The indispensable fruit and vegetable claie

In the age of everything high-tech, sometimes it's comforting to discover something utterly simple and incredibly useful.  The French claie is such an object--downright elegant in its simplicity.  The claie is nothing more than a shallow, slatted wooden tray with short legs that ingeniously enable you to stack the claies up to 10 high.  With this simple yet ingenious innovation from a simple slatted wooden tray, the versatile French claie allows you to stack vegetables, fruits and other produce like tomatoes harvested straight from your greenhouses and gardens into a stack reaching up to 10 trays high without taking up much needed space in your stockrooms or sheds.

The claie is used to store fruits and certain vegetables to perfection.  Its structure allows air to circulate freely around the produce, minimizing mold and rot.  Their shallow structure is meant to accommodate a single layer of, say, pears while they ripen.  Ripe tomatoes stored in a cool dark place in a claie will easily last 2-3 weeks.  And of course, this is the ideal storage module for ripening green tomatoes when frost threatens.

This summer I harvested my tree-ripe peaches into claies .  As there was no bruising, they kept at least a week while I got around to freezing them.

In France, claies are also used for sprouting potatoes for spring planting.  I think the advantages are obvious to any gardener.  As the potatoes are spread out, the sprouts don't tangle and break off before planting.

I've come into the possession of about 20 of these ingenious devices by pouncing on them at small local flea markets.  I doubt if--even here in France--anyone is still making them, at least out of wood.  (I hate plastic and avoid anything made of it in my gardening envirornment.)  Unless some ingenious American company is manufacturing such a thing, you'll have to make your own.  It shouldn't be difficult for anyone with minimally handy skills.  I do not include myself in that category, nor, sadly, can I include my dear but handily useless husband in it.  But I'm hoping the majority of you, my dear readers, are infinitely more competent than we are.  I would so like to think you could experience just how handy these contraptions are, especially at harvest time.

Mine are approximately 2 feet square, made of slats of an unidentified wood that is neither pine nor oak.  The slats are about an inch and a quarter wide and about a third of an inch thick.  The legs are made of wood about an inch square in cross-section.  Note in the photo at right that the corners are reinforced for stability with a metal bracket.  The sides are about twice the width of the slats.

I'm ending this article with a larger photo showing a detail of the corner of the claie so tthat you can see how the leg is recessed on the inside so that you can stack the claies securely.  Now, it's off to the hardware store with you so that you, too, can have your very own garden claies!

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