How to Design a Root Cellar
People have use root cellars to keep food from spoiling for centuries. In the days before electricity, people were innovative by necessity, and learned to create the optimum conditions for food preservation by building storage spaces into hillsides and in holes dug into the earth. Root cellars work as well today as they ever did. You can build a traditional root cellar outdoors, or recreate optimum conditions by walling off a portion of your basement. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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Designing an Outdoor Root Cellar
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Survey your property to determine the location that is most suitable for an outdoor root cellar. A north-facing hillside with sandy soil is ideal. Any location that has adequate drainage and deep enough soil to create a substantial storage space will work.
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Design the size of your root cellar to suit the amount of food that you need to store. A root cellar for a couple doesn't need to be as large as a root cellar for a family of eight. A space that is 4 feet wide by 6 feet long by 6 feet high can easily store enough produce to get three or four people through a winter.
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Provide the conditions that will allow food to keep through the winter. These include a dirt floor to keep humidity high, walls that are almost completely underground to keep temperatures low during warm weather but above freezing during cold weather and ideally an insulated roof to separate the interior root cellar climate from the outdoors.
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Design spaces for shelves along all the walls and a doorway to get into and out of the root cellar. In a steep enough hillside, this can be a conventional vertical doorway. For a root cellar that is built into flat ground, you will need to design a trap door.
Designing an Indoor Root Cellar
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Plan a root cellar that is situated on the north wall of your basement. Ideally, it should go in a corner to maximize its exposure to cooler outside walls, and so it requires you to build only two interior walls rather than three.
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Situate the root cellar so it incorporates a basement window. You can then take out this window and replace it with a piece of plywood through which you can run two 4-inch diameter vent pipes. Design one pipe to extend down to the floor and the other to end near the ceiling. This will create a flow of cool air through the root cellar.
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Design shelves to run from floor to ceiling along the walls of the root cellar. For maximum flexibility, make the shelves adjustable. You can then use fewer, taller shelves for large produce containers, or put in more shelves closer together for canned goods or small items.
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Plan to insulate the interior walls of the root cellar to isolate it from the warmer temperature inside the house. Like an outdoor root cellar, the temperature in a basement root cellar should stay below 45 degrees Fahrenheit, but above freezing.
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