Quick & Easy Ways to Store Your Carrots Until Spring

There are six ways to store carrots for the winter: canning, freezing, pickling, dehydrating, cold storage in a root cellar, and refrigeration. Do it right and you can easily supply yourself with carrots until spring!

Some of these ways take more time, effort, or resources than others. I’ll go through each way, showing you how to do it (or providing a link), as well as talk about some of the pros and cons of each method.

Wondering how to store your carrots so they'll last until Spring? I'll show you six ways: refrigeration, root cellar, pressure canning, pickling, freezing, and dehydrating. #carrots #canning #pickling #preserving #storage #gardening #harvest

Storing Carrots in the Refrigerator

This is the method I use and is the easiest and quickest of all the methods. Unfortunately, it is not zero waste and requires that you have a decent amount of fridge space or an extra fridge.

Wash your carrots and remove the greens.
Fill a clear, plastic bag with carrots and add a sheet of paper towel.
Tie the bag shut and poke a few holes in the plastic with a fork.
Store in the refrigerator.
Check carrots once a month and remove any mouldy or soft carrots.

Store Carrots in a Root Cellar

Before you reject this idea, thinking you don’t have a root cellar–think again. If you live in a warmer climate, you can easily make your own root cellar with a trash can or cooler dug into the ground. Here’s a comprehensive post on the different ways you can create your own root cellar from the Prairie Homestead.

In researching making my own root cellar, I found posts suggesting you could do this project from Zones 3-9, as long as you put more insulation on top of the lid the lower your growing zone is. I live in Zone 3, and while I could see this working, I really wouldn’t want to trudge out into my yard in the middle of a stretch of -30 and piles of snow drifts to go collect my carrots and potatoes. If you have tried this idea in a lower growing zone, let me know how it worked (or not) in the comments!

Not keen on the whole outdoor root cellar idea? You can always store your carrots in a container in your basement or heated garage with insulation. Here’s how.

Put a small layer of insulation on the bottom of a large cardboard box or plastic tub. Insulation materials can be sand, shredded newspaper, sawdust, or leaves.
Put a layer of unwashed carrots on top of the layer of insulation.
Put another layer of insulation over your unwashed carrots.
Repeat until the container is full.

Warning: Your carrots might still get mushy using this method if your basement or heated garage is damp.

RELATED: HOW TO PRESERVE ONIONS UNTIL SPRING

Freezing Carrots

Freezing carrots has a few steps to it, but is less intensive than pressure canning. If you are going to use your carrots within a month, it is okay to clean them and freeze them in bags without boiling them. Storing them for longer? You’ll need to follow these steps so you don’t lose out on colour, flavour and nutrition:

Wash carrots, remove greens and peel.
Slice into your desired shape–cubes, coins, or shredded.
Boil carrots for 3 minutes
Transfer carrots into a large bowl filled with water and ice for 3 minutes.
Remove carrots and store them in freezer-safe bags.

RELATED: WHAT GROWS IN ZONE 3

Quick Pickled Carrots

If you enjoy pickled carrots, pickling them is an easy way to preserve your harvest–especially if you skip the canning step and put your jars in the fridge. I personally have never pickled carrots, but here are a few recipes to get you started:

Simple Refrigerator Sweet Pickled Carrots from the Kitchen Magpie
Quick and Easy Refrigerator Pickled Carrots from the Domestic Dreamboat
How to Make Quick Pickled Carrots from the Pioneer Woman

If you have a bit more time, you can can these recipes in a water bath to store out of the fridge!

Canning Carrots in a Pressure Canner

If you have the time and inclination, you can can the year’s carrot harvest with a pressure canner. Do not use a water bath to can carrots! Carrots are a basic vegetable, and a water bath can not kill all the bad bacteria unless the carrots are pickled.

I personally would be unlikely to use this method, but if you have a pressure canner and the time, here’s how to do it.

Dehydrating Carrots

I’ve also never personally dehydrated carrots, but I do own a dehydrator, and I can see this being a fairly easy way to preserve the harvest without refrigeration. Basically, the steps are exactly the same as freezing carrots, except the last step is to put them in the dehydrator, not the freezer. Because I know you’re not going to scroll up, here are the directions:

Wash carrots, remove greens and peel.
Slice into your desired shape. (Cubes, coins, or shredded)
Boil carrots for 3 minutes
Transfer carrots into a large bowl filled with water and ice for 3 minutes.
Layer cooled carrots into the dehydrator and dehydrate for
Dry at 125 degrees until dry and crispy. Check every few hours, or follow guidelines on your dehydrator.

