Earthbag Root Cellar | Storing a Year's Worth of Food

so it has been about three months since we finally completed our root cellar we've been getting a ton of requests to do a update or tour video on this and the only reason we have been Delaine is we have been busy canning but we are pretty much done canning so today is the day we're gonna give you guys an inside look at a root cellar so if you didn't catch us in a video building this thing it is a earthbag root cellar and what that means is this thing is built out of sandbags the dimensions of it are 8 by 8 and it is about 7 feet underground a lot has changed since we last showed a video on the root cellar especially a couple things on the outside let's go over those first so something that we quickly realized with the cellar is that when we got a lot of rain we were having some major problems with erosion so kind of our quick fix for this year is we gathered a bunch of rocks from our property and stack them up all on the edge and it actually seems to be working pretty good we haven't had any erosion and we've been getting a ton of rain lately so we didn't cover the top section with rocks and that is because the ground is going to be freezing pretty soon so this mud is going to go away and also we didn't want to put even more weight on the top than we had to we also made a couple changes to our hatch so we first built the hatch all it was was two by fours basically so what we did is on top of the two by fours we put one and a half inch foam insulation all the way around and then we sandwiched more two by fours on the outside what you're seeing right here so we have a good amount of insulation in the hatch going down to the cellar the next thing that we did is we turned our vent caps upside down so we're not going to get any rain in there and then we also ended up adding another vent which is right on the other side so this is our other vent and this one actually goes all the way down inside to the floor of the root cellar and you may be thinking that this hatch just kind of low to the ground and that's gonna get snowed in but we are gonna be managing the snow on the top of the hatch so we'll be clear when we need to go in and out of this thing so before we take off the lid and head down in the cellar we have a question that we wanted to answer and that is how do we get things in and out of the root cellar and to be honest with you it's pretty simple we either load up a small wooden crate that I built with canned food and one person just brings it down there or if it's something bigger like a tote that we have our carrots in we just help each other so it's actually not that big of an issue getting bangs in and out of here so let's get the top off and head down welcome down into the root cellar first things first let me show you how we light this thing I either will have my headlight on I always carry a small flashlight in my pocket and if we're going to be down here for a while I use our Oh light and it comes with an attachment that turns it into a lantern so that's what we're gonna be using today alright so something that we added down here in the cellar is we reinforce the stairs we added cleats on most of them where we could get them and then we just ran a bunch of long thick nails to the sides so the ladder is holding up great next thing we added was a sump pump which is right underneath the stairs so when we first dug the root cellar we initially wanted to get 10 feet deep and we did but we hit water so we had to do was we had to fill back in the dirt until we're about 7 feet and we weren't seeing water anymore that was in the summer we kind of knew that in the springtime the water was gonna rise up and we might get some water in the floor in here turns out it happened a lot earlier we did get some water in here on the floor just a couple months ago so what we did is we installed our sump pump which has been working great I put an attachment on it to hook a garden hose to it and when we see the buck is starting to fill up with water we turn on the sump pump pump it for a little while until we don't see any more water then we're good to go so the water table right now if you can see down here on the bucket it's coming up just a little bit above this bucket it's not ideal it's not perfect but it's also not the end of the world and it is still letting us use this root cellar we're just gonna have a little bit of water on the ground if we're not pumping it with the sump pump before we jump into the tour of what is down here I was gonna go over a few more things first off we get a lot of questions about temperature and if it's frozen down here we have already dipped into the teens just briefly and what we found was we were staying at 38 degrees down here so I'm not personally concerned that this stuff in here is going to freeze this year we are down below the ground and it just feels like that it feels like root cellar it's wet and damp and it feels pretty stable for the most part so along with that means that we have excess moisture in here you guys remember when we built this we were in the ninety to a hundred percent range and we are still there we did try a few things with fans down here and try to get that humidity down I think in the summertime we were able to get it about 270 but it's just not realistic for us to have our hatch open due to the possibility of too cold of air coming in here and also exposing our potatoes to light where that comes into play is certain crops store wonderfully down here so our potatoes or carrots or beets leeks anything like that that needs a really high humidity does great it's