Here are our picks for the three easiest vegetables to store. These are the foods to stock up on when you're building your emergency food supply or just want to have a nice stockpile for peace of mind.

The 3 Easiest Vegetables to Store – #1 – Onions
Onions like it cool and dry, so I generally keep them on the middle shelves of the root cellar. We cure ours in the greenhouse and trim off the tops before storing in the root cellar. Just pull, cure, brush off dirt and they're ready to go into storage.

Preferred temperature range = 32 to 35°F (0 to 1.7°C)
Relative Humidity = 60 to 70 percent
They can sit out on your kitchen counter for a while, but the warmth will get them sprouting. If your storage is really dry they'll start looking like a shrinky-dink, but you'll notice that they're comfortable at the upper end of what humans find comfortable, too. Our generally last from one season to the next, even in less than perfect conditions (our root cellar tends to stay a little warm).

If you see something like this at the top of your onion, don't try to cure and store it. This is a blossom, and the onion will rot instead of curing. You may still remove the center shoot and cook as usual, dehydrate or freeze.

The 3 Easiest Vegetables to Store – #2 – Garlic
Like their onion cousins, garlic bulbs keep best in cool, dry storage. They are also easy to grow, as long as you have good soil. Plant a clove in fall, harvest a whole bulb the following summer. Now that I grow my own, I always have a bulb or two on the counter ready to use, while the rest hang out on one of the middle shelves in the root cellar.

Preferred temperature range = 32 to 35°F (0 to 1.67°C)
Relative Humidity = 60 to 70 percent
For more garlicky goodness, visit “How to Grow Garlic – From Planting to Harvest“. There's still time this fall (as of 9/25/14) to plant this year for a crop next year.

The 3 Easiest Vegetables to Store – #3 – Shell Beans
Although they are cooked like a starch, shell beans originate as a vegetable, so I group them together with other storage veggies. Like onions and garlic, they prefer cool, dry storage. (See a trend here?) They have an even wider range of acceptable temperatures, making them a great preparedness item to keep stashed in a cooler bedroom, closet or pantry as part of your long term food storage.

Exactly how long will shell beans (dry beans) keep? USA Emergency Supply states:

As beans age they lose their oils, resist water absorption and won't swell. Worst case, they must be ground to be used. Storing beans in nitrogen helps prolong the loss of these oils as does cool temperatures. Hermetically sealed in the absence of oxygen, plan on a storage life of 8-10 years at a stable temperature of 70 degrees F. They should keep proportionately longer if stored at cooler temperatures.

Utah State University Extension is more conservative:

Scientific studies on vitamin loss in dried beans during prolonged storage could not be found. The loss would be expected to follow similar patterns as other long term stored foods where vitamin degradation occurs after 2-3 years and most vitamins are no longer present after approximately 5 years. Storage at warm temperatures will accelerate vitamin degradation. The other nutritional components (proteins, carbohydrates, minerals, etc) should remain unchanged during long term storage.

From personal experience, after 2-3 years in simple mason jars storage (clean beans placed in jar with lid screwed on, no vacuum storage or oxygen absorbers) the beans cook just fine. Beyond that, they start to get a little dry and tough and some just don't get tender no matter how much you cook them. I like to rotate my stock regularly, so I don't worry about it too much, but for longer storage I'd definitely use oxygen absorbers and a hermetically sealed container.

Preferred temperature range = 32 to 50°F (0 to 10°C)
Relative Humidity = 60 to 70 percent

Have you ever stored any of these vegetables long-term? What methods did you use? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Article Source: Common Sense Homesteading