How do you store your carrots for the winter?

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Maven

We have done the hole (a fancy hole!) in the ground method and it absolutely works in zone 2b. We’ve had it for close to 12 years now. We buried a 10ft long by 5ft wide piece of culvert standing on end to make a shaft then built a framed, insulated “roof” for it at ground level with a smaller opening lid in the middle. There’s a vent in the lid (which is key, since one year we neglected to clear the snow for an extended period of time and everything was very damp and mouldy down there when we finally went to open it up). We partially inserted screws (the kind with a smooth section on the shaft next to the head) all around the inside of the opening and use paracord with hooks (“8” hooks with one side pried out a bit) on the end to hang burlap sacks fastened with zip ties. Having it outside, we’ve found the key is to store smaller quantities in each bag so that grabbing veggies doesn’t involve digging thru the bags. Just grab and go. Some drawbacks: During a particularly wet year there was standing water in the bottom of the hole. But it was gone by the fall, so no adverse effects. And there’s no way to keep an eye on and remove the odd spoiling veggie. It WILL affect the ones touching it in the bag. Be choosey when deciding which to store and put questionable ones in a bag labeled “use first” and it’s mostly fine. Potatoes can be good well into May, beets and turnips a month before that and carrots only stay really good until about February (although I’m trying a few things, like adding wood chips to their bags and using plastic inside the burlap, so maybe I’ll find a way to make them go longer. If things are damp they don’t seem to like that and they tend to absorb musty, dirt flavours.) Onions are another that doesn’t like damp, but they’ve been good for a couple months, along with winter squash, bulbs (in sawdust) and I am trying out storing jars of ferments down there this year in a crate. The colder the winter the better things store. As the weather warms up it isn’t as cold down there and the odd bag we’ve forgotten over the summer sprouts and rots.

Comments

Maven

We have done the hole (a fancy hole!) in the ground method and it absolutely works in zone 2b. We’ve had it for close to 12 years now. We buried a 10ft long by 5ft wide piece of culvert standing on end to make a shaft then built a framed, insulated “roof” for it at ground level with a smaller opening lid in the middle. There’s a vent in the lid (which is key, since one year we neglected to clear the snow for an extended period of time and everything was very damp and mouldy down there when we finally went to open it up). We partially inserted screws (the kind with a smooth section on the shaft next to the head) all around the inside of the opening and use paracord with hooks (“8” hooks with one side pried out a bit) on the end to hang burlap sacks fastened with zip ties. Having it outside, we’ve found the key is to store smaller quantities in each bag so that grabbing veggies doesn’t involve digging thru the bags. Just grab and go. Some drawbacks: During a particularly wet year there was standing water in the bottom of the hole. But it was gone by the fall, so no adverse effects. And there’s no way to keep an eye on and remove the odd spoiling veggie. It WILL affect the ones touching it in the bag. Be choosey when deciding which to store and put questionable ones in a bag labeled “use first” and it’s mostly fine. Potatoes can be good well into May, beets and turnips a month before that and carrots only stay really good until about February (although I’m trying a few things, like adding wood chips to their bags and using plastic inside the burlap, so maybe I’ll find a way to make them go longer. If things are damp they don’t seem to like that and they tend to absorb musty, dirt flavours.) Onions are another that doesn’t like damp, but they’ve been good for a couple months, along with winter squash, bulbs (in sawdust) and I am trying out storing jars of ferments down there this year in a crate. The colder the winter the better things store. As the weather warms up it isn’t as cold down there and the odd bag we’ve forgotten over the summer sprouts and rots.

- Kristen Raney
  
  Thank you so much for sharing this information!! This is extremely helpful to a lot of people.
  
June R

Thank you Kirsten. I’m going to try storing in a plastic bin outside. I wondered should the bin be out of direct sun, and canI store carrots then layer of potatoes then layer of onions all together or not? Thank you 🙏

Iris Thomas

There are some ways to store carrots from the garden, which include: storing carrots in the fridge, storing carrots through home freezing, storing carrots by canning, storing carrots in sand box, storing carrots in the root cellar or garage.

Ellen

I wash, shred and dehydrate. I add dried in soup, but mainly bread, quick bread, yeast bread. Or use blender and turn it into flour.