Earthbag Root Cellar Build | Off Grid Food Storage (Part 1)

so today is the start of another big project for us a huge project in fact we are going to be building a root cellar or a underground food storage so let's go over why we're building a root cellar and what kind of root cellar we're going to be building undoubtedly we are going to need somewhere to store our food this winter since we can't grow it all year long and of course a root cellar came to mind there's lots of ways you can mimic root cellars I believe traditionally they were built into hillsides and they used the earth and rocks to keep food at a cooler temperature and keep it preserved longer now you may be wondering why we can't just store our food or canned food in our house our house is only a 320 square foot cabin and when we moved here from Oregon we did bring quite a bit of produce and canned food with us and it got very full very fast in there this year I don't know how many cans exactly we're going to be putting up but I'm guessing well over a thousand so that is going to take up a considerable amount of space and the primary reason why we can't store the food inside is that we keep our cabinet very warm in the winter so things like potatoes and cabbages they don't want to be kept at 80 degrees in winter they want to be kept probably closer to 30 to 40 degrees just a little bit above freezing same with your canned foods they're gonna last a lot longer when they're kept at that temperature a lot of you know that we also as well are theoretically off-grid here so we do not have a frigerator we actually use our ice chests with some ice jugs that we throw in and out of there from our chest freezer and we only operate our chest freezer in the summer so this is going to be a great option for us to store food so like Ariel said earlier there's tons of different ways you can build a root cellar that will work very well our main goal was first thing we want to do something that is inexpensive or as inexpensive as we can get the second thing we don't want to have to replace this thing every couple years we want something that's really gonna last a while for us we're also looking at our land the type of soil we have and how much moisture we get here so we went back and forth between three different concepts or ideas for a root cellar these were in our own we definitely researched them a little bit online but did have some difficulty finding what people do build here in Alaska so there was three main ideas on how we wanted to build this root cellar the first one was going to be building it out of cinder blocks in concrete and rebar we quickly discarded that idea when we researched it and found out exactly how much it was going to cost us it was just gonna be too much for us to spend on a root cellar the second idea was building it out of wood which we found plans for online and it seemed like a great idea but we just didn't want to have to dig this whole entire thing up and redo it in five or ten years when it broke down from the elements and then as we kept digging deeper into our research we found a third option which is earth bags so we will be building a earth bag underground root cellar or root storage area so if you're unfamiliar of a earth bag structure they are basically built out of these sand bags and these are 14 by 26 inch poly sand bags you put the soil in there you put a specific type of soil in here and you tamp it down and that's why they're called earth bags because you are utilizing earth to make your structure so the pros of building with this material is cost it's definitely the cheapest by far Lange jibbety it will outlast a wooden structure I'm not sure it will last as long as something with cement and concrete but for the cost I definitely think it's a great option for us also another great thing about these sandbags is the water repellency factor so they're appropriate to put underground and they should resist breaking down over time so like Ariel said we've done a ton of research on this we've been wanting to build a root cellar for a long time we've done research on what we're gonna build it out of where we're gonna build it on the property how we're gonna build it there's only so much research we could do building this root cellar out of these earth bags in Alaska I mean there's really not a lot on these so we're taking what we can find off the internet I mean a lot of people are building these out in the desert a lot of people are building root cellars out of them but not a lot of people are doing it here in a climate like we are so we're gonna kind of do our own thing here we research as much as we can and we're kind of just gonna use our judgment and try to make this thing as strong and obviously as safe as possible to store our food under the ground so let's show you a little more about what we're gonna use to get this thing built so we have this mini excavator for the whole weekend to get this project done let's head over by the garden and we're going to show you where we're gonna dig it so this is it this is where it's gonna go we chose this spot on the property because we are pretty sure that we're not going to hit water when we dig is deep as we need to dig and one of the reasons we did that is our outhouse is pretty close to this area and that is over eight feet deep