Building a Root Cellar

Enlarge Image Image Gallery When it was constructed, this root cellar plan cost its creators only $164. PHOTO: JOE STEUBEN

Building a root cellar for storing food can be quick, simple and inexpensive. Below, author Mike Wells explains how, building with railroad ties, he dug and constructed a root cellar within three months. 

Our five-year search was over. We had found our home in the country: Sky Meadow, one hundred sixty acres of pasture, pines, junipers, bubbling springs and a panoramic 60-mile view of valley, mountain, sky and weather. It was nine months later before we took up residence in what — barring a subdivision and shopping center on the next section — will be our final move.

We arrived, grossly overloaded, on June 1, after three days of "unusually heavy" rains. The mile and a half of rutted tracks from the country road had turned into an impassable morass of adobe muck. A neighbor rancher down in the valley led us 12 miles through the forest on graveled logging roads to a spot only a quarter of a mile from the cabin. We packed in essentials and made camp, awaiting the drying of the roads.

While we waited out the three days of sunny, dry weather before the roads became passable, we explored our domain and planned our summer. The garden would go down there on that flat next to the orchard. We'd develop the spring uphill from the cabin first, and then the other two ... one for the garden and the other for the duck pond. One benefit of the cabin siding being off was that it would be easy to insulate and wire. We could get the poles for the deer fence over in that big stand of junipers on the east forty. I had to do something about that log shed before it collapsed. And that fallen-in root cellar ...

Where did the time go? Suddenly we were well into our second summer and Joanie kept complaining that if the root cellar wasn't completed soon we could split the turnips, rutabagas and kohlrabi and use them for cordwood. And I'd horse another 125-pound railroad tie into position and exclaim, "Only five more courses to go ... then comes the roof!"

The 8' X 12' hole at the brow of the hill had, in fact, been started over a year before. Willing summer visitors had wielded shovel, bar and pick with fervor and vigor — for a few minutes — and then had suddenly become more interested in the beer in the spring box or the view or just conversation ... the least of our needs during summer working weather.

Desultory stabs were made at "the hole" after the spring thaw but seemed to deepen it little. Other priorities beckoned: tilling, planting the garden, getting in next winter's wood (ideally done the prior spring), repairing winter damage to the road, clearing the last mile of the REA pole line, improving the big spring, digging 21 eight-foot-deep pole holes for the electricity and a few other miscellanea.

Along about early July, Joanie consulted her planting charts and announced, "I have to have a root cellar by September 1." (The garden was, by then, doing its thing all by itself with a little help from Joanie ... like beetle picking, earwig smashing and applying three tons of hay mulch.)