on the inside. I have it insulated on the inside walls to help hold the cold in. I originally had an inch of foam board on the inside of the walls, but last year I added more insulation because the room wasn't staying cold enough to keep the potatoes from sprouting over the course of the winter. I used the insulation board with the foil faces to add to the interior walls.
This is what it looks like from the basement. Notice the zucchinis that I still have. :-)

We brought the old refrigerator into the basement earlier this year to use for storing carrots because I can't get the cold room cold enough to keep carrots from sprouting. I can keep the refrigerator at about 36-38 degrees, better for the carrots.

So, lets look in the cold room. The first thing you'll notice is all my bottles of home made wine that I keep in the room. It keeps them cold and in the dark.

The tubs and boxes on the left side on the floor are holding the potatoes that I have in storage. These are almost all Yukon Gold potatoes. We eat the reds first because they don't store well for very long. I keep folded up sheets on top of the boxes to to help hold in the cold and to keep the light out. Even in storage, potatoes will turn green over time if they're exposed to light. Since the top of the interior walls of the room are not sealed, some light does filter into the room. Being open between the floor joists above the room also keeps the room from getting too cold, it lets a little warm air into the top of the room.