It’s about time I post about the root cellar. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s no way any family of three can grow this much produce without figuring out some way to store it all. That means a lot of canning, a lot of drying, and the need for a cool, ventilated room to keep it in. Plus we have plenty of six-packs and wine bottles of hard cider, currently hiding underneath a staircase, that are in need of a new home. That’s a lot of space – and space, unfortunately, is something we lack.

In many parts of the country homes are equipped with a cellar, or basement. In New England, where I grew up, we had a good 1,000 square feet of perfectly liveable, if a little spidery, extra space. That basement, which was made  up of three distinct sections, was home to my father’s work bench (seldom used), our weight bench (used even less), a laundry room (used daily), and even a decent-sized pub complete with a bar, couches, a stereo and even a bumper pool table (used the most). The damn thing even had swinging saloon doors.

Not here in the West Coast, though. For some reason every house has only a shallow, forbidding, cobwebbed mouse habitat commonly known as the crawl space.

As in, the only way to get around in there is to crawl. And if the parade of plumbers, electricians and other contractors we’ve had around here are to be believed, I, as a homeowner, should already have done plenty of crawling. I mean, you’d think that for every other new homeowner clamping a mag-lite between their teeth, kicking out the small, ground-level screen window and diving into the abyss is an act undertaken before the moving truck has even backed out of the driveway.

Me, I haven’t gone down there since moving in. Okay, so I did send Sarah down there once, but that hardly counts. I mean, she was the one who wanted to play with the flash light.

Anyway, the point is there’s no room at all to store anything down there. Skeletal remains, maybe, but quart jars of dilly beans? Not bloody likely.

It just so happens that we don’t have a heck of a lot of pantry space inside the house either, so we knew we’d have to come up with another idea.

What we did have was a steep hill, running behind the house and abutting the parking area, that had sort of become the dumping ground for old lumber. So, we thought, why not excavate here, throw in an 8 X 10 structure, run a ventilation pipe up skyward, and fill back in? Instant Root Cellar!

Of course I’m misusing the word “instant” here; it turned out to be a pretty large contracting job that took twice as long to complete as originally planned. Ultimately, we didn’t excavate as deeply into the hill as we would have liked (due to safety concerns), and consequently the front of the structure sticks out from, rather than is flush with, the side of the hill. That forced us to build some retaining walls on either side to prevent the still-loose dirt from sliding down and around the front due to rain or just plain gravity.

One of the neat consequences of all this is that, for a time at least, Sarah had a very large pile of dirt to climb on and play around in for several weeks….

Notice how easily all of that dirt could slide down around the front corners, particularly after a heavy rain. Which is exactly what happened when the project was interrupted by several days of downpours, a mess that resulted in our door being sealed closed by almost a foot of heavy, wet mud.

And here’s what it looks like now. Inside we’ve got a dirt floor, decent ventilation, and plenty of space for shelving. No electricity, of course, but we’ve inserted a piece of PVC pipe in the cement and through a retaining wall to allow for the use of an extension cord to power any lights, fans or wide-screen tv’s we might want to have in there (you have to admit–it does look like the perfect man-cave). Come Spring we’ll throw some seeds down along the top and sides, and with a little luck we’ll eventually get some good ground cover for erosion control. I’ll build a ramp, and maybe even landscape a bit around the front.

But at least it’s done before next summer. Whew!

-Jason