Living without refrigeration, this resourceful homesteader creates a DIY basement root cellar.
Our cabin has neither cellar nor long-term food storage. During the warmer months, we eat from the garden and supplement our family’s diet with dry goods. Perishables are a treat — and eaten quickly. A cooler dug into the ground is our closest approximation of a refrigerator.
After a prolific season in the garden, food storage is our major challenge. In some years, when the harvest was small, we stored produce in baskets and boxes in a yurt, and ate everything before the freezing cold (or decomposition from time) could lead to our food’s demise. This season we’re lucky: My parents have moved here to Dorchester, New Hampshire, where we homestead, we quite conveniently own a full unfinished basement with space extra for us to fill. We can now lay potatoes on and under cardboard, and bury root vegetables, such as turnips, carrots and beets, in buckets of sand. We stuff cabbage heads into containers of compost.
Creating Our DIY Basement Root Cellar
Even still, during the heat of summer, the cellar is a tad too warm for storage. I could tell from cabbage leaves losing their life too quickly and turnips and carrots trying to sprout.
I was worried, but the problem did not persist for long. The direct exit from the cellar to the outside sits between an insulated door and the bulkhead hatch. Upon removing the stairs from this exit, we cleverly created a nook that was insulated from the house heat, and readily cooled by its thin exterior storm door and shaded location.
So, voilá! We have a grocery store under the stairs. What a pleasant adventure compared with the average shopping routine! Every day or two, with a basket or bucket in hand, I trot down to the darkened basement and enter this makeshift root cellar. Headlamp affixed to my head, I plunge my fingers through layers of damp sand and newspaper. I retrieve sweet ‘Scarlet Nantes’ carrots, large Purple Top turnips, and ‘Detroit Dark Red’ beets. Red- and white-skinned potatoes, green cabbage, and more than half a dozen winter squash varieties (stored upstairs, as they prefer drier conditions) round out the options for each meal.
Enjoying Root Cellar Vegetables
A good scrubbing is required, but then I pile high gleaming vegetables, their bright colors and sweet, earthy flavors satiating both our eyes and our palettes. No lines, no check-out counters, no price tag – just some dirt under our nails, very generous parents (they get vegetables, too!), and a little bit of planning. The thrill and satisfaction of a garden continues well after the cold season has arrived.
Bethann Weick is a farmer, educator, writer and mountain steward in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.