A new store room

We have a basement room that is not in use. About 10 years ago my son Brian turned it into his music room .We called it "the drum room" . It's damp in the summer and cold in the winter, but my father had built in some wonderful shelves years ago. So I'm turning it into my root/fruit cellar. I moved all my beautiful jars of preserved food. The lower shelves I filled with baskets holding apples, onions, garlic. sweet potatoes, and winter squash. Other shelves are filled with nuts, grains, dried beans, dehydrated apples, berries , onions, herbs and spices. I also moved the 50 pound bags of potatoes I got from the farm there . Hopefully they'll last longer down there that is , not sprout so fast. I still need to block out the light coming in from the small windows. Light might discolor some of the food in jars and also encourage potatoes to sprout.

I love looking at full shelves of food that I have "put up". I love the juxtaposition of colors and shapes in the jars. Ground beef next to white potato, next to tomatoes, next to pickles, next to sweet potato, next to pineapple. Beautiful. I am so thankful that I can "can" and that we ha place to store it. How wonderful it is when I want to prepare a meal, to go there with a shopping and fill it with what ever I need. But the idea that we have a food storage to use is hard times is even better.