The conversation that got it all started.
Bally002 had asked for input on a food storage structure he was building, He started the conversation with this post in the shoutbox:
so I replied with:
In the northern hemisphere, the sun rides in the southern part of the sky on it's daily travels, so the north side of hills are more shady, which is where you want to locate a storage area that you want to keep cooler than average. In the southern hemisphere, the situation is exactly reversed, with the sun riding in the northern half of the sky, making southern exposures shadier there.
The cellar is dug back into a hillside or as a hole in the ground to take advantage of the natural cooling insulation of the Earth. It's lined with stone to prevent the gradual caving in of the dirt walls, and that is lined with shelving to hold whatever it is you are storing in it.
This is the first house I've ever lived in in these hills that does not have a root cellar per se. However, I do have a 3 room basement, walled in with cinder blocks and dug back into the northwest facing slope of a hill. Any one of those rooms could be pretty conveniently converted into a root cellar. In my case, to make it effective I'd have to seal the cinderblocks with something like Thoroseal. They are in contact with the dirt, and there is a water vein running under the house which creates a certain amount of seepage into the basement - more when it rains hard. Cool is good for storage, wet not so much.
Further ideas for storage enclosures from the hills:
The one we had was built like an addition to the kitchen, with a door at the back of the kitchen to access the spring house. It had a series of 3 concrete troughs. Spring water was fed into the "high" end of it with an old iron pipe. It successively flowed from one trough to the next, and drained out the "lower" end via another iron pipe set into that end as an outlet. We had a creek running directly under the kitchen (the kitchen was built like a bridge over it), so the water from the spring house emptied directly into the creek.
That kept cold spring water constantly circulating and replenishing, keeping the water - and everything in it - cold, like a refrigerator. Not quite as cold as a refrigerator, but cool enough.The place I grew up was composed of limestone karst, so it was shot full of caves carved out by flowing underground water. Those caves, and that water, maintained a constant temperature of around 54 degrees F until exposed to the outside world. about a half mile or a mile from my house, there was a spring that gushed from a crack in a rock cliff, and aeons ago someone had jammed an iron pipe into it, and built a stone and concrete box about 2" x 2" at the other end of the pipe. All bu the foundation of the box was gone, and the pipe therefore exposed where you could get to it, and that was the coldest water I've ever drank straight out of the Earth. I suppose that long ago there was a cabin there, and the inhabitants had built that box as a spring house to keep their stuff cold.
That little 2x2 spring box was all that remained of the homestead.
.
Bally002 had asked for input on a food storage structure he was building, He started the conversation with this post in the shoutbox:
Quote:Hello all, a little project I'm working on is building an underground cool room to store edibles. I'm fine with dried canned and jarred etc. But I'm trying to find a recipe for curing meat and preserving it un refridgerated for over 12 months. I've done all the googling and find that most methods do not allow for anything of a couple of months. I thought the jerky I make would last indefinitely but it is not recommended. Any tips?
so I replied with:
Quote:Sounds like you are talking about what we used to call here a "root cellar".
We dug ours into the north side of a hill so the sun didn't hit it directly, and walled it with stone (of which we have an overabundance), then lined the stone walls with wooden shelves to hold cans. or jars. We had one dug under the house I was raised in, like a basement. In addition to the wall shelves, there was a wooden shelf structure built in the center of it, with wood bins at the bottom of that structure for holding root crops like potatoes.
For preservation, we "canned" just about everything into Mason jars. My dear old dad would even jar up meat and fish, and it would keep for a couple years. Fruit and vegetables, like apples and tomatoes and such, were either canned or dried in the sun. Beans were threaded on strings still in the husk and dried for storage. Jerky is good, but pemmican is better, stores more energy and keeps longer. There are YouTube videos now on how to make pemmican, but the basics are dried meat, powdered, and dried fruit like berries, bound together with melted suet and cooled into little cakes.
Root crops like potatoes and onions Would keep in the bins all year from one harvest to the next if kept in the cool and dry of the cellar, out of the sun. Some meat was salted, mostly ham, bacon, and beef, and that too was hung in the root cellar for storage..
In the northern hemisphere, the sun rides in the southern part of the sky on it's daily travels, so the north side of hills are more shady, which is where you want to locate a storage area that you want to keep cooler than average. In the southern hemisphere, the situation is exactly reversed, with the sun riding in the northern half of the sky, making southern exposures shadier there.
The cellar is dug back into a hillside or as a hole in the ground to take advantage of the natural cooling insulation of the Earth. It's lined with stone to prevent the gradual caving in of the dirt walls, and that is lined with shelving to hold whatever it is you are storing in it.
This is the first house I've ever lived in in these hills that does not have a root cellar per se. However, I do have a 3 room basement, walled in with cinder blocks and dug back into the northwest facing slope of a hill. Any one of those rooms could be pretty conveniently converted into a root cellar. In my case, to make it effective I'd have to seal the cinderblocks with something like Thoroseal. They are in contact with the dirt, and there is a water vein running under the house which creates a certain amount of seepage into the basement - more when it rains hard. Cool is good for storage, wet not so much.
Further ideas for storage enclosures from the hills:
Quote:Some folks around here had ice houses, too. It's like a root cellar, dug into a hill or underground, but during the winter they'd wait fir the river to freeze and then cut big slabs of ice out of it and haul the ice back to the ice house to keep things cool. Packed in sawdust for insulation, some would manage to save that ice and keep stuff cool up into late July or early August, which for you I reckon would equate to late January or early February.
We also had "spring houses" or "dairies". The house I grew up in had one built on to the back of it, accessible from the kitchen. What that was was a series of troughs with water from a spring constantly circulating though them. Here, water gushes out of mountainsides in places, and it's cold water - keeps a constant temperature year 'round. You could set jugs of milk or well-wrapped cheeses into that water, and it would keep it cold like a refrigerator does now.
The one we had was built like an addition to the kitchen, with a door at the back of the kitchen to access the spring house. It had a series of 3 concrete troughs. Spring water was fed into the "high" end of it with an old iron pipe. It successively flowed from one trough to the next, and drained out the "lower" end via another iron pipe set into that end as an outlet. We had a creek running directly under the kitchen (the kitchen was built like a bridge over it), so the water from the spring house emptied directly into the creek.
That kept cold spring water constantly circulating and replenishing, keeping the water - and everything in it - cold, like a refrigerator. Not quite as cold as a refrigerator, but cool enough.The place I grew up was composed of limestone karst, so it was shot full of caves carved out by flowing underground water. Those caves, and that water, maintained a constant temperature of around 54 degrees F until exposed to the outside world. about a half mile or a mile from my house, there was a spring that gushed from a crack in a rock cliff, and aeons ago someone had jammed an iron pipe into it, and built a stone and concrete box about 2" x 2" at the other end of the pipe. All bu the foundation of the box was gone, and the pipe therefore exposed where you could get to it, and that was the coldest water I've ever drank straight out of the Earth. I suppose that long ago there was a cabin there, and the inhabitants had built that box as a spring house to keep their stuff cold.
That little 2x2 spring box was all that remained of the homestead.
.