Easy DIY Root Cellars (That Don’t Require A Shovel!)

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Root cellaring is a time-honored tradition for keeping food fresh all winter long. Most people these days think of a root cellar as a complicated and costly endeavor that involves a separate building somewhere on their property. The reality is that anyone can root cellar (even in an apartment) with little to no investment.

In a nutshell, root cellaring involves keeping produce cool without electricity. While a root cellar dug into the ground is one way to do that, there are a lot of other options that work just as well, depending on your climate.

For warmer climates, a cool shaded place under the porch is enough to keep vegetables fresh through the cooler months. In colder climates, an unheated basement or a closet along the north wall tends to work well.

Depending on where you live, you may also be able to construct a makeshift root cellar just inside a north-facing window. The main idea is to trap the cool outside air around the produce, but keep it warm enough that it doesn’t freeze. A box placed against an apartment window, with the window slightly cracked all winter, might be just enough.

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Get creative. How you construct your makeshift root cellar will largely depend on your climate and how cold or warm it is in the winter months. For example, in the north country, a back closet in my house far from the wood stove stays between 40 and 50 degrees all winter. In warmer climates, even an open window in December might not be sufficient to keep things cool. You’ll have to adjust based on your particular situation.

Temperature and Moisture

The ideal temperature of you root cellar depends on what you’re trying to store. Some fruits, like apples, want a cold root cellar, kept just above freezing. Other things, like tomatoes, will spoil rapidly if kept too cold. Tomatoes need to be kept above 50 degrees.

Moisture is also a big variable. Root crops like carrots and beets need to be kept very most, at 90 to 95 percent humidity to avoid drying out. Other crops like dry beans and garlic need to be kept dry at 60-70 percent humidity to prevent mold and spoilage.

Be sure to check the requirements for the specific vegetables or fruits you’re planning to store before designing your root cellaring space.

Ventilation and Cross Contamination

Some fruits, such as apples, give off ethylene gas to promote ripening. That’s why they always say to stick an apple in a bag with a banana to ripen your bananas faster. In a closed space without proper ventilation, ethylene gas will build up and spoil your food.

Some foods, such as potatoes, are very susceptible to ethylene and should not be kept near apples. Many people even suggest keeping potatoes and apples in completely different spaces, but very few people have the option of two good root cellar spaces, so most suggest separating them as best you can.  Ethylene gas descends, so keeping potatoes above apples in space is also a good option.

Other things, like cabbage, can give off flavors to other vegetables stored nearby. For this reason, some people choose not to store cabbage at all, to prevent it from flavoring the other items in the cellar over time.

Proper ventilation also helps prevent mold issues.

The best ventilation setup will depend on your particular setup, but as a general rule try to set it up to take in cold air and vent warm air. Basement root cellars have an air intake on the north side of the house that descends in a pipe to the bottom of the root cellar so that cold air can naturally move down the pipe and into the cellar. Another vent at the top of the cellar helps to passively move warm air out.

Items Not to Root Cellar

Some produce doesn’t belong in the root cellar at all. Pumpkins and squash do best at relatively warm (50 to 60 degrees) and must be kept in dry conditions to prevent spoilage. Warm and dry are the opposite of most root cellared vegetables, so these will store best in a closet or neatly tucked away under a bed for months.

Pests and Rodents

Obviously, you’ll need to take care to keep pests and rodents out of your food, just as you do with any food in your home. Dry items, like dried beans, are best kept in sealed rodent-proof containers like Mason jars. Any air vents should be sealed with rodent-proof galvanized hardware cloth. Cool temperatures tend to deter pests, so be sure and check your produce carefully to avoid bringing any unwanted pests into your food storage.

What advice would you add on making a DIY root cellar? Share your thoughts in the section below:

5 Forgotten Ways To Keep Food Cold Without Electricity

We have a hard time even thinking about living without electrical power. We use it for everything, from powering our cell phones to running our factories. Without it, modern life, as we know it, would cease to exist.

That’s why the loss of the electrical grid is one of the most challenging survival scenarios that we as a society face. While electricity is not normally considered a survival priority on an individual level, it is for society as a whole.

Quite literally, the entire infrastructure breaks down without electrical power. Besides all the obvious things that would stop working in such a situation, we would also lose the entire distribution system. Without electrical power to run the computers and the machines, getting products from manufacturers and distributors to stores comes to a screeching halt.

