Did Our Food Supply Last Through Winter? | Earthbag Root Cellar

[Music] [Music] welcome back everyone it is early April and we thought it would be fun to show you our root cellar how it did through winter and basically all the food that we have left in it today let's first take a look around and show you guys what it looks like down here our earth bag root cellar is an 8 by 8 on the inside so we've got a really good amount of space down here and you can see lots of things are I don't know if I want to say bear but starting to look more empty so we started with about I want to say 550 cans back in the fall and we had already eaten quite a bit of them and that was just a rough count that I did at that point we have also can't quite a bit more food throughout the winter which I wasn't quite expecting so all in all I think we probably canned anywhere from 6 to probably closer to 650 jars this year really awesome and all together I think we probably have like 700 jars or something like that with some of the mason jars that we use for dry storage as well right off the bat you probably noticed that we have lots of empty jars and this is our storage place for them we used to store them in our conics but we just don't have enough room in there anymore and it works really well to store them down here and we just come and get them when we need them so a lot of them have frost on them right now this is the part of the root cellar that sits you know a little bit closer to the ground line so it is a little bit colder up there I think today we are close to 30 to 40 degrees outside and it is 30 degrees Fahrenheit inside the root cellar and that's pretty much what it was all winter it actually was a little bit colder was about 28 so it has heated up a little bit which is great and we haven't had to worry about freezing so let's go ahead and jump right in and show you guys what we have left first over here we have lots of jellies left we didn't go through all of those and a few syrups we've got some of our cowboy candy marinade one jar of pepper teenies left and this is a new batch of mustard that I made we finished through the their batch earlier this year we've got potatoes down along here and they're kind of just sporadic when we first harvested them they filled up these four shelves maybe even five and down at the bottom they're all organized and that's because we are going to be using those as seed potatoes for this year we also have our apple cider vinegar that we made earlier this year Eric and I have just been letting it age down here we haven't even you know broken into it yet so we have a good amount of that this bottom shelf there are quite a few canned foods that we haven't even touched we did not get to our canned parsnips and purple carrots we didn't get to some of the canned carrots still have a plethora of the canned grains I think we went in with like 50 of those and that was just with too much we have lots of pink salmon left these are our pickled eggs that we recently made these are some pickled carrots and we have quite a bit of pork or lard left so this is really exciting because we use this quite a bit and on this next level we have pickles we've got pickles left we have two chicken stocks left I think we only have one red or sockeye salmon and this is some of that canned ham we made celery stock and we're just using this as like a soup base we had so many of these I think over 40 and we still have you know over 10 really really happy with that this year this is the moose bone broth we recently did we've got some of our pickled cauliflower and kohlrabi and we were lucky enough when we bought that pig in the fall to actually get some beef bone so we made some beef bone broth and we also rendered some tallow so it's got a little more of a yellow color and this is just a little random section I have some pickled eggplants some more brined salmon and smoked and then we are storing some commercial yeast down here too since it's so cold now that we went over what's left we are going to talk quickly on what we want to grow much more of this year some of the things that we ran out of right away were peppers we like a lot of hot peppers so we ran out of cowboy candy and we we did really well but we just want to double that we're gonna do so many more peppers this year and want to can a lot more of those same thing for Tomatoes we had 30 tomato plants I believe and just barely got enough for pasta sauce and tomato sauce and we ran out of that quite a while ago so we'd like to do sun-dried tomatoes or dehydrated we like to do red salsa and we also ran out of our green salsa so we're gonna be making more of that from the tomatillos and cabbage is another thing that we want to grow more of we did grow quite a bit but I didn't stagger it enough to where we actually had them late in the season we went through all our sauerkraut pretty quickly especially when we were doing that challenge back in January we really went through a lot of like that the topping foods and that's because Eric and I don't really buy condiments so that's kind of like our sweet or salty or extra flavor that we get there and we're realizing we need more of that if we want to go all the way through which or with it and even have some of that in the spring time three things we grew too much of was greens and the greens were really helpful to have extra for our chickens but we grew too much and we always tend to grow too many greens and that's because it's just so difficult to get to all of them so we're gonna actually be growing a little bit less of that we're gonna pull back on that this year herbs was another one group way too many of those I have a bunch of those you know upstairs with our dry storage or out on our conics and it's quite possible we may have grown too many carrots I don't quite know if that's true yet but we still have a lot and I'm thinking we may even still have some come this summer so we may scale that back down a little bit too before we dive into some of the roof vegetables that we're storing down here I just wanted to mention something about canning I know it