The Complete Guide to Your New Root Cellar: How to Build an Underground Root Cellar and Use It for Natural Storage of Fruits and Vegetables

234 Pages·2011·12.29 MB·English

by  Julie Fryer

The Complete Guide to Your New
Root Cellar
How to Build an Underground Root
Cellar and Use it for Natural Storage of
Fruits and Vegetables
BY JULIE FRYER
A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also
the “Vice President of Sunshine” here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked
tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.
Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean,
Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love.
He made a lot of people smile every day.
We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bear’s memory to local
animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need
of assistance.

– Douglas and Sherri Brown PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the
following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.
Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement
today:
Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
Be a developer — put up some birdhouses.
Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
Support your local farmers market.
Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.
Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote
environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste,
choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled
stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature
trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the
equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my Mom, Annette Sasser, and my Grandma, Orietta
Garland. These two amazing women taught me how to grow a garden, harvest
the bounty, and turn it all into delicious meals and preserves for the winter.
Thank you for these valuable lessons and for giving me the power each night to
go down to the canning room and pick something for supper.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Creating a Root Cellar in Your Home
Chapter 2: Design Options for Root Cellars
Chapter 3: An Early Start: What to do During the Winter
Chapter 4: Construction Season Starts: Welcome to Early Spring
Chapter 5: The Big Build is Here: Late Spring
Chapter 6: Growing Season Begins: Early Summer
Chapter 7: Final Preparations: Late Summer
Chapter 8: Finally Harvest Time: Early Fall
Chapter 9: The End of Harvest Season: Late Fall
Chapter 10: Storage Season: Winter Comes Again
Chapter 11: Yearly Maintenance Needs
Conclusion
Appendix A: Planning Tools
Appendix B: Design Plans
Appendix C: Resources
Appendix D: Recipes from the Root Cellar
Appendix E: Tools Dictionary and General Glossary
Glossary
Bibliography
Author Biography
Introduction
How many times were we told to eat our vegetables while growing up? How
many times have we said this to our own children and encountered resistance to
eating that chunk of green produce? Vegetables and fruit are essential parts of
every diet and provide vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber, and calcium.
Despite a host of healthy benefits, from cancer protection to a glowing
complexion, few people consistently get their recommended daily allowance of
produce each day.
For a variety of reasons, eating enough produce can be a challenge. Fresh fruits
and vegetables usually require more preparation time than processed foods, and
some do not taste good. Providing a family with a wide variety of wholesome
produce can stress the grocery budget, especially when the children will not eat
what is put on their plates.
Would you like a solution to this produce dilemma that will actually save you
money and get your children to eat their veggies? The humble root cellar might
be that answer. Although this might sound too much like living off the land and
too complex for the average homeowner, root cellaring is a reliable storage
method that has been used for centuries. Sometimes referred to as a cold cellar,
an earth cellar, or cold storage, a root cellar is a structure built partially or
completely underground that ranges in size from a multi-chambered room to a
small can buried in the ground. The primary purpose of root cellaring is long-
term, remote storage of produce at temperatures that will significantly slow the
deterioration process — without chemicals, preservatives, or additional
preservation methods, such as canning. Easy to operate and practical to use, a
root cellar still has a place in the modern home.
This approach to food storage is similar to the grocery stockpiling approach of
those who use coupons or buy in bulk at warehouse stores. As a root cellar user,
you are able to buy or grow in large quantities and store the food for future use.
Perfect for the self-sufficient and adventurous family, this project has something
for everyone. If you are a gardener, keeping a cellar will cut your workload
during harvest time and give you more room to store a winter’s worth of
during harvest time and give you more room to store a winter’s worth of
produce. If you are not a gardener, using a root cellar will allow you to buy in
bulk from local sources and cut your grocery budget by thousands per year. Root
cellaring stretches your food budget, and best of all, you are stockpiling
nutrition. After your first year of root cellaring, you will wonder how you ever
lived without it.
If you are interested in adopting a more eco-friendly lifestyle, the root cellar fits.
By growing your own produce or purchasing it from sources close to home, you
eliminate the high environmental costs of stocking supermarkets with produce.
The produce you find in the canned foods aisle, freezer cases, or fresh produce
section is typically grown on big, commercial farms. To plant, harvest, and
transport this produce, these farms consume large amounts of natural resources,
such as land, water, and fossil fuels. Even more fuel is required to keep the
produce cool on the shelves and for you to drive it home for dinner. Estimates
now show American food travels up to 1,500 miles from farm to cupboard.
Many people refer to this use of natural resources and the subsequent pollution
as a carbon footprint, and even a 1-pound bag of commercially produced
potatoes affects the environment.
Nutrition and taste are the other big advantages of root cellaring, and it might
just be the way to get your children to eat their veggies. Most produce available
on your supermarket’s shelves is highly processed. It is either treated with
pesticides during growth or preserved with chemicals after harvest so it stays
shelf-stable longer. Many fruits and vegetables must be picked before they are
fully ripe so they can make the journey to your store; this means the nutrients
and flavor are not at their peak when you purchase them. Because you will be
transferring your own produce directly from the ground to storage, those
nutrients and great flavor are locked in at their highest levels. And when your
children are able to help grow and harvest this produce, their interest in eating it
goes up. Just think of all the valuable life lessons learned a child learns when he
or she is allowed to dig in the dirt and enjoy the fruits of hard work.
Back to Our Roots
Root cellars date back to the earliest days of civilization; archaeologists found
evidence of ancient root cellars in Australia from 40,000 years ago. Of course,
root cellars from this time consisted of little more than a hole dug into the
ground to store yams. Our current vision of the constructed, walk-in root cellar
th
filled with produce was most likely developed in 17 century England because
people of this time had the perfect conditions for growing root crops and the
ideal climate for preserving these crops underground.
As these men and women immigrated to North America, they brought with them
their knowledge of root cellaring. When they reached their new home, they
found new food crops but similar geographies and climates — and native
populations willing to share their methods of preservation. Learning from these
practices, the immigrants modified their root cellars to work in their new land
and passed these ideas on to the next generations. As settlers moved west, so did
this type of root cellar and the preservation techniques to go with it. During even
the harshest Northern Plains winters, pioneer families survived off the produce
and other food they packed away in their cellars.
Created before full basements existed, these spaces doubled as storm shelters,
safe houses, and even hiding places for slaves on the run. Built to last, thousands
of these structures still stand today in the open or hidden under the grasses of
original homesteads. Colleges and archaeologists throughout North America are
now searching for these lost root cellars and documenting any they find. The
National Register of Historic Places keeps a list of discovered root cellars, and
after they are registered, they will be chronicled and preserved for future
generations.
With the advent of electricity, refrigeration, and industrialization, the practice of
root cellaring fell out of favor. As people moved to towns, they had no place to
put root cellars and began to rely on buying produce from corner stands and
supermarkets. Not so ironically, people’s diets changed to include more
processed grains and meats and less fresh produce. This trend has somewhat
reversed as people saw the benefits of a more naturally based diet and search out
organically and grown produce. Gardening of all types has emerged as one of the
most popular pastimes in the nation, and cities all over the country have seen a
resurgence of farmers markets and food co-ops. A natural progression of this