A year and a month ago, I shared a weekend project where I added shelving to our root cellar which had been sitting unused under the house for a good couple of decades. Since I’ve finished storing most things in the root cellar this autumn, it seemed a good time to catch up on how it’s worked out this past year!
1. The stairway downstairs, with temperatures warmer than the basement but cooler than the house proper. This also happens to be the perfect place to store onions (hanging along the wall) and baskets of apples (in the corners). Last winter, we had a big box of apples stashed here for over six months in perfect condition that provided not only convenient fruit but a lovely aroma as you went down the stairs.
2. The view from the door into the root cellar. The small shelves attached to the wall on the left came with the house. I installed the middle set of three shelves last year. The set of three more shelves to the right was installed this past spring. I’m considering taking out the small shelves next year and lengthening the middle set of shelves, as well as adding another set along the wall to the right of the door, to give the whole room a more uniform appearance. That is, if the shelves don’t end up being discontinued, which seems to be a real concern at the moment.
3. Anything that does better in cold storage is kept down here. That includes jars of various canned preserves and juices, dried herbs, packaged items from the store, and baskets of root vegetables.
4. Spare jars, pots, dormant bulbs, and overwintering plants are along this side.
5. This year, I’m storing my garden carrots in this big bin filled with potting moss. It keeps them from drying out, which was the main problem I had last year when I kept them out in mesh baskets like the potatoes.
6. You can see in the pictures from last year that I originally was keeping my potatoes in cute little rattan baskets. This proved to be an epically bad idea, as the material soaked in too much moisture and started molding after only a few weeks, ruining the entire batch of potatoes inside it. Everything ended up going straight into the compost heap and I ordered these metal mesh baskets to store anything that remained. They have been enormously useful for all sorts of purposes over the year and are now back on potato duty for their second winter.
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
Little Blue and White House 
The photos of your root cellar reminds me of my family home. In it was stored potatoes, onions and plenty of jars of my mothers pickles and preserves. Thank you for restoring that precious memory.
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Thank you for sharing yours! I love knowing that what we’re doing is carrying on a tradition that has gone on for generations, and that the advice I find is often knowledge transmitted from somebody’s parents and grandparents down the line. And of course it’s great knowing that I can feed everybody even if we’re snowed in for a couple of weeks!
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What a great root cellar and great to hear about your storage experiments.
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Thank you! There’s definitely a lot of live and learn involved, but that makes the successes all the more exciting! This year, I’ll be storing kohlrabi, parsley root, salsify and Jerusalem artichokes for the first time, so I’m sure you guys will get to hear all about how well (or not) it goes 😀
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What a fascinating place, I could do with one of those, a lovely different six for this week!
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Now that I’ve started using it, I can’t believe I let that space go empty for so long! I find new things to squirrel away down there every other day.
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Thanks for the tour of the root cellar. Looks like a very useful space indeed.
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Especially since it doesn’t require any electricity and stays at walk-in refrigerator temperatures for 3/4 of the year! I’m not brave enough to keep whole hams down there yet, but just might be in another few months…
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Your cellar is very tidy, Angela – and useful! No cellars (or basements) here – our house sits on a concrete slab.
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Thank you! Yes, and the warm climate would make it difficult to get the right temperatures unless you dug an entire cavern! Then again, you can plant an entire winter garden and have fresh stuff year round 😉
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What an Aladdin’s cave down there! It looks fantastic. How to you keep track of all those goodies? I have a small larder and I get confused even with that. 😉
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Oh, I am envious of that Angela! It looks nice as well as being useful too! Do you know what the humidity level is? Our cellar/basement is simply an extension of the house, and although not heated it remains at around 16°C in the winter which is far too warm for potatoes! Outside the mice would get them. Almost everyone has a cellar here, but why they stopped putting in root cellars is a mystery!
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The humidity level usually hovers around 85% but doesn’t go much above 90%. A bit on the lower side but still within reason. It stays between 1-4°C for 3/4 of the year, which is more than enough time for us to finish off the stored vegetables before summer hits again. I’m impressed with how warm your basement is, sometimes that’s the temperature of our house! You must have some amazing insulation and perhaps a newer house? I know that the newer homes here do not have them as well, since they weren’t considered modern and desirable for a while. You’re right, though — what’s not to love about a room that refrigerates without electricity?
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Our basement/house IS insulated well, which helps in summer when we get heatwaves! But our heating system (pellets) is also down there so that emkts a bit of warmth too.
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