Build your own fall harvest cellar
Installing a fruit and vegetable cellar is a great way to keep your harvest fresh during the colder months. With protection from the elements and animals, these cellars can be just as good as a regular fridge. They can be built into a cellar wall, dug into the ground, or simply buried.
TThe following excerpt is from Four-season harvest By Elliot ColemanIt has been adapted to the web.
How to Build a Root Cellar for Fall
No one wants second place. Slippery cabbage from a dingy corner of the basement will never compete with the crunchy specimens on the greens shelf at the supermarket. Wilted, dried-out carrots look unappealing next to the crunchy, plastic-wrapped beauties in the fridge. If home storage does not produce results, you may want to consider artificial cooling.
But cabbages need not be slippery, and carrots need not be wilted. A properly constructed root cellar is as good as any other method of food storage. It is no great feat to manage a uncomplicated underground root cellar so that the quality of the produce is equal to or better than that of the produce stored in an artificially refrigerated unit, even after long periods of storage.
What makes a root cellar successful?
A well-prepared vegetable cellar should be appropriately located, have a solid construction, be tight, straightforward to fill and empty, straightforward to inspect and spotless, and protected against rodents.
Insulate and brick up a corner of your basement to create a root cellar.
The right location means underground, at a sufficient depth where frost will not penetrate. The basement should be of a solid structure so that it does not collapse on you. The container must be airtight so that chilly winds cannot blow and freeze the products.
You need to have straightforward access to fill it, operate the produce, and spotless it at the end of winter. It should be rodent-proof so that all the food you store doesn’t get gnawed on by rats and mice.
As with any other basement, it needs to be drained and insulated to keep it cold for as long as possible and provide adequately muggy conditions for storage.
Finally, the basement microclimate (colder at the floor, warmer at the ceiling) should allow for the different temperature and humidity requirements of different crops to be met. A basement will be most successful if it combines your underground food storage needs into one effective, compact unit. It’s surprising how easily a hole in the ground can fulfill all of these requirements.
The perfect place for a cellar: Your cellar
Every home with a basement already has a potential root cellar. Simply open a vent to let chilly air in on fall nights and spray the floor with water to create moisture. Temperature control in a root cellar is almost automatic because the chilly air, which is heavier than the sultry air, will flow down, displacing the warmer air that rises and exits. This lowers the temperature in the basement gradually as fall progresses and the nights become cooler.
When the weather outside is chilly enough to require moving the root crops indoors (around October 21st to November 7th here in Maine), the conditions in the underground garden are just right – cold and humid. With minimal attention, they will stay that way until slow spring.
Material considerations
Root Cellar Option – A box buried in the ground works well in basements with earth floors.
No wood or other moisture-resistant material should be used to build a root cellar. The ideal root cellar is made of concrete or stone with stiff insulation on the outside. Any solid wood in a root cellar will quickly become damp and moldy.
Wood will not only rot, but it will also serve as a home for bacteria and food spoilage organisms, and will be susceptible to gnawing. A stone or concrete basement is impregnable. It will not rot or decay, and the bulky walls will keep the ground cold.
Build a wall or dig a hole
The easiest way to make a root cellar is to separate one corner of the cellar with a partition wall as a separate room. The best material is concrete block. No problem, even if the rest of the cellar is heated. It is enough to isolate one temperature zone from another.
Leave enough room between the top of the walls and the ceiling joists above to install a cement board ceiling with stiff insulation above it. Also, attach stiff insulation to the heated side of the basement walls you are building. The insulation can be sealed with a concrete-like coating such as Block Bond. Install an insulated metal door for access, and the structure is complete.
A barrel buried in the ground is a uncomplicated vegetable cellar.
There are some simpler solutions, especially when storing tiny quantities of vegetables.
Storing vegetables in a root cellar
If your home has an old-fashioned basement with a clay floor and there is ample drainage below floor level, you can dig a hole in the floor 18 to 24 inches deep, line it with concrete blocks, and add an insulated cover. You will want to open the cover every few days to encourage air exchange in the pit.
The hole won’t be as comfortable to operate as a walk-in room, but like any hole in the ground, it should keep the root crops cold and humid. In warmer climates, similar pits or buried barrels can be used for outdoor storage or in an unheated shed.
Tried and true storage techniques
One of the simplest techniques we used before we had a vegetable cellar wasabout dig holes in one part of the winter greenhouse. In this case, we used metal garbage cans and buried them to the rim in soil under the inner layer. To make sure they stayed cold, we insulated their lids. We filled these cans with all the established root crops after harvesting them in the slow fall.
All of our winter food supplies this year were in one central location, and when we went out to pick fresh spinach and chives for dinner, we would also bring in stored potatoes and cabbage.