Everything You Need To Know About Root Cellaring - Preservation 101

hey you guys this is josh and carolyn with homesteading family and welcome to this week's episode of the pantry chat food for thought this week we're going to be talking about preserving vegetables and fruits by root cellaring awesome [Music] all right so we're continuing on with the series on food preservation yeah i'm excited about this one this is a good one it really is um but it's it's a tough one to tackle in a lot of ways and that is root selling yeah we're going to be covering the basics of root cellaring today what you need to know and some alternatives because a lot of us don't have an actual root cellar and that's why a lot of people don't tackle it i think is there is some infrastructure required we still don't have a root cellar but we have been celerying vegetables for a long time that's right so we're going to give you a rundown on the basics what you need and then some alternatives to help you get through until you get to that point right of an actual route seller hey but before we do that need to catch up a little bit yeah and answer a question so what is going on oh well first i want to let everybody know that grandma genie is doing better much better she is improving she's still not home yet but she is improving so i know a lot of you guys um have expressed really you know get well soon wishes to her and we're so thankful for that and i'm passing those along but she is doing much better um but then aside from that we're actually getting ready for a trip yep yay we get to take a little trip coming up here and so of course when you're leaving the homestead there are things that need to get done before you leave especially when you're leaving kind of for us at the trailing end of harvest season yep trailing in the harvest season we're getting ready for for winter and we got a big household we're leaving behind for a little bit yeah so we've been kind of busy with those preparations yeah yeah what about you pretty much same here yeah you know just visited on grandma and we're working away we've gotten some um pasture reseeded and an area if you guys remember we dug out the pond large pond we had a lot of soil like an acre of soil we had to spread out that finally dried out we got that grated and disked and harrowed and seeded and seeding a few other areas doing a fall seeding here yeah to try to get a start on some of these areas and just a lot of it's been a lot of infrastructure this work the infrastructure if you guys have been following along this year and so we're starting to wrap all of that up yeah there's a lot going on i think we're going to be getting a roof on the edition here really soon and so we will be really ready for some weather to come in yeah and then we can start on the inside start on the electrical and stuff like that very exciting so lots of things going on absolutely but hey let's dive right in we've got okay the question for the day question for the day from so fast on the preservation 101 video the intro into canning asks do you freeze most of your meat products if so what is your backup if electricity goes out other than a generator okay so i don't know if i'm totally clear on the nature of that question but yes we do freeze most of our meat we have several large freezers i saw another question was asking how many we've got at least four large chest freezers uh we freeze some other things too but yes we freeze most of our meat and the backup generators always cover that as far as like backing up that meat supply or we've never never lost a uh freezer it does happen you do have to be careful you need to be attentive of them and certainly if the power goes out you need to be watching them even more carefully and making sure that your generators are working they're ready you've got all the plugs you need you've got fuel everything else so on that side that is the backup yeah um you know and we just have to take care of that and be prepared for it so we are now on the other side of being backed up like are we backing up our meat supply in case something happens and we had a failure then yes we do keep a bit not a ton a bit of canned meat there um for convenience for easy meals and and um and yes that is an additional backup supply and in fact we have actually talked about um beefing that up you know at times and getting a little larger supply in there something to do to add on to for for those kind of reserves because it is nice to have those reserves it really is and you know canning meat is actually really really easy i know it's very intimidating to a lot of people but it's a very easy thing to can as far as the prep work so it's a great way to go but you also have dehydrating meat you could do that freeze drying yeah curing of course you've got some cured meats to make them shelf stable and then they can be in a root cellar type environment right we're going to be talking about that so and that's something we do plan to tackle i want to tackle personally i guess for me that's more the culinary side yeah though building the skill of that preservation without uh um electricity or some of the other methods is a good skill we want to add eventually but it hasn't hit the priority list yet good yeah very good good question all right so let's dive in here we're talking about root cellaring today we are and as carolyn was saying we don't have an actual technical root seller we actually are working towards building one we need a really large one um so and let me let me just put this in context because i meant to say that too you're talking