But we’ll feel the pinch of losing electrical power long before things get to that point. Without our appliances, society would be set back by over a century. Actually, it would be worse than that, because our great-grandparents knew how to live without electricity … and we don’t.

Of all the domestic uses of electricity, the single most important one is refrigeration. We depend on it to keep fresh food fresh and frozen food frozen. Without that capability, those foods would spoil fast.

Yet refrigeration, in one form or another, existed long before electric power and the modern refrigerator. If we are going to keep foods fresh, once the grid goes out, we’re going to have to rediscover those methods and put them to use.

Here’s five ways to do that:

1. Go underground

Long before refrigerators or even ice boxes, people discovered that they could keep food cool by keeping it underground. Those who had caves on their property would use them for food storage. But even people who didn’t have a cave would take advantage of things being cooler underground, if they had a well.

Pitchers of milk, cheese, sides of meat and other foods could be kept cool, helping them to last longer. The further down in the well the item was hung, the cooler it would be. So, it wasn’t uncommon to see a number of ropes going down into a well, with each one holding something that the owner wanted to keep from spoiling.

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This idea evolved into the root cellar, which was extremely common in the pioneering days of our country. Root cellars are nothing more than man-made caves, carved out of the ground to provide a cool place to keep food — especially root vegetables like potatoes and carrots – cool.

The home I grew up in had a concrete bomb shelter attached to it, a leftover from World War II. That became our family’s root cellar, giving us space that we could use when our refrigerator was already full.

2. Running water

There’s nothing better than fresh water from a cool stream, especially if it is fresh runoff from melting snow. While that might be a bit cool to bathe in, it’s great for keeping food cool. This is a trick that’s been used by campers and backpackers for years. But it’s one that we need to add to our survival arsenal.

Running groundwater stays cool due to evaporation. That’s why running water is usually cooler than standing water. The movement of the water exposes more of it to the air, increasing the amount of evaporation. In cases of whitewater, where the water is being thrown into the air by rocks and other obstacles, evaporation increases even more, making the water even cooler.

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The one problem with using running water to keep food cool is that there is a chance of fish and aquatic animals eating your food. So, if you’re going to do this, you need the food in a container to protect it.

3. Evaporative cooling

Since evaporation cools water, we can use evaporation to cool food, as well. All we need is some means of putting the food in a place where it is surrounded by evaporating water. This is easily accomplished by wrapping fabric around a shelving unit and wetting it down. Food placed on the shelves will be nice and cool. Of course, you’ll need to add water from time to time.

A makeshift evaporative refrigerator like this works best if it is placed where a breeze is hitting it. The breeze increases the amount of air flowing over the wet fabric, thereby increasing the amount of evaporation.

Of course, for evaporative cooling to work, you need to be in a relatively dry climate. High humidity lowers the amount of evaporation you can expect, which in turn lowers the effectiveness of these methods of keeping food cool.

4. The zeer pot

The zeer pot is a primitive, but quite effective, evaporative cooler that is still in use in parts of the world today. It consists of two unglazed clay pots, one larger than the other. The small pot is placed inside the larger one and the space between the two filled with sand. Food is placed inside the inner pot and the sand is filled with water.

Since the pots are unglazed, the water will soak through them, making the clay wet. Water on the surface of the outer pot will then evaporate, cooling the pots and their contents. Covering the top with a wet cloth will increase the overall cooling, helping to keep the food inside fresh.

In tests, produce kept in a zeer pot will last four times as long as comparable produce kept at room temperature. These tests were done in a hot climate, so it’s possible that in a cooler climate, the zeer pot would be even more effective.

5. The ice box

The most recent means of keeping food cool, before the refrigerator came on the scene, was the ice box. I’m not talking about an ice chest that you’d use on a picnic here, but rather something that was in the kitchen and used to keep food cool.

An ice box, obviously, requires ice. This was delivered every few days by the ice man, who brought it from a warehouse called an “ice house.” This ice would have been harvested from lakes in the wintertime and stored in a well-insulated area – using straw and sawdust — until warmer weather. Anyone who has seen the movie Frozen should be familiar with this concept, as the movie shows workers harvesting ice and storing it away in an ice house.

While it would be difficult, you could build an ice house and harvest ice in the wintertime, for use when the weather is warmer. The best ice houses, of course, are underground.

What advice would you add for keeping food cool when it’s warm? Share your thoughts in the section below: