Cabin FEVER..!

Is it spring yet?

Over on the Northland Food Sovereignty Community blog there's some stuff on ROOT CELLARS, and in particular there was a picture of an olde tyme cellar that looked quite a bit like the partially completed log cabin we started last fall.  Since (I think) I'm getting motivated to plant a garden in the spring, it occurred to me that maybe the cabin could rather become a cellar to store root vegetables:  Chinese cabbage, turnips, beets, sweet potatoes?, rutabagas, parsnips, green tomatoes?, and the like.

Before the snow fell, we had the cabin up to 5 courses (one more than in the picture), and were having a hard time finding more 13-foot logs without cutting down live trees.  But from what I've been reading about building a root cellar, what we have now might be a really good start on a fairly GINORMOUS food storage.

Looks like what it would take is to dig down a few feet inside, put on a door, some steps going down, and a good roof over the top.

Maybe the roof could be basically poles with a waterproof sheet and sticks and dirt on top for insulation.

The whole thing would have to be sealed up pretty good to keep it cool in the fall and in the spring, and to keep it above freezing during the long winter up here.

cabin fever...

The reason that root cellars work is that the vegetables are still alive when you pick them.  They keep taking in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide until you cook them.  The cold slows down the process and helps to counteract the deteriorating effect of their own "body heat" (at 32 degrees, 1 pound of broccoli produces 2 Btu of heat a day).  Earth is a good insulator because the soil temperature underground stays fairly constant. At a depth of about 12 feet in wet soil, the temperature changes only about 7 degrees throughout the year, remaining close to the average air temperature for that locality.  (That's the basis for geothermal heat pumps.)


I'll have to do some more studying on the subject to help insure that it works as intended, and it might take a season or two of experimentation to get it just right.  But having a long interest in gardening and self-sufficiency, it seems like something I could have fun at.  Borrowing our neighbor's backhoe would probably add to the "fun" compared to shoveling it all out by hand.

Anyone with experience in root cellars, please chime in!