Mailbag: Root Cellar for Winter Vegetables?
Patrick Stanton asked me about root cellar requirements in an email message.
“I had a technical self-reliance question that you could address on the blog, MLL list, or directly: What are the requirements of a root cellar? We have a dirt floor, brick walled basement, but what alterations would be needed to store food through the winter effectively?”
Heather Flores, in her book Food Not Lawns
Flores discusses food safety, advocates local produce because it stays fresh longer, suggests “building a draft box and/or a root cellar to store perishables” and describes them in more detail.
Here’s a site with many links about root cellars.
Also, here’s what Harvey Ussery of The Modern Homestead, who I’ve talked to personally, and who has enough experience to write about homesteading for Mother Earth News, wrote on the subject:
“I do not have a proper root cellar. An alternative is what people used to call a “clamp.” Basically, that’s just a hole in the ground, with some protection from frost (I’ve used straw bales) and something to shed rain so your vegetables don’t end up in standing water. Such storage is better than a refrigerator, which is dehydrating. Inside the clamp, the temperature is cold, just above freezing, but the humidity is high. Root crops such as carrots, turnips, beets, daikon and other winter radishes, and rutabagas keep very well in a clamp—also cabbages and Chinese cabbages.”
“Another strategy for cabbages is to pull up by the roots, stack them in a mound with the roots up, and cover heavily enough with straw to prevent freezing.”
“We store potatoes and sweet potatoes in the basement. (Ellen wraps the better tubers of sweet potatoes in newspaper.) Conditions are not ideal there because of waste heat from the furnace, but they are good enough—the tubers keep until late winter.”
