The Year-Round Harvest

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If you can maintain temperatures between 32 and 40°F, you have an excellent storage place. A temperature range of 40 to 50° will still permit shorter-term storage of root vegetables and apples, and will keep onions and some of the short-lived storage vegetables like peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant in good shape for a month or so.

In an indoor root cellar, the area close to the ceiling will be a few degrees warmer than space near the floor, so you'll have at least a small difference in conditions that you can take advantage of by placing vegetables according to their different storage requirements.

A thermometer is essential for a well-run root cellar. One with minimum/maximum readings will give you a good picture of the kind of temperature variations you're working with.

The kind of root cellar you build or adapt will depend on the floor plan of your house, the lay of your land, and the temperatures and snow cover in your area.

If you have an old house with an unheated, dirt-floor basement room, you're all set. With slight modification, or in some cases none at all, you'll have an ideal vegetable-storage cellar. In a house with a heated basement, it's possible to partition off an unheated corner for vegetable storage.

If you prefer an outdoor root cellar, you can either dig into a hill or go straight underground and top the cellar entrance with a bulkhead door, patio, or porch. Most outdoor root cellars are dug into a north-facing hill or are underground on the north (coolest) side of the house. You'll find exceptions to this rule in some of the northern states and Canada, where temperatures plummet well below zero in winter, and stay there. Some of the old-time outdoor root cellars in these areas are built on southern exposures for easier winter access. Once winter sets in, it's plenty cold there even though these cellars get more sunlight than it seems they should.

If you live in an area where winter temperatures are often below 0°F and snow cover is heavy, you may prefer climbing into an under-porch storage pit to shoveling through drifts to get to a hill-cave root cellar. Many underground root cellars (such as the one detailed below) are built with an anteroom or double doors that form an airlock, which helps keep warm summer air out of the cellar and also prevents undo chilling of the produce in severe winter weather.

If your winters are mild, with average temperatures well over 30°F, you won't be able to achieve the most desirable low temperature in your cellar for keeping root vegetables. Those vegetables probably will keep very well in the garden row, and the warm-keepers like squash, onions, and sweets should do fine in a cool corner of your house.

Many people opt for a 8' X 10' space or larger-but few can fill them to capacity (a 5' X 8' space can hold 30 bushels of produce). If you plan on keeping buckets of soil to store vegetables such as celery, a 8' X 8' space should suffice. We recommend using multiple shelves to maximize space. Use only rot-resistant woods, and slat for good air circulation. Shelves should also have one- to two-inch cleat at the back to keep edges away from the wall.

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