Underground Root Cellar Designs

When planning your winter food storage, don’t overlook the preserving power of the earth in your garden.

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by Adobestock/Aleshchenko

Check out these five underground root cellar designs for vegetable storage that will help you preserve your harvest through winter. Many root crops, such as potatoes and carrots, can be stored for fresh eating all winter long simply by digging a trench, covering them with leaves or straw, or even burying them in a trash can.

You don’t need an underground room to have an effective root cellar — you can easily use soil, mulch and a few other tools to store vegetables and fruits without ever leaving your garden. Based on your winter weather and your available space, choose from these five ideas for outdoor root cellars to store your harvests through the snowy winter months.

The Organic Garden Blanket

The earth holds a surprising amount of summer heat in its mass. If you can trap this heat with some kind of fluffy organic blanket — leaves, clean straw, sawdust or even banked-up snow — it’s entirely possible to keep soil from freezing for months longer than if it were left bare. In areas with mild winters, you can even keep soil soft enough to dig in year-round, allowing you to harvest snapping-fresh, cold-tolerant vegetables while everyone else is relying on food from the grocery store. To make handling the blanket easy, tuck your leaves or other material into recycled trash bags before you lay them over your root crops.

  • Updated on Jun 19, 2023
  • Originally Published on Sep 16, 2011
Tagged with: food storage, root cellaring, root cellars, underground food storage
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