The Root Cellar-Food preservation B4 electricity

[Sir Charles deMouton-Black]

Well.  As I was layin aroun' thinkin about gettin up, all cozy & everythin'  The gas furnace is workin overtime, and I'm thinkin about POTATOES!

After I get up I notice on the weather channel,  A very popular channel up here!  The temperature at 8 am is -18 Celcius.  The news says that Vancouver & Victoria have SNOW!

The thing with potatoes is that they can't freeze, and they have to be stored out of the light or they will start thinkin its spring & start to sprout.

I recall at my uncles ranch, and all his neighbours, had ROOT CELLARS.  Another option is to dig a cellar inside your cabin or farmhouse.

Find a hillside with well drained soil.  Dig out a space large enough.  Build your cellar with hewn logs, or whatever construction materials are available, ideally without having to spend any cash.  The doorway has to have two insulated doors, with a space between.  Now cover the whole structure well using the material you dug out in the first place.  Actual "plans" depended on your location, skill and resourses available.

[Delmonico]

There are still a lot of them in use around here, not only for root crops, but a place out of the way to store home canning.  Of course around here if possible you want to build the door to the north, the east or best, to the north-east.  The reason is them tornados tend to come from the south-west.

[Singing Bear]

There are still a lot of them in use around here, not only for root crops, but a place out of the way to store home canning.  Of course around here if possible you want to build the door to the north, the east or best, to the north-east.  The reason is them tornados tend to come from the south-west.

Huh, that's interesting.   Something we'd never think of since we don't have the extremes as y'all do. 

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[Sir Charles deMouton-Black]

Singin' Bear;  You from Hawaii?? 

You don't get extremes?  Ill betcha Kans ass doen't get too many Tsunamis? Nor Lava flows?

Hawaii still has a Cattle Industry, I hear.  Anyone call themselves a "Paniolo"?

About Lava.  We are located on "the ring of fire" and a nearby dormant volcano  "The Nazko Cone" is rumbling!

[Delmonico]

Sir Charles, a root cellar might not be the best place to hide from a Tsunamis or a lava flow.

[Sir Charles deMouton-Black]

Del;  Everywhere has their trials & tribulations.  I am 500 miles from the sea, and 150 miles from The Nazco Cone.  We have winter and floods and forest fires and Mountain Pine beetles  But what affects us the most where I live is the US housing market.  In 1998 my house lost 25% of its market value, and most of our young families moved to Vancouver or Alberta.  With the current high Loonie (That is the Canadian Dollar coin that has a Loon on the "tails" side) and jittery US realestate market I am about to lose again!

[Singing Bear]

Del;  Everywhere has their trials & tribulations.  I am 500 miles from the sea, and 150 miles from The Nazco Cone.  We have winter and floods and forest fires and Mountain Pine beetles  But what affects us the most where I live is the US housing market.  In 1998 my house lost 25% of its market value, and most of our young families moved to Vancouver or Alberta.  With the current high Loonie (That is the Canadian Dollar coin that has a Loon on the "tails" side) and jittery US realestate market I am about to lose again!

Kinda damned if ya do and damned if ya don't.  Housing market in Hawaii skyrocketed and we're paying the price.  Along with the expected higher property taxes, our all wise mayor decided to jack it up another notch to pay for a rail system that may or may not get built. 

Trials and tribulations indeed.  We need to worry about hurricanes, mostly.  We've been getting some close calls and one of them is bound to hit us head on.  I'd like to build a "storm room" and materials are available that can withstand winds up to 200 mph.  A composite of concrete and styrofoam, of all things.   It needs to be self sufficient in plumbing and power.  Thinking about converting our garage into this "safe room" and there's probably enough space to get a 2 bedroom unit.  Pickling and canning will play a role in our disaster food supply as well as vacuum packing certain staples like rice.

I live up in the central plains of Oahu.  No worries about tsunamis or lava flows or even earthquakes.  Our volcanoes are long dead and we're well past the "hot zone".  The Big Island is over that zone now and there's a new island building up to the south it.  It'll be well past my lifetime before it sees daylight.   