and there is no water underneath that so we're hoping when we dig down we don't hit any water the next reason we're putting it here is we've dug a few holes on this part of the property and the earth that is coming out of the ground here is sandier and that's gonna be perfect for filling our sandbags to build a root cellar out of so for the size on this thing we want an 8 by 8 of usable space and what that means is we're gonna have to subtract the size of the bags which are 14 inches wide and then we're also gonna dig the hole just a little bit wider than that so we can pack the soil in around the sandbags so we are gonna be digging a 12-foot spoiler and then on the inside of the root cellar we want enough room obviously to store all of our stuff and we want enough room where we can stand up in there so we're gonna make the root cellar a little over six feet high we're gonna be doing some sort of drainage on the bottom so we're gonna have to consider that when we're digging we're gonna have to go a little bit deeper and we're also going to be putting wood and soil on top so we're gonna be going about eight foot deep and then a little bit deeper in the center and as you can tell by the area we've selected we don't have a hillside that we can dig this thing into so we're gonna be putting a small patch we're thinking to this corner not for sure we're gonna make it small enough that we can just fit down there with canned goods and produce obviously we've done some research and the smaller door we have to get into this thing the less cold air is going to get in there and freeze our canned goods and produce so we've got our square marked out and we are going to start digging [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so eric has been working for about two hours or so on this whole and this is one of those times that you really appreciate heavy machinery because the excavator is doing a heck of a job and if we had to take this whole by hand I'm pretty sure we would still be here until next year [Music] all right so we were back out in the hole we dug yesterday and it is the next day yesterday we noticed that when Eric was digging probably closer to about nine and a half feet or the ten foot mark we went a little bit deep we did start to get some water so we think that's where our water table is which is pretty shallow I mean I'm glad we hit it because we know where it is but again that this is summer so it's it's pretty low right now and we have to kind of anticipate that it may go up a little bit in the winter so with that being said we're gonna get down here and kind of measure things out and probably lift the root cellar up just a wee bit we only needed to go eight feet down and we did go a little bit deeper and I think we're just gonna be pushing dirt on the water for now and hopefully it'll just drain back into the ground over time so we are gonna get going for the day and start by scraping some of the sides and get this hole perfectly square for [Music] so we are taking a quick break we just unloaded I think about two yards of some larger gravel we decided to come back up to about seven feet for the bottom of the root cellar we're gonna have that as our base the water table is probably closer to ten feet so just to be safe we really wanted to come back up a little what this does mean is that we're going to have to mound the top of the root cellar just a tiny bit I think it'll still be fine you know insulated wise but that is just so we don't have any flooding in there in the winter so we got our first load of gravel in there we're trying to get lunch in us as fast as we can and get back down to the gravel yard before they close we're thinking we're gonna need just one more two yard load we're gonna get a smaller rock for the next load the gravel we just put in there that's three quarter to one and a half inch I believe so that's a good drain Rock and on top of that which is gonna be the actual surface that we walk on we build our shelves on and you're gonna actually see in the root cellar we're gonna go a little bit of a smaller rock so that's what we're going to pick up next whoa we campus like a rock oh yeah yeah yeah I mean so this will be it'll be eight feet ten feet you'll be good okay so we'll have an extra we're still gonna build it by a train yeah so we are getting set up to start actually putting in the earth bags and we've got our string laid out so we have a v8 to follow we want the inside damn Ruby a by eight so we did go out with the string the size of the bags even though they are 14 by 26 they are about 12 inches once they are tamp down I think the plan of action is I will be up there feeding soil down the chute to Eric and he will be tamping and lining up the courses I believe they're called this is what one of the bags looks like tamp down and it is incredibly strong so these are used as shelters underground pretty frequently we feel pretty comfortable with the size that we are doing that the weight against the walls will be fine and although it's not the same thing as cinder blocks and concrete I really feel like it's just as sturdy because when you're tamping it down you're basically just mimicking the ground or in the soil itself and we do have really good soil to get this project going we've got the sand and like a denser soil which I