Storing Yukon’s Abundant Cold to Chill our Produce
The Yukon’s abundant cold can be a challenge, but it is also a valuable resource. We store winter cold in the form of ice and use it to refrigerate our produce.
Our unique walk-in vegetable cooler rapidly chills our produce down to 3 or 4 degrees C all summer long without the use of electricity.
We value passive technologies and in 2017, we built our passive walk-in vegetable cooler that we call the Ice House with support from the Cold Climate Innovation Center in Whitehorse, Yukon.
A Full Year Cycle
Winter/Spring
Inside the Ice House, there are eight 1000L tanks that we fill with Lake Laberge water throughout the coldest part of the winter.
The Ice House is left wide open to allow the water tanks to freeze naturally. We fill the tanks in 5-6 layers to minimize the risk of them breaking as the water expands into ice.
When the weather begins to warm in February, the very well insulated Ice House is closed to retain the cold captured in winter. It remains closed until the first harvest in June.
Summer
Our produce is quickly, efficiently and reliably chilled in the Ice House, where it is stored between harvest and delivery. We wash and pack produce on the building’s covered porch and the surrounding area for a smooth work flow.
The Ice House has three rooms. From the outside, we enter the Arctic Entrance which helps to keep the relatively hotter air outside and the colder air inside. We move our harvest bins into the Arctic Entrance and close the exterior door before entering the Veggie Room, which is where we store our bins on racks or stacks on the floor. We control the temperature simply by opening or closing the door between the Veggie Room and the Ice Room, which is where all the tanks are located.
Fall
We drain the meltwater from the tanks so that we can control the freezing in the winter. We can store produce inside the Ice House up until the end of October. By then, outdoor temperatures are well below zero and the building is near freezing, so we move our winter reserves into an indoor cold room, open all the doors to the Ice House and the cycle starts all over again.
Sarah's Harvest - Market Garden 