Finding a red pepper in my washer this morning — I’ll explain later, and no it’s not early-onset dementia — reminded me of something my sister Diane taught me years ago: clean your fall harvest of garden carrots (potatoes, etc) in the washing machine.
If you have a garden and plant root crops — potatoes, carrots, turnips — nothing works better for cleaning a large amount of fresh-picked tubers than the good ole Maytag (or whatever brand of washer you happen to use). Just dump in the vegetables and run the machine on a cold wash and rinse (no soap) and a gentle spin and VOILA! You’ve just saved yourself hours of scrubbing. Bag and refrigerate your veggies and wipe out or shop-vac the detritus from the washer.
So how did the red pepper get into the wash? Another tip, keep your vegetables in cotton bags in the crisper drawers — I use old pillow cases cut in half. The cloth bags allow the veggies to breathe and they keep longer without rotting. Every week or so, I toss the cloth bags in the wash to freshen them up — I guess I didn’t see this little pepper from Gerry’s greenhouse in the bottom of the bag. It’s clean now!
Hope for the Rest of Us 