[Sir Charles deMouton-Black]

Boy did this thread take an odd turn!  But maybe it hasn't.

Before electricity, we had to rely on our own efforts to get by.  Now, to be secure when the ''it hits the fan, we have to rely on our own efforts!

[Singing Bear]

Yup.  Food preservation goes back a ways and with modern techniques and recipes, there's some darned good stuff out there.   I know Del has vast knowledge on this subject. 

We got plenty of canned meat and such, but heard about dehydrating cooked ground meat or storing cooked meat in lard or shortening.  "Canning" fruits sounds interesting and will be trying some come next summer when we start getting all that "fresh" peaches and plums, both of which my wife and daughter can't seem to get enough of.   Meanwhile, we're waiting for out guava tree to give more fruit so we can try our hand at making guava jelly.  We also have a couple of lilikoi (passion fruit) vines started and can't wait for it to start fruiting as well.  Lilikoi jelly is another favorite of ours'.   

Can't help but think that this is a growing trend, here, as I'm seeing larger inventories of mason jars and parafin in more stores, some of which never had such items for sale before.   Also more people are getting into dehydrating their own fruit or making beef jerky.  For some, they have found it too time consuming and we've been finding good deals on dehydrators at garage sales.    

[Beans]

Grew up on a self sustaining farm in Missouri in the 40's & 50's  The only thing we bought were spices, salt, pepper, sugar, flour, coffee & tea, dried beans and of course mason jars by the case.  We had an acre of vegetable garden and my grandmother canned everything including rhubarb, she made watermelon rind jam along with all the other type of jellies and jam.

What did we eat?   Chicken, Pork, beef, fish, squirrel, rabbit, quail, deer, blackberries, strawberries, goose berries, raspberries in the middle of winter. Hickory nuts, Black walnuts, pecans, made our own butter, baked our bread, pies, cakes Etc, milked our cows, gathered our eggs. Fresh vegetables in season, home canned vegetables in the middle of winter

Potatoes was stored in a bin in the root cellar, no problem with them lasting season to season

About the only thing we didn't have was money or indoor plumbing of any kind.  Baths was a #2 wash tub.  Wood cook stove in the winter and propane gas in the summer. Central heat was a big wood stove in the living room.

We had a root cellar, spent some time in it hiding from cyclones, tornados and of course to retrieve some of the best canned food in the world.

Didn't really consider my self poor until I left the farm and found out that most people had things we didn’t but we eat better then most of them and got more exercise.

I joined the USMC at age 17 to see the world and found the physical transition from farmer to Marine not that big a jump.


Before someone askes  No I didn't walk 5 miles to school uphill both ways, I only walked a 1/4 mile to catch the bus and we did have a hill on both ends of walk,

[Gold Canyon Kid]

My grandad had a farm/ranch out in Western kansas long before power.  He had a celler, actually a tunnel really, he dug.  In the winter they cut ice from the river and put it into the tunnel with hay all around.  He stored every kind of meat you can imagine all summer long as well as cheeze, and other food which would be better cold.  At the base of the stairs he and my grandma stored all the canning of vegies and jams she made up in the summer and fall to eat all winter and spring.  By fall the ice was starting to run low but a new supply was just around the corner.  I never saw any roots tho.

[Delmonico]

Where did they keep their supply on onions, potatoes and carrots?

[Athena Jake]

A couple years back my wife and I spent our Honeymoon up in Wisconsin off to the west of Madison.  The Cornish mining village up there had some root cellars in the stone of the area, one was sort of set back out of the wind, and had what looked like a raised flower bed full of sand.  They kept their root vegetables in the sand buried for the winter.  Alton Brown mentions the same thing (Storing root veggies in sand) in one of his shows, but I think tubs of sand in the fridge to keep the vegetables is a bit much.  I think I will wait until I am a home owner.

Athena Jake