think will work great for it [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so I think it is probably about 10:00 p.m. this is our second day working on the root cellar I think we've made pretty good progress we're gonna keep chipping away for a few hours we are going to wait until tomorrow to put another course down and get our barbed wire down we're just gonna keep chipping away at filling up bags I think we have a little over 300 we thought what was at the stores nearest to us but we do need to drive a little bit further to go pick up another 300 or so the project itself should probably take about 600 maybe a little bit more so it is quite a few bags but again it's still a very economical way to build this all right last night we got quite a bit of work done I think we got around 50 of these bags filled up didn't take us too long and we kind of found the most efficient way for us to do it is have a aerial feed the gravel or the sand down the chute to me and I just basically put as many bags down here as I can I just stack them aside and then when we get a large amount of bags we come down and we start tying them up next thing we're gonna be doing is laying down the barbed wire on this layer we already have down and then getting these bags on top so we got the two strands of barbed wire down that's gonna keep these bags from slipping and we're ready to start working on our second layer all right we got three layers done time to set up the chute again and start filling up some more bags [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right we are at the end of day four of working on this root cellar project we took a day off to do some activities and just kind of kept looking at this hole and we finally got back in it today and we're gonna start working on this a little bit more we're pretty happy with the way it's going so far it's time-consuming and it takes energy but it's super solid very impressed with the integrity of these sandbags yeah so this is taking us a little bit longer than we thought pretty much like every single project that we do the main time-consuming part on this one I think is fill in the bags but hopefully it will get easier as we get closer to the surface because we'll be able to just feel the bags up up top we won't have to use the shoot anymore two things we didn't point out is that we put house wrap around the edge of the structure and that is just to help with moisture and we chose house wrap because we had researched a few things and other people use house wrap versus just the plastic because it's breathable so we went with the house wrap and we also put gravel down before we filled this back with dirt and we're gonna do the same thing when we're done with the inside and that is because you want that bottom layer of sandbags to be kind of like beveled in the ground so rather than doing it that way we're doing it kind of after the fact and adding gravel up so the root cellar will probably be at six feet when we're done which will be probably level with the ground and then we'll have to go about a foot and a half above the ground mounted up just because we did need to come back up for flood concerns so we got nine layers done it's gonna be pretty much the same process over and over fill in the bags stacking them putting on the barbed wire tamping them down until we get to the top and at that point we are gonna be putting on our top and building our hatch to get down into the cellar we're also going to be adding a little vent we did decide that that was going to be something we'd like to put in for this root cellar and we don't know if we're gonna use the vent or not a lot of people say you have to have the vent but a lot of that research is coming from warmer climates and then there's people here in Alaska that aren't using vents so we're gonna put one in and if we need to use it will use it if not we'll just cap it off so we're going to wrap up this video this is just part 1 of this build we will be coming back at you and probably a week or so when we finish this hopefully part two of our root cellar will cut you guys next time we are building a Oh together you don't like that no why not I liked it no one else did undoubtedly undoubtedly we are undoubtedly we are going undoubtedly we are going to what are you doing get your calculator out the Hat yeah I know that easy singing to make a bomb shelter that's why I said there ain't bulletproof there's literally like I don't even think I can move that I don't holy smokes you don't even camp it like that's literally like concrete you keep going a little there we go cool say in our ass baby one what's a rest would you carve in my name that's not my name

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 194,035

Rating: 4.8893456 out of 5

Keywords: off grid root cellar, alaskan root cellar, alaska root cellar, storing food off grid, off grid living, off grid life, living in alaska, off grid vlog, earthbag construction cellar, earthbag cellar, earthbag root cellar plans, earthbag root cellar, earthbag construction, alaska vlog, sandbag root cellar, building with earthbags, root cellar build, root cellar food storage, diy root cellar, underground root cellar plan, homestead alaska

Id: xtDdf1K73j0

Length: 23min 57sec (1437 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2019