Dangers in the Root Cellar

It had been nagging at me for a month or so.  Somehow, the thought never got close enough to my awareness to be acted upon.  But last week when the pest control folks came to spray my house (gasp, choke, do I have to?) to rid it of hobo spiders (we've seen 8 or 9 at last count) so that my husband could stop joking about using his sleeping bag to sleep in the car at night to prevent another nasty bite,  I had the crawl space hatch open to give the pest man access to where the hobos live when they are not marching around in our living space.

You may not remember that at the edge of the crawl space hatch is where my "root cellar" was installed last fall.  And somewhere in the very, back, back recesses of my memory, it seemed that squash was still tucked away in one of the bins.

One year in the root cellar is TOO long

Before the pest man began his toxic work, I checked.  Three squash, indeed, left from last year, not rotten, but with a funny, waxy, sticky feel grinned up at me when I slid out the bin.

Good enough for the chickens was my first thought.  NO!  I'll bake them and use them in a wonderful butternut soup recipe.  After their appropriate time in the oven, I tasted the golden flesh.  Not very good.  I guess the Things I get to do today include baking squash for the hens.


But the chickens didn't really take to it at all.  And any food that is left in the hen yard overnight is fair game for the jays and (can I make this small enough type to barely be seen?) the rats.  Now four days later, most of it is still on the ground in the hen pen.  Good sign that cleaning out the root cellar each spring must find its way to the Things list.

Root Cellar Revisited

I finally have mine.   Do you have one?  Are you still longing for yours?  I'm certain that it is what everyone wants.  We're talking about a root cellar.

If you were fortunate enough to grow up a hundred years ago, you had a root cellar.  A root cellar is a "cave" carved into the cool, damp earth where you could store the root crops from you garden.  My grandmother's root cellar was on a slight incline.  Two large doors hinged like shutters over the entrance.  When open, the doors flopped back against the sloped earth, revealing a yawning darkness, a few steps leading down and the fragrance of soil.  When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could make out a few bushel baskets and apple boxes that had been stacked to form shelves.  Jars of peaches, apricots and green beens nestles in groups on these shelves, the result of many long hours in the hot kitchen (think wood stove fire in the middle of summer in a small kitchen with one window) putting up food for winter.

But in the bushel baskets were the root vegetables: carrots, potatoes, turnips, rutabagas and beets blanketed in dirt to hold their moisture.  Refrigeration was not yet a widely available convenience, and these crops like it cool and dark.  Certainly, they needed to be dug in the fall to save them for the hard freeze of winter, but in the root cellar, they could go back to bed and hibernate all winter at a very comfortable temperature until they became something delicious in the kitchen.

I planted carrots and potatoes and beets this year.  The refrigerator, in spite of its exquisite convenience is not ideal for storing my harvest.  Too cold and too dry.  Ever since moving into our current house (34 years ago), I've known that the space under the house held hope for storing produce.  My tall frame can almost stand up in one end of that crawl space, but before rather recently becoming table-saw-certified, I've not felt empowered to go ahead with any construction that could transform "crawl space" into "root cellar." That's history now.

A month ago "install hatch ring" was at the top of "Things I get to do today."  Our house was remodeled in 1992.  The carpenters and especially the flooring men pegged me right off as a lunatic for wanting the access door to the crawl space changed from my daughter's bedroom closet to the middle of the floor in the pantry just off the kitchen.  (To this day, not one person needing to do whatever needs to be done in a crawl space has complained about the clean, convenient and easy access to do gritty, uncomfortable work.)  But the flooring guys, grumbling about cutting a hole in the middle this beautiful sheet of vinyl, were not the ones to ask to put in the ring that would make it easy to pull the very heavy access lid into the open position.

Everyday look of the pantry floor.

Rug removed.  Crawl space access lid

Nearly 20 years later, I know I can do it.  Once that hurdle was jumped, everything else became real.

Hatch ring installed

Lid/hatch open to crawl space

A few dollars spent at my favorite store, a small pile of sawdust made from recycling a garden bean frame and an hour slightly crunched over with several years-worth of delicate spider lace and I have my modern version of a root cellar.

Attached to the sub-flooring are rails that hold the lips of the bins.
The bins pull out like drawers.

I think the beets and carrots would like a dirt blanket.