not really great for dry goods and it's definitely not good for squashes garlic onions things like that and I didn't really anticipate that but all that stuff is up in our cabin we haven't had any issues with rust so far these shelves are doing really good what we did do was line the shelves with this little bathroom rated plastic liner and it's super easy to clean if it gets any dirt on it we have had a little bit of mold growth here and there on certain jars and what we found works is wiping them with vinegar before we bring them down just to get rid of any residue before they're in storage another major concern was earthquakes and we do have earthquakes pretty frequently here we've had two earthquakes in the five range I think one was a 5.0 and one was a 5.2 and they were decent-sized earthquakes I feel pretty confident saying this shelter would be fine in the seven earthquake that we had before I think some of our jars would suffer losses but we did add a little bungee to help with that we don't have it completely perfect in here but I'm not overly worried about it we've already had these canned goods be through multiple earthquakes and we were fine we just finished counting all of these cans yesterday and we are sitting at right under 550 I think it would have been a little bit more if we harvested a moose but we're pretty happy with what we have for this winter let's go ahead and take a look at what we have on this first shelf we have all salmon and this is pink salmon right here we actually have a mixture of Salmons up here as far as how they're processed we have some brine some smoked this is some of the red salmon that we caught a little bit earlier in the year we have about 110 jars left we've eaten quite a few already and it would have been nice to go into winter with quite a bit more but we were counting on getting a moose that we did so the next shelf is more of our staples we've got first over in the corner we've got chicken stock and this is also chicken stock just processed at a different date we have our celery stock and this is basically for soup stews it's celery onions herbs next we have our pasta sauce and then we go into our tomato sauce we're gonna go down one more row in the corner we have a few cans of that lard that we made a while back and I have a little bit of applesauce back here we have some of that zucchini bread that we made earlier we just have a few cans of that left and a whole bunch of green salsa next we move on to canned greens here we have just canned green beans and then next to them is canned green beans some bunching onions and carrots this jar is a little bit funny to look at but it is purple carrots and parsnips because of those purple carrots it's all purple we have some lovely carrots right here and all of this is pressure canned besides the acidic foods like the green salsa that we water-bath on to our other shelf we have sauerkraut we have lots of cans of those and then we have this is delicious this is Dale kohlrabi cauliflower it's a really light pickle mixture and we've had one of those cans so far it's really yummy the next row we have some relish we have pickled onions jalapeno and carrots this is cowboy candy marinade and these are the cowboy candy or candied jalapeños that we made a while back back in this corner we have a favorite of ours which is banana peppers or pepper teenies now we're on to our jellies and we have first a apple jelly this is some of local apples that we picked up and turned into jelly and we have blueberry fireweed syrup so I put some really special code on these cans that I'm probably gonna have a really hard time remembering this winter we have lots of those then we have elderberry syrup which is from red elderberries and that's why it has that color this is fireweed jelly that one has a nice set this one's my favorite WB rhj and i believe that means watermelon berry rosehip jelly that's a really gorgeous color and we have one more which was blueberry and crowberry jelly so we are stuffed as far as jellies and syrups go this is our last row of canned goods this is a coleslaw mixture that we made this year which is really good this is a first for us it's a recipe I found online but we altered it a little bit so there is collards carrots I think we may have kohlrabi in there too and there is red cabbage as you could tell next I have pickled green beans and we have a funny looking jar this is called a garden antipasto and it is a olive oil and vinegar marinated with veggies so there are carrots eggplant there's herbs in here I also have some onions and peppers and it does look pretty funny because the olive oil has thickened up because of the temperature but this is a super good thing to have as an appetizer we also have a new recipe here this was a sweet pickle so we've got honey in here we've got onions peppercorns herbs kohlrabi and some daikon radishes and then we have our pickles and we did just a basic dill pickle recipe we have lots of those back here we've got some big ones I think these ones are just whole whole pickles since we had some big ones next to that shelf we have all of our potatoes we have four rows potatoes and I think that's a good amount first this winter will probably have more for next year because we want to also save the seed to plant them for the following year and these guys are cured now they've been down here for a few weeks they are rock-hard and they're doing wonderful as long as we keep our hatch closed they should be fine and they shouldn't sprout prematurely you may have noticed that we didn't fill everything up this year so we have more room next year