Urban Homesteading: Tips and Tricks to Building a Root Cellar

Location of the Root Cellar

My husband didn’t grow up poor as I did, but for some reason he has an obsession with keeping food around. It’s kind of like a safety blanket for him. We got a 14 cubic foot chest freezer for a wedding present and it has been packed to the top ever since!

Two summers ago we started canning and drying food and have built up quite a collection of canned goods. But we found there are some things that can’t be canned or dried, or just lose quality when you try, such as onions, carrots, potatoes, and apples to name a few. The solution: we needed to build a root cellar.

We began negotiations with our landlords at the time (my in-laws luckily). After looking around the basement they decided they could spare the southeast corner. It was piled high with boxes, old tools, forgotten toys, bits of wood, and other oddments. As we cleaned it out and organized things into other corners, we found the remains of some industrious mice. And we found that sections of the stone walls were shelling off. And the thin concrete floor was breaking up in spots to reveal dirt underneath. We had a lot of work to do.

Once the basement corner was cleaned out and the years of cobwebs and dust swept away, I filled in as many holes as I could with a couple bags of Quickcrete. Then I mixed up a large amount of whitewash (water, hydrated lime, salt, and a little Elmer’s glue) in a galvanized steel bucket and painted the whole space. I think the whitewash was supposed to help add a little strength to the walls. Regardless, it certainly looked a lot nicer.

Framing in the root cellar

While I was busy cleaning and patching and painting the corner in the basement, my husband was doing research on what we could store and how to build the cellar. We used a couple different resources: Stocking Up: How to Preserve the Foods You Grow, Naturally, published in 1973; a document we found online called Storing Vegetables at Home by H.C. Harrison; and the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

The paper by Harrison was probably the most useful. It talks briefly about indoor cellars, outdoor cellars, outdoor pits, how to maintain the correct temperature for your veggies, how long different things will last, and it includes a plan for building a basement cellar.

We decided to wall off the whole space between the outside wall and the laundry room wall – about 10’ by 8’. The basement was, as many basements are, a bit warm and humid at times–very bad for veggies. As my husband framed in the new walls, I put up moisture barrier (thick plastic) so that it would be on the exterior of the cellar, walls and ceiling. Then we packed in insulation and closed up the walls with sheets of plywood. We found a cute little 2-foot-wide door at a recycling center and put that in the wall, along with a threshold. The cellar was good and tight.

It took us awhile to gather up the necessary bits and pieces for the “ventilation” system. The most important thing for your basement root cellar is that it be located near a window because you need that outside air to keep things cool. We looked briefly at an electronic ventilation system that would automatically control the temperature. Very cool – and very expensive. Instead, we picked up a couple old metal vents from our local building supply re-use store and some metal ducting (about 6-inch diameter). We cut some holes in a piece of plywood and fit in the vents and the ducting. We had tracked down a large damper which fit inside the ducts. Basically it was a large metal disk that sat inside the duct and could be turned so it either blocked the flow of air or allowed it in.

Root cellar ventilation system

Root cellar ventilation system

This whole assembly was fit into the window space in our cellar. We stapled screening over the front of it (don’t want the critters getting in). The ducting came in a couple inches, bent at an elbow joint, then continued straight down to the floor. This allowed cold air to pour into the cellar and keep things right about 32 – 38 degrees. We could also let more air in with the two vents if we needed to. The last thing we got was a remote thermometer so we could keep an eye on the temperature in the cellar.

Once our cellar was built, we started moving in our veggies and fruit. My husband had built some shelves that hung from the ceiling and we also had a couple freestanding shelving units. We built an enormous crate out of old pallets to keep our onions. We had also picked up a number of old wooden crates which we used to store various veggies. Different sources recommend different ways of storing veggies. Some say sphagnum moss but that is expensive and not really a local or a sustainable option here in Minneapolis. One source said to use leaves but we weren’t too happy with those (though we did use them for our apples with success). Another source suggested sand. So my husband dug out the old sandbox in the back yard (sifting out the cars and trucks and legos).

Root cellar storage

Another piece of advice is to leave your veggies dirty and leave the roots and leaves on. This helps them to keep longer. We requested piles of rutabaga, carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic, turnips, beets, and other root veggies from a couple different farmer friends at our local farmer’s market. They were more than willing to help us out. The various root veggies were nestled into wood crates and covered over with sand.

So we filled up our root cellar with lots of root veggies and other things and we stored all our canned goods there too. You may be asking why on earth we would store onions or garlic or apples when we could just purchase them in the store any time we wanted? The point is to buy everything locally and store it so we still have local potatoes and apples and onions in the middle of winter – instead of buying those things that may have been trucked in from farther away.

The root cellar was an incredible success. Apples we bought in October were still crispy three or four months later. And most things lasted through the winter and spring. When we bought our own home, we moved over pails and bins of turnips and potatoes and a few other things. We stored too much of course. But we’re learning, and now we get to build a new root cellar!

About the author: Aimee McAdams grew up in the Northwest and now lives in the fair city of Minneapolis. From building raised beds and root cellars to keeping chickens and making preserves, Aimee and her husband Jeremy are experimenting with all things urban agriculture. She writes the blog Adventures in Urban Homesteading. Contact her at aimee.mcadams@yahoo.com.

No related posts.

Comments RSS You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.