about the number of freezers that we have for those of you who don't know us we have 13 members in the household right now so we're feeding a lot of people we have grandma and grandpa on the property they're here for quite a few meals you know we have 15 people full time on the property on the property and so and then of course we have a lot of guests in and out so we're often feeding you know 17 18 19 people at a meal so we have a lot more food requirements than say a four-person household does so we just want to put that into context because yes we need a really big root seller but it's for a large number of people well and we're also for our environment because a lot of root cellar and crops a lot of storage crops do well in our environment and so it makes a lot of sense to be moving towards growing more of those yes it's easier preservation but like we're going to talk about here um it's it's a large space that needs to be created and built into the earth yeah and so that's a larger project to tackle that's that's coming on now a lot of you don't need something that large and so there's a lot of ways to go about it and i guess we'll get to that we'll start digging in here yeah absolutely excuse me i've got a frog in my throat i think well let's just dive right in what is root salary okay so root cellaring is creating an environment where food keeps for a really long time which usually means controlling the temperature in and the humidity or finding a place that kind of does that for you to allow food to keep without any processing in its natural form for a long time and so there's there's a the most standard way we would do that would be in the earth right for a specific reason you want to cover that why why root cellars are generally down in the ground well because of temperature control when you're down in the ground you're dropping that temperature you're cooler right and you're also stable temperature wise it doesn't fluctuate because the insulation of the earth the other thing though is that the earth is moist there's moisture down in there so you have that humid more humid environment it's also easier to keep that humidity in especially if you're in a dry place because you have all that insulation well it's a it's a great resource from that angle because pretty much anywhere that you have earth you can create storage you just have to get down deep enough if you're in a cold environment you've got to get down below your freezing depth and even in a hot environment you can get down deep enough to keep things cool at that general 50 55 degrees which is your soil temperature when you get down there and so that becomes it takes no energy to do that besides building it yeah yeah but again we're going to say that you don't have to have a technical root cellar in order to actually take advantage of some of these methods right it does make things a lot easier well well it makes things a lot easier and you're going to be able to store things a lot longer in the right conditions right but we'll cover towards the end of this you know some other things that you can do and they may not be ideal conditions but uh you can put up a lot of food mimicking root cellaring in other environments and these are exactly the things that we've done over the last decade or so very very well yeah it has okay so um let's just dive into kind of we've been covering pros and cons on these topics so what are some of the pros for root cellar okay so one of the top pros for me for somebody who's generally responsible for bringing in a huge amount of food and having it stored for the winter is that it is fast you bring it in and you park it somewhere you know if you have the right environment you're not processing you're not chopping peeling cooking any of that that all comes later and so that is just a major benefit to somebody who's trying to actually eat predominantly off of your food storage so fast is a really big one easy is the next one right it's it's not very hard yeah when you're easier once you have the space set up it's one of the easiest preservation methods because there's not much to do but to harvest and prep the vegetables a lot of them got to be cured properly right and then stored yeah yeah of course it's also done correctly or done there are ways that you can root cellar with a lot of electricity but in general it is your low energy it has very low energy power costs related to it you're not usually running anything except for maybe a light to see where you're going in your root cellar right maybe a fan um and then a really really great thing that has become more and more important to me as we live in the far north of idaho and have these long dark snowy cold winters is that it keeps food fresh they're in their same condition or at least they're still fresh you haven't cooked them you haven't processed them or changed their shape so you can still go get fresh food to eat you know even when the garden is under feet of snow right so that's really good very cool now there are a few cons actually not a lot but there are a few reasons why you know what's challenge or why you might not do it well and the first one we've been talking about is the infrastructure right the infrastructure you've got to get down into the earth so you've got to move earth you've got to build something and of course if you're building a structure that's going to go under earth it needs to be a hefty structure and we're not getting into how to build a root seller but it's a major project to take on and the larger the amount you're trying to store in it the larger it has to be yeah now