Kitchen Garden Forum

If you're chucking out an old fridge/freezer with slatted shelves, you may find it worth keeping the shelves. I've mounted mine on brick "towers" to provide a most useful drying stand for newly dug & washed potatoes.

Why wash potatoes ? I've always heard that they store better left with the dirt on ?

The rack would be good for onions though.

Keep The glass shelves as well - good cloches!

Westi

The plastic salad bin - if its transparent - makes a good cloche too. And if there are egg trays you could use them for chitting spuds.

Hi Adam,
In no way am I trying to out-do anybody but I have used an entire Iced Diamond refrigerator as a propagator. I had the working parts removed safely by a person who works in Refrigeration. Then cast a concrete slab into the base (otherwise it is unstable) took all the plastic out and lined with thin plywood put runners of wood in to hold the shelves and put a warming cable wound into the base above the concrete. Put a thermostat into the top of the right hand side and then made it rodent proof with expanded metal lath at the back.
You may by now be wondering where this is leading well there are certain plants that do not need light to initiate germination and one of them is Parsley and I used to sell Parsley to the trade, retail trade and mail order.
I used to put 15 trays into the propagator for seven days then remove and place onto the bench with no visible signs of germination but within a week the Parsley was through and growing furiously. The trays were 576 modules per tray and just kept on sowing producing 8640 plants a week for about 16 weeks and then the orders used to drop off. A great little earner!
I have done the same to another tall fridge shell and it is a wonderful cupboard in one of the tunnels.
The propagator has been used for several things that have proved difficult to germinate where the thermostat can be turned up fully and also for producing Lily scale bulbils. I feel sure that you could produce onions bulbils that way but I have never tried. Perhaps I should as yet another experiment.
JB.