is a totally hot thing to do and it's really an awesome feeling to be able to can your own food and preserve it and have it throughout winter but it is costly and I'm not gonna try and sit here and tell you that it doesn't cost money because it does these jars cost money you know you have to buy new lids and then there's the costs of propane or electricity to actually preserve it or Canon or water bath it so Eric and I although we really love having the canned food we're trying to figure out ways that we could have our food stored in a more economical way whether that be dehydrated you know or Sun AirDroid and just stored as it's not needing to can it because it does add up especially on the propane end for us and that brings me to a complete success this year which we've never done which was storing our root crops so beets we have carrots and we even did parsnips this way in wood shavings and it worked wonderfully we were so thrilled with it and I think it was really advantageous that we have them in such a cool humid area that's definitely ideal for them but I want to show you guys them they really turned out awesome I believe this is our peas we're down to like our last row of beets but we just pulled them out and they are wonderful they're just like when we pulled them out of the ground you know six months ago I've got a white one there we're actually gonna be bringing some of these up today when we lived in Oregon we were actually able to keep these in the ground over winter and just pulled them up as we needed them but because it's such a different climate and the frost is so deep in the ground these would have been damaged if they weren't heavily mulch and I'm not even sure that that would work either so we have been just like I said very excited about this you can even see there's a few little frost crystals on it but the beet itself is not damaged that ice just comes right off the reason we've been so excited about this is that they are really crunchy they're really preserved really well or you know dormant shall I say and when we go to eat them they're still crunchy we can still eat them raw and in my mind I just thought when you stored vegetables like this for so long you have like a soggy beat down here and it's not at all the case they're really crisp really delicious and beneath this we have two bins of carrots which is where I was saying we may have too much this is the bin we were first working on and it has a lot of the sawdust on top that I need to remove but down there there are more carrots they've been a little bit hard to get out I'm gonna show you guys the other one we have right here okay so this is a better example and same thing you know we've got the little ice crystals but once we bring them in and rinse them off they're actually in great shape I'm I don't know how but the frost has not penetrated them and they're just doing I mean you would think that they would have been damaged but I think we're just hovering right around that temperature where they're still okay so we're gonna be bringing up lots of these today this has been something we really enjoy having in the middle of winter when sometimes you don't have anything else that's raw fresh so again this was our first time doing it this way this year and I would do it the exact same way again this is actually a good example Eric and I have only pulled out I mean I want to say under five carrots that look like this I don't if you could see that it's a little mold on that so so little of them have been damaged and that's just super exciting for me in fact not even all of these were storage type carrots I don't think the rainbow ones are meant to store that long but they have all stored really well and all we used was pretty much dry wood shavings some of them were slightly damp but I really want to say they were pretty much dry our root cellar has a lot of humidity going for it already so we didn't need to worry about that I know damp sand is another way that people do it and we stayed away from that because we had the wood shavings and also because of the heaviness getting these down and up you know if we need to do that would be a nightmare was hand so overall this was just a really cool experience for us and I'm glad it worked out you know we really didn't know what to expect going into it these carrots are actually just dormant which is the coolest thing I'm pretty sure if I planted these in the spring they would grow tops again and maybe even go to seed that would be really awesome let's go ahead and show you and talk about our potatoes real quick we are going to be doing an upcoming video on sprouting those and getting them all prepared for planting that's something that we are also really excited about in fact I'm just gonna be honest potatoes are my absolute favorite crop to dig up and the fact that they have been able to last this long you know until spring planting spring planting is probably going to be in about a month and we harvested these over six months ago so I'm just thrilled with that an organ we had a storage room where we were able to keep our potatoes but we pretty much always ate through them before February and these have all made it to April and what I have done is I've already started bringing them inside sprouting them just to make sure that's all gonna go all right I'm not quite sure how many potatoes or how much weight we grew this year I think we put 30 potatoes in the ground or so and we had hundreds and you can tell we still have maybe a hundred left so still more than enough to plant and more than enough that we're eating it's been really awesome this winter getting to just pull these potatoes out of here and having a few a day not even having to worry about it so this is definitely a crop I recommend growing and it's great for storage some of the other vegetables we try to store down here was leeks and parsnips and cabbage we had I think only one or two cabbages at the beginning that we ate through and that lasted pretty well for about a month and then we ate it leeks are something that we've been storing down here and they're not