Storage rooms for vegetables come in from the cold
Cold storage rooms are a hot property for gardeners in Ottawa keen to preserve the bounty of summer
When looking for a new home, some people look first at the number of bedrooms or the curb appeal. Gardener Caroline Agnew was delighted to find a cold storage room to hold her homegrown vegetables over the winter.
She found what she wanted in a post-war house in Vanier, and realized that many of the homes on her street also contained the traditional room.
Cold storage rooms are small spaces in the basement or under the front porch with no insulation. Back when people didn’t have refrigerators, they were a cool place for perishable vegetables like potatoes and onions.
Agnew’s cold room is a small room in the basement with pipes going through the walls to the outside to allow for air circulation. “I hadn’t even realized that these were a ‘thing’ in our climate until we went on the market for our first house,” she says.
“As an avid gardener with all kinds of ideas about how to make my home as eco-friendly as possible, I was excited to find a house with a large established vegetable garden as well as a cold store. We are just off of St. Laurent Boulevard, so we could do it right in the middle of the city.”
Her family planted an apple tree and is “hoping that we get more than two apples eventually, which will certainly need storage. I think we’ll need to re-think the air exchange system too, and insulate the ceiling. It’s right under my daughter’s bedroom, and makes it quite cold in there in winter. It’s a concept that I think is really interesting, but I still need to learn more about how to use it properly.”
Julia Laforge is planning to build a cold store at her home; her parents in Saskatchewan have one, and she intends to base her design on that.
“My parents live in a house built in the 1980s. It wasn’t a design standard at the time, so they were lucky to have it,” she says. “We had a huge, huge, garden and grew up using it all the time; it just seemed very practical.”
When she and her husband were house-hunting two years ago, they were trying to find a house with a cold room, “but we realized it couldn’t be a make-or-break or we wouldn’t find a house.”
They bought a split level near Mooney’s Bay without one, and now intend to build one when they finish the basement. Meanwhile, there’s a space about one foot-byone foot, ” a little cubby” she uses to store vegetables grown in her backyard.
“The sunny backyard was top of the list, even more important than the house itself.”
Hannah Yang lives in the Queensway Terrace North neighbourhood and has a cold storage room located in her basement. “It is probably one of my favourite rooms in this house, which was originally built by an Italian family,” she says.
“In the summer it becomes a bit too humid but is still cooler than the rest of the house. For the rest of the year it stays dry and cold. Potatoes and onions would last months in the cold room. It’s also used for storage of wine, tomato sauce and outdoor bonsai during the winter months.
“This house was custom built for the family themselves, and they have a second kitchen in the basement,” she says.
As an avid gardener ... I was excited to find a house with a large established vegetable garden as well as a cold store. CAROLINE AGNEW
“The second kitchen also has stove so they can cook the tomato sauce and then store it. The original owners had their relatives living next door. In August they’d do hundreds of pounds of tomatoes and store sauce in the storage room.”
It was the isolation due to COVID-19 that got Yang into gardening, which she usually didn’t have time for before. She was pleased to get a lot of gardening tips from her neighbours on Alpine Avenue with large backyards.
“I can’t see anyone who wouldn’t want a cold storage if they bought a house with one,” she says. “They should put them in new houses.”
Homeowner Jacqueline Warren has a cold store under the front step of her 1961-built home in Ottawa’s west end. “I think many of the homes in my neighbourhood have cold stores,” says Warren, who moved there in 2005.
“There were two apple trees in the backyard given out in 1967,” she says. “It was the fall and they were full of apples.”
The next summer she filled the whole south facing backyard with raspberries, blueberries and all kinds of vegetables, including pumpkins and beets. She started canning at that time and stored them on the shelves.
“We cleaned the cold room up after moving in, and I use it all the time,” she says. “In fact, I want a bigger one.
“I store a dozen or more cabbages in the fall, sauerkraut crocks, onions, and often boxes of beets and carrots that can last until May. Oh, and some cider that I brew. It is a little warm right now, but that will change shortly. I cannot live without one now!”
They have two vents they open and close depending on the season. At the end of September and early October she’ll open the vents and cool it down. “It doesn’t freeze at all during the winter.”
This summer has been one of her better seasons — “because I’m home and able to pick weeds and tend to it.”
She stored a 10-pound bag of beets and carrots and had vegetables all winter. “Try and find a fresh beet in February!”
She also buys fresh produce at the market, such as a dozen or more cabbages for $1.50 a cabbage, and they keep all winter.
And if you don’t have your own cold storage, the queen of cold storage has been built by the Deep Roots Food Hub.
Deep Roots Food Hub, a non-profit group based in West Carleton, has built an aboveground and off-grid root storage structure on NCC land. Their community-funded facility provides small-scale vegetable growers with a post-season sustainable and energy-efficient storage facility providing longer root crop storage and extended sales and/or distribution possibilities.
I store a dozen or more cabbages in the fall, sauerkraut crocks, onions, and often boxes of beets and carrots that can last until May.