Garbage can root cellar

The water table is very high in my neighborhood ( often a good thing during the summer, when most of the garden never needs watering). As a result, my house has a four foot high crawl space full of  sump pumps instead of a cellar.  So where do I store the crops that traditionally go in a root cellar?

For several winters I stored my potatoes in the garage, in racks draped with newspaper.  Until last winter this worked fine.  It took me a while to notice, but eventually I realized the piles of  potatoes were getting smaller every day, and moved the remaining tubers inside to under the kitchen sink.
In the spring I found a pile of half eaten, sprouting potatoes behind a row of storage bins, along with the carcass of a rat.  Did he die from eating green potatoes? I'll never know, but that's my guess.

We live in a farming community, and rats are a nasty reality around barns full of cows and feed. This year I came up with more secure, yet accessible root storage --  a steel garbage can with holes punched  in the lid for air flow.  It has worked great!

Besides the holes,  the  keys to the success of my garbage can root cellar are placement in the garage and using brown paper bags.  My furnace is located in the back of the garage in a small insulated room. By placing the can next to this room, it absorbs just enough heat to keep the contents from freezing, even during our recent ten degree weather.
The paper bags let the tubers (which are alive, although in a dormant state)  release and reabsorb moisture.  Unlike my winter squash, which likes the dry cool air of my back bedroom, most root crops need fairly high humidity to store well.
I've finished all the potatoes, but now the bin is full of sunchokes. They are storing better than I could have hoped, after reading (after I dug up thirty pounds) that they don't usually store well for more than a couple of weeks.  Here's a pic of  a bag of chokes:

And here's a choke I harvested before Christmas, still firm on January 27th:

Meanwhile, my garlic, hung above the root cellar, is sprouting despite the cold. That's because it is an extra cold hardy hardneck garlic, rather than the better storing softneck.  I am going to plant a crop of the hardiest softneck I can find this fall so I can have my own garlic year round.  The sprouting garlic is still good, but I need to eat it fast before the sprouts get too big.  Than means it's time to eat lots of oven roasted garlic and sunchokes!