beautiful that's for sure but they actually stored really well what happened because they have a higher moisture content as they did freeze so we bring them up and we cook them and clean them up and they are still wonderful again they don't look very pretty but it worked I don't think leeks are meant to store like this long term when we first brought them in here we had put them in some dirt in a bin and that worked for I want to say the first two to three months until we dip down into those really low temperatures our parsnips are just in a bucket and I believe this is frozen I need to bring this up and out so it you know unthought but there are still parsnips in there and they are still good so this is the last bit of weeks and parsnips we have and even though they're not the same texture as when we first brought them down here I would actually do this again and and that's because it's so cheap and economical you know we yanked them out of the ground left their roots on just brought them down here there is a little bit of cleaning you know involved when we bring them up to the cabin but they've stored with no cost to us basically to store them besides the root cellar itself and that goes back to the cost of caning we also planned to do that for some of our celery this year because we made a lot of celery stock which it's great it's wonderful and I really like to have it on hand however we looked at the cost of it and I think that we could store it not can we can soar it similar to the leaks it'll probably freeze and it will probably taste and look different but if we bring it up and clean it and cook it you know we're gonna be cooking it then I really don't think it will make a huge difference and again that's not true if you want like fresh you know raw crunchy celery but for us I think that would work really well so as I'm walking around pointing out all these highlights and saying how wonderful everything is I also just wanted to mention that there has been some things that have happened some learning curves and we are still kind of adapting to this whole thing when we lived an organ you know we could garden a lot more in the winter and actually harvest then so this has been the first year that we've really had to or that we really have put so much emphasis on growing you know the majority of our own food and preserving it and back an organ we relied on freezing foods with the freezers and more dehydrating but here again we're just really trying to do it like the least resistance you know economically and financially - right we just don't want to spend that much money on it because I don't think you need to I think it's highly impressive that these vegetables have stored in their optimum conditions can actually last that long I mean we have vegetables that are six to eight months old which blows my mind but it they are still really really good and they taste good now we definitely don't only eat all of our own food you know we obviously still buy certain oils still source out things like grains rice and on occasion we definitely do eat out so I don't know if I could say how much we grow our own food in a year but I would say it was it was a lot I know it's over 50% it's probably quite a bit over 50% and we're pretty hardcore if we don't have an ingredient for something we usually just don't use it or we substitute it for what we have and I'm gonna be honest it doesn't always work that well but that's just what we do and it's helped us in the long run be able to make a lot of this food from just what we had available and so over time I know that this is gonna change we're gonna learn more and learn you know if we want to grow more of this gorlice that's not how it fared what's stored right maybe what didn't work out well and we're also not you know closing off our mind to options and future changes that we may do you know we want to plant some apple trees and have apples stored down here at the beginning of the fall we did have some that were from a local orchard and we would love to have our own fruit down here and just kind of keep evolving with what food we can find locally and produce ourselves we're gonna turn the camera around to Eric and he's gonna talk a little bit about structurally the design and how its held up this winter let's go back in time and we'll kind of talk about what this root cellar has been through since we built it when we first built it main plan was to go down 10 feet and build the root cellar there we couldn't do that because we hit water we ended up coming up a little bit to around 7 feet down we've built the root cellar everything was working great it was starting to cool down in here during the summer time when the fall hit we got a lot of rain and we started to get some water in here I think at one point we got all the way up to like a foot and a half of water in the bottom of this thing we do have a sump pump so we were pumping water out and as things started to get a lot colder the water just kind of started going to the ground it was freezing so come I guess beginning of wintertime we had absolutely no water on the ground in here and this thing was performing awesome January got really cold for us we had sustained temperatures of negative 20 and we got down to negative 30 some time and like Errol said earlier the coldest it got in the root cellar was 28 degrees might seem weird but absolutely nothing frozen here and now that winter has kind of come to an end and we're getting into spring that's kind of where we're at now with the root cellar and we're sitting at about 30 degrees in here as far as predictions with where this thing is going to go in the spring we haven't had this in a spring yet we only built it in late summer of last year so we're thinking it's gonna be pretty bad with water coming in here and rising up I don't think it's gonna get up higher than it did in the fall maybe like a foot and a half we do have our sump pump down here in the corner ready to go for when we need it and we just run this off either our solar system inside or off a generator and it fits in this five-gallon bucket that's