Our Root Cellar - Perfect Way To Store A Harvest!

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.

The long pipe is from the kitchen drain.

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

Happenings Around Our Homestead

My horse Georgie Girl loves her fresh clean water from our hand dug well. It is the first thing she wants when you come into the barn. Horses consume a lot of water and hay. It is a constant need for them and good for their physical being. Georgie Girl is very careful when she drinks not to drop any grain or hay from her mouth into the water bucket. The other two girls are not as careful as she is so she tries to get her water first.


The last few days my husband has been working on my pantry. Our house is very old as I have told a zillion times before on this blog. It was built in 1850 and had absolutely no insulation in the walls. What it had was little slat boards and cement. Then we had mice running behind that, inside the walls. I could not stand that! I would hear them and it would keep me awake all night. I knew they could not get to me, but I knew they were there! So my husband has been slowly taking that out and it is a big job. It is the way the ceilings are built too, so it all needed to be removed. When he is doing it, all that cement dust comes down on him, in his hair, eyes, mouth and lungs. It is in the air and we are all coughing for a few days afterwards. Not good! But it had to be done. So he has my pantry all stripped out now. All he has left to do now is the living room walls and ceiling, and half of the bathroom. The rest of the house is all stripped out and can be finished off.

Now I am cleaning up all that dust. I will be putting all our food and supplies back into the pantry for the time being. Since he has been working on putting our solar panels up on the barn roof presently, that is where our money has to go for now. The pantry I figure will be a job to do during the colder months and right now he has to get the solar system moved. This will give me a chance to see how I can organize it best anyway.

The pantry has one door out to the kitchen and one to the root cellar. During the day I open the door to the cellar a crack to let cool air in from the root cellar. At night I close that door and will be opening a window in the root cellar a crack. That cools the root cellar off and it will stay cool through out the day even in the hot days of summer. Opening the door to the cellar a bit during the day brings the cool air from the root cellar into the pantry and will keep it cool during the day. Eventually, my husband will finish the pantry off so it will be almost as cool as a walk-in cooler all the time.

Copyright © 2010  Kathleen G. Lupole

Root Cellars - A Homesteader's Must Have!

I got a book from paperbackswap two weeks ago and have been reading it aloud in the evenings to my husband, and we have learned a lot from it. It really applies to us as we have this wonderful root cellar that we have not been using due to our mice problem down there. Today we cleaned it out. Since he is working on the foundation down there (he is in the process of building an additional room on our cellar to house our battery system and a water pump), he is able to work on some of the root cellar. He is determined to get rid of the mice and to make it an awesome homesteader's root cellar.

In this book, Root Cellaring - Natural Cold Storage Of Fruits and Vegetables by Mike and Nancy Bubel, they describe how they were canning so much food and it was so much work. Then when they got interested in root cellars and eventually built theirs, they learned to not can ALL the vegetables. Just the ones that don't last. They had 33 vegetables and fruits in the root cellar that were fresh and they ate them all winter. Not only that, they also stored cheese (encased in wax), nuts, wheats and grains, crocks of sauerkraut and pickles and potting soil for spring seed starting.......and a log with mushrooms growing on it.

So she would just take her basket and go to the root cellar and pick and choose what she wanted to fix for supper that night. It has many good ideas for us to use as we fix ours. By utilizing our root cellar we will be able to cut out a lot of the work of canning. I would only have to can things like green beans, tomatoes, tomato sauces, meats of course, condiments. And we could eat from our root cellar all winter, fresh produce from our garden or if it is something we didn't grow but can buy locally and store it for winter. I am really excited about doing this.

I know this book is pretty well known. I had it on my wish list forever, when I started I was about the 70th person who requested it. I FINALLY got it. It shows though, how many people are interested in having a root cellar. People are looking for ways to live on their land and the root cellar is a perfect homesteader's tool. It was the way to store your food for the future and now all people know is how to buy it at the store. Bring it home and put it in the freezer.

You can really cut down on your grocery bills if you learn to can, dehydrate and store your garden harvest. If you have trouble with gardening.......oh boy! do I ever know that feeling. My legs keep getting worse and worse. I figure I may end up doing much of my work from a wheelchair in the future. So my husband is making things NOW to cover that time period. He has been building more and more raised beds for our gardens and you can make them high enough to pull a chair right up to it. On our root cellar he is planning on making a ramp for going up and down. Then to add a dumbwaiter for bringing food up and down. You have to think of these things as you get older.

Don't think you have to have a root cellar like I have! You can dig a pit, use a closet or a porch, just about anything as long as it has the right air flow and humidity and temps. Not as hard as it sounds. Why waste your money buying expensive tasteless produce in the off season months when you can eat your own bounty from your gardens? Or purchase produce in the summer from local farms and markets.....NOT grocery stores! Think about it. Things like this become like a game to me......I love it.

Have a great homesteading day!

katlupe


"Change your hearts and lives because the Kingdom of heaven is near." Matthew 3:2