to grow more food and to have a place to store it let's go over what is in our tubs this first one is carrots we actually have two tubs with carrots and that ones just put away we got these apples at a local orchard and we are going to be making apple cider vinegar out of them soon 5-gallon bucket was just some extra carrots we had and so far I mean they're storing really well in these it's just the perfect amount of moistness we've come down here and got forgotten a few carrots this next container is the beets that we store just a little while back and behind me we have our leeks and we have a cabbage so I just have one Seoul cabbage that was mature this late and usually you leave a lot of their leaves on and you hang them up and this fruit seller is working wonderful it's almost identical to putting something like this in a crisp drawer in your refrigerator so our leeks are looking good down here and I'm going to take this off to show you guys some of the carrots so far these have been storing well in these shavings they're really they're still really hard not soft at all and this is our first year doing this so we'll see how it goes when I get those covered back up so that's it for what we have down here at a different date we're gonna go over some of this stuff we are storing in our conics and in our cabin so far this has been great for us to store food because you can see that this is quite a lot of food to put in our cabin in fact I don't even know where we would put it all in our potatoes would definitely not store that well in there a question we receive a lot is how do you determine how much you're going to grow and put away for winter and being our first year in Alaska this is a little bit of a different experience since there was a major shift on how much food we actually canned I personally would want to have a little bit more going into winter but I do think that this is a really good start and we just tried to grow as much as we can for that year so we're not trying to be canning for years and years in advance or anything like that these are one year's season cans that's why I'm not overly worried about rust or any sort of growth on the jars but with that being said these cans behind me would last much longer we've had canned food that's three four years old so if we have a crop that we did particularly well in and we can too much of it that's great it'll just carry on for the next year for us another question we get a lot is would you change anything or how would you do it differently and my answer is yes and the first thing I would do differently is not have foot this wood in here so we already know that's going to be kind of like an immediate redo or at least within a few years they are holding up and they're pretty strong I'm not at all concerned about them but with this bark they're just not gonna last very long so again we're happy that we at least have somewhere to store our food this winter and I do think that this set up will most likely work for us in the future but the roof is gonna have to come off eventually Eric's gonna talk a little bit more about some of the changes we may be doing in the future okay so first thing I want to point out the root cellar this thing actually is working it does work it works great too I mean it's like you're standing in a refrigerator down here and it fits our needs we're able to store all of our canned food down here for a whole winter but that being said we are going to kind of just let this thing be how it is through the whole winter and then we're gonna kind of judge on what needs to be changed we do know that the water table rising up is going to be a problem we don't want to be having to come down here and our waiters just to get our food so we're gonna have to deal with that issue at some point next year but like I said we want to kind of let this thing do what it's going to do before we make any drastic changes and then like Ariel said with the roof this was kind of just what we had to build with it was kind of spur the moment when we built this root cellar if we were planning it but we didn't know we were gonna start when we did so the roof it will change eventually but right now it's still holding up pretty good to end this video we're gonna show you guys what we look forward to coming down here and grabbing in the middle of winter okay I'm gonna do it my favorite thing that I'm going to be grabbing this winter is this cowboy candy the stuffs awesome we've already I think we even have a can the fridge right now actually we're through but the best thing about this is when you're done with all the jalapenos you have this awesome juice you can use for cooking okay so I'm kind of cheating I have two and these are both new recipes for us but this coleslaw is freaking killer this is my favorite thing to come down here and get along with these sweet pickled vegetables we love these as well those are my two favorites okay and since we're down here we're gonna do a little bit of grocery shopping and we'll see you guys on the next video

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 700,371

Keywords: off grid living, cabin life, life in alaska, home canning, off grid cabin, root cellar tour, storing food alaska, earthbag root cellar, sandbag root cellar, root cellar food storage, alaskan root cellar, root cellar build, underground root cellar, off grid food preservation, sustainable living alaska, food supply room, growing your own food, earthbag build, earthbag underground, eating in winter, seasonal eating, homestead alaska

Id: IG9va-Gn5aI

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019