Road to Emmaus: Trying out the cellar

Our homestead was once part of a larger farm with standard house, barn, and outbuildings. Though most of the buildings have long since been torn down, one remnant of days gone by is the old cement cistern. It was placed up hill of the rest of the farm, and water was pumped in to it from the windmill, and then it was a gravity flow from there.

We've decided to use it for a root cellar for our vegetables. It's about 10 feet in diameter and about 9 feet deep. The bottom should keep an even temperature in the 50s. We'll be adding sawdust to the cement roof for added insulation. We'll also he adding a wooden door with hinges, and a vent pipe to curb condensation.

Inside the cellar, we will store our potatoes and carrots. For the potatoes, we dug the potatoes and then spread them out in a shed for a couple days to dry and harden. It's important to keep potatoes out if direct sunlight for extended periods of time. We then lowered them in plastic 5 gallon pails, where they'll remain until use. In the past, we've usually stored potatoes in large wooden bins. We'll see if buckets makes it easier to keep track of bad potatoes, and it should make it easier to get then in and out for actual use.

For carrots, we're trying two methods. I dug about half the carrots and trimmed the green tops to about an inch and a half. We then spread them out in a half plastic barrel in between layers of moist sand. The other half if the carrots will be left in the garden and covered with a heavy mulch of hay--hay that we had on the potatoes this summer.

We also planted a small patch of garlic. They will sprout and get some growth this winter, and then go dormant until the spring. They should be ready for harvest next summer.

Finally, in addition to the slab wood we've been getting from the Amish saw mills, we cut and drug up a good amount of dead trees for firewood. We like to drag the logs out of the woods with the tractor and then cut them up in the pasture.