Original stairs from our root cellar
I guess when I moved here in 1999 I didn't quite understand what a treasure I had in our house having an old fashioned real root cellar. Since our house was built in 1850, the root cellar was put in with all intentions of storing and preserving food. There was a science to it. It cannot be too humid, too hot, too cold..........has to be just right.
Stairs leading to the pantry upstairs
Our root cellar was built originally with field stone.........or should I say rock? Big rocks! In fact, since this hadn't been used as a root cellar at all since 1923, when the owners sold it to a family in Oxford for a hunting camp, we had some work to do. Previous owners had some kind of problem with the cellar walls and had replaced them with cinder blocks. That would have been fine but they took all the big rocks out of the wall and just piled them up in no orderly manner on the floor of the cellar. So you had them in the way and they were too big for me to move. Then when they put the wall in, they did not put it directly under the house wall. Now why they did that.......who knows? The only thing I know about hunting camps is that they are a place where people go to party and that may explain it.
Rocks that were in a big pile are now our rock bench
My husband moved all those rocks and built a stone bench on the far side of the cellar. On the other side of the stairs going to the pantry. So now I will be able to store containers of things down there. He plans on rebuilding the stairs to the pantry as they are not real safe at this point.
A former post I wrote on root cellars, Root Cellars - A Homesteaders' Must Have! tells about a book I read on the subject. This is how I plan to use mine. I will have a secure screen on the cellar windows so nothing can get in so I can open then a bit for the night. Then in the morning I will close them and open the pantry door. That way the night air will cool the root cellar, and then in the morning that cool air will cool the pantry. My husband has some plans for the pantry as to putting in a vent to the cellar, so I will know more about that set up when it is done.
Built in bin - notice no legs!
Our root cellar also has this built in bin to store produce. It may have been built for storing apples since our property and the property around us (State Forest now) is covered with apple trees. So I am guessing it was for apples but could have been for other things. I plan on making wooden boxes and covering them with screen (not plastic and not coated) to put fresh produce in to store. I have a terrible problem with mice and worry about them ruining my crops.
Another view of the bin
You can easily build a root cellar outside of your house. Here are some plans I found on building a root cellar with earthbags which is on the Mother Earth News website. I know many people can just build a hole in the ground and work with that. I like mine being a part of my house, but it depends on what you have to begin with.
Copyright © 2010 Kathleen G. Lupole
7 comments:
I enjoy reading your blog so much. I think we need to know more about how our ancestors lived even if we don't practice those skills right now. I guess I read too many Sci-Fi books, but I always think about what would happen in a world-wide catastrophe.
Well Sunny, the whole "modern homesteading" movement is about just that.........preparing for those times. Even if it never happens, as I have found in my own life, there are times when you may not have any money coming in at all or someone is sick or your money has to pay for something not being food and utilities. Then what do you do? Best to prepare and stock up and implement ways of doing things on your own with no outside help. Be Prepared!
You are so lucky to have a root cellar! I would love to have one, so we could store our potatoes and the salsa and tomatoes we can. I'm going to go and check the site you mentioned using earthbags. I really want to start canning and preserving our own food, so if you don't mind, I'm going to wander around your site and try and get some ideas :)
When I was a kid, I was scared to death of my Grandma's root cellar. It was so creepy going in there. Looking at those pictures brought back some memories for me.
I was scared of my grandmother's also. I think it is because they are usually dark. Mine has two cellar windows so it gets a little light but you can't have much coming in. In the old days, you had to have one or your food would not keep until the next spring.
I never saw my grandfather's childhood home, but he told me so much about it, it was like I was there.
Their cellar was always very cold , he told me. And someone had dug down a hole, I guess a sort of shallow well, in the cellar. The well was fed by a small stream, so in the summer, they had a place to store th ings that needed to stay cold.
That house was there from sometime in the 1600 to 1700's until it was torn down to build a housing complex. :(
But in my memory, it is still there.
Very lucky to have that!
I can see where it would scare impressionable children, though!
Martin's determined to make one at our place. I'm going to show him yours.
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