How to store apples at home for the winter. How to store apples in the refrigerator, cellar

Preparing apples for storage

To keep the fruit long and presentablelooked, they need to be properly prepared. After harvesting, experienced gardeners are advised to leave apples for 48 hours in a shade or cool room for cooling. Cooled fruit will lie much longer. After that, they need to be sorted not only by grade, but also by size (small, medium, large), then the fruits are more evenly distributed in the container. For winter storage, only healthy, mechanically undamaged and worm-eaten fruits are taken, with a peduncle, necessarily. The sorted apples are kept in clean boxes and stored in a cool place (cellar, loggia, pantry).

Where and how to store apples

Wherever these fruits are stored, it is necessarypay special attention to the container, as well as what they will be poured or processed. This can be a basket, covered with paper or sheathed, or wooden boards or plastic boxes, but without foreign smell. Apples, folded in clean containers, one wrapped in paper, interspersed with buckwheat husks, sand, sawdust, and also treated with alcohol propolis solution (per 1 liter of alcohol 200 g propolis) or 2% calcium chloride solution will stay well and long.

The harvest of apples is stored:

• 
  in an apartment (in a cool storeroom, a hallway or on a loggia);


• 
  in the cellar of his own house or basement of a high-rise building;


• 
  in plastic bags on the backyard.

Features of storing the harvest of apples at home

In an apartment, storing apples for a long time is not easy. To do this, you have to choose the coolest place with the optimum temperature at 2 ° C and humidity of about 80%. It can be a well-ventilated pantry, a loggia or a refrigerator, but not a living room, since there is a high enough and unsuitable temperature for storage, in which the fruit will quickly fade and rot. In the housing conditions it is recommended to store large and medium-sized fruits, small fry quickly and easily succumb to diseases.

In a refrigerator

If you can store apples inrefrigerator, then you need to know that the winter varieties lie longer than summer and autumn. Fruits of one kind are stacked separately from the other. For storage, you can use special trays, cardboard boxes or drawers (if the refrigerator is spacious), as well as plastic bags, each of which is placed no more than 5kg. In packages, it is necessary to provide ventilation openings to ensure that the fetuses breathe, otherwise they will quickly rot. Fruit is best kept in the refrigerator compartment, where the temperature is 1-3C, and the humidity is 85-90%. Before storage, it is advisable to spend 3-4 days heat treatment of fruits at high (30C) temperature. This should be done to ensure that the tissues of the fruit are freed from ethylene, which accelerates their maturation.

In the cellar (cellar)

The cellar, intended for storing fruits,should be dry, cool (with an ideal temperature close to 0С, but not above 5С), relatively moist (90-95%) and well-ventilated. Before laying the crop, it is necessary to whitewash it with lime. It must be remembered that you can not store apples next to any vegetables, for example, carrots, beets, potatoes. With this neighborhood fruit will acquire an unpleasant starchy taste and ripen faster. Therefore, they should be isolated as much as possible so that the harvested crop with good quality characteristics can be kept as long as possible.

Apples can be packed in strong polyethylenepacks of 3 kg, and then tie and hang. If the packets put fruit, cooled to + 4C, then with a full seal, they will remain naturally fresh for many months. Fruits will last long if wrapped in oiled, fruity, parchment paper or replaced with clean, dry sawdust or shredded chips.

Read also the recipe for soaked apples at home in a barrel.

In plastic bags on the backyard

With such storage, apples are hermetically sealedPacked in food plastic bags and buried at 30-40 cm in the ground. The only thing that can threaten fruit in the process of storage is the opportunity to freeze and mice. Therefore, on top of the packs cover with any warming agent (lapnikom coniferous trees, fallen leaves), and to protect the crop from the ubiquitous rodents, the perimeter is laid out a mouse poison.

And how to properly harvest apples, read here.