You don’t need an underground room to have an effective root cellar — you can easily use soil, mulch and a few other tools to store vegetables and fruits without ever leaving your garden. Based on your winter weather and your available space, choose from these five ideas for outdoor root cellars to store your harvests through the snowy winter months.
The Organic Garden Blanket
The earth holds a surprising amount of summer heat in its mass. If you can trap this heat with some kind of fluffy organic blanket — leaves, clean straw, sawdust or even banked-up snow — it’s entirely possible to keep soil from freezing for months longer than if it were left bare. In areas with mild winters, you can even keep soil soft enough to dig in year-round, allowing you to harvest snapping-fresh, cold-tolerant vegetables while everyone else is relying on food from the grocery store. To make handling the blanket easy, tuck your leaves or other material into recycled trash bags before you lay them over your root crops.
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The Trench Silo
Root crops come from the soil, and soil is wonderful at keeping them fresh. This is the power behind the trench silo, and a shovel is all you need to make one. Start by digging up your beets, carrots, parsnips and other long-keeping root crops, cutting the tops down to about 1 inch. Next, dig a trench 6 to 10 inches deep and 18 to 24 inches wide. Replant your vegetables close together in the bottom of this trench, replacing the soil around them and heaping it 6 to 10 inches above them, burying the crops completely with soil. A variety of crops can be kept in the same trench.
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The Garbage Can Cellar
Keeping water out is one of the challenges of a hole-in-the-ground pit cellar, but using a garbage can will help. Dig a hole slightly larger than the diameter of the can and deep enough so that the can’s lid will sit 6 inches or so below the soil level. Set the can inside the hole, then layer in the veggies with some straw or dead leaves. Set the lid on the can, use a stick to pack soil all the way down into the gap around the outside of the can, and then flare the soil out at a tidy angle around the opening. Long-keeping root vegetables will live happily down there, even in the coldest weather. Good storage apple varieties will too, but keep your veggies separate from them. (Apples release ethylene gas as they ripen, which will shorten the storage life of vegetables.)
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Article source: Mother Earth News
Image source: In Habitat