Just as you have the challenge of fitting all your vegetables into your refrigerator, or finding the right container to stash your garlic and onions, we have the same challenges on a bigger scale. When we first harvested the onions, we dried them in front of fans and then we stacked them (with the tails still on) in the coolers, where they waited for us to sort and clean them. That took dozens of crates out of circulation. Same with the garlic. We have a small room that is air conditioned (or heated, in the winter) where the garlic is stashed. More crates taken out of circulation. Then came the winter squash, and it was a good season. Many towers of stacked crates in our 58 degree room.
We have three coolers on the Loudoun farm, with three different temperatures: the coldest one for the leafy stuff, the middle one for squash and peppers and tomatoes, and the warmest one for winter squash and new potatoes. In Vienna we have a walk-in cooler (38 degrees), a cooler that is set at about 42 degrees where we mostly store vegetables from other farms, and one insulated room that stays at about 53 plus two rooms that have plastic strips for doors -- they probably stay at about 75 degrees during the hot months. At the moment we have two 100' long greenhouses filled with sweet potatoes, curing in the warm air.
Most of these cool spaces have come into existence just in the last few years as we have started to grow enough to keep the CSA going for 25 weeks, using some storage crops in addition to the vegetables that come fresh straight out of the field. The storage crops are often the most popular (garlic, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes) and they give balance to the vegetables that need to be cooked sooner than later.
If we were a farm that sold things wholesale, we would need a lot more storage than we already have. Right now things go in and out of the cooler constantly. On a Wednesday it could look relatively spacious in the warmer rooms, and by Friday they are filled from floor to ceiling as we get ready to go to the farmers markets. It is a constant game of Vegetable Tetris. On Friday night we roll the carts of cut flowers into the center of the cooler and that fills the space completely.
On Saturday morning we move most of the fresh greens out onto the market trucks and the cycle begins again. We know that your vegetable bin at the bottom of your refrigerator is probably crammed after your CSA pickup and as the week goes on you manage to cook most of it before your next CSA day. We have the same situation, it's just that our refrigerators are for 500 families and yours is just for you.