down in the ground and that bucket has a bunch of holes in the bottom so that allows the water to rise up in there before it actually gets to the floor one issue we have been having I don't know if it's actually an issue is we've had some separation in these bags and that's due to the freezing so you can tell these have separated there's a blob wire in between there we're hoping during the spring thaw that everything is just going to kind of settle down into place so that's a one thing we're gonna be watching for really carefully in this root cellar during the spring thaw is shifting of these bags we don't want to have walls starting to bow in or things not sitting down exactly where they were so we're gonna keep a really close eye on that this spring and what we built this root cellar the top of the root cellar right here is basically at the grade so that's right where the dirt is and we just piled dirt on top of it so the roof of this thing doesn't have the best insulation and that's gonna be one thing we're gonna be looking at improving with this root cellar later on down the road a few other side notes on the root cellar this thing is basically acting as a big refrigerator for us it's been really nice bringing things down here that just need to be kept cold like our apple cider vinegar we made or we actually even brined meat and we were able to leave it down here and keep it nice and cool another problem that we thought we were gonna have which turned out not to be a big deal was the humidity down here it's 99% humidity so its way up there we thought we were gonna be getting a ton of mold and a ton of rust on our jars or at least on the lids and that just wasn't the case the mold was very minimal amounts and the jar lids I mean we really don't have any rust on these things they are in great condition these lids they're not reusable as soon as you can with them and you open this jar you eat it that little e has to be used for something else we do not store our jars down here with the rings on them so we didn't have to worry about the Rings rusting at all so that was good for us our goal with the root cellar is to basically put a year's worth of food away and eat through it so we don't plan on having this stuff down here for more than two seasons some of the things like jellies are something we've made too much of it might be it'll still be okay to eat but like I said we're really happy with a minimal amounts of for us we've had on these jars this root cellar is is still really new to us it's a young project for us and it's going to be evolving we are probably not going to be working on any major things in here this summer unless something major happens it needs to be addressed we have a of other projects planned we got a bunch of fun stuff to do so this root cellar is pretty much just going to sit and hopefully it keeps working for us I'm gonna grab a few ingredients some carrots some beets and some other things and we're gonna head upstairs we're gonna make an awesome lunch we made it back up to the cabin we're gonna get our veggies washed real quick before we start making lunch one thing we have noticed on our beets and with our potatoes we've noticed a little bit of a flavor difference it seems like these have just gotten a little bit sweeter which we don't mind at all and then I want to show you guys on these carrots we were talking about it earlier these are 6 months old and it's basically like you just pulled this carrot up I mean it's just it snaps and it tastes just like I pulled it out of the ground for lunch today we're going to be making a cold bean salad we're gonna have some really good beans in there we're gonna do carrot beet we're gonna do some of our red onion and then we're gonna be throwing in a can of our smoked salmon let's start at first with chopping up a red onion so it's the red onion I'm chopping up we have red onions left and we also have shallots left and we had to store these in the cabin because the humidity is just way too high down the root cellar and we also ended up storing our squash up here so this onion I'm chopping up right now is eight months old so it did a great job store for us so like Ariel said down the root cellar it's been awesome being able to have fresh veggies like this to eat because you know you can only eat so much can feed and having to care it like this that's actually crunchy and you can eat raw is a lot different from having a carrot that's just you know been canned let's get our beet peeled and we are gonna use a candy stripe beet today for an add our can of smoked salmon and this is sockeye salmon that we smoked this actually our last jar I'm just gonna drain the oil from it and then we're gonna add the fish to the salad there are some herbs in the bottom of there I think we have some dill in there and maybe some sage but we're gonna add some more herbs to this I'm gonna grab a couple from the top so I'm going to use some tarragon and some parsley and you can see all of our herbs up there and that's just a fraction of what we have like Ariel mentioned earlier she dried a ton of those over the last growing season so we have a bunch out in the conex okay our salads almost done we're going to add our dressing on here and I made a dressing out of some of our mayonnaise or mustard I did some vinegar and some honey and salt and pepper so I'm gonna get our lunch served up that's it for today's video we'll see you guys next time you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 562,999

Rating: 4.9635973 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, life in alaska, off grid cabin, root cellar tour, earthbag root cellar, root cellar food storage, root cellar build, underground root cellar, off grid food preservation, food supply room, growing your own food, earthbag build, earthbag underground, eating in winter, seasonal eating, homestead alaska, home canned food supply, storing root crops in winter, storing root vegetables, storing potatoes, root vegetables wood shavings, storing potatoes over winter

Id: CYk4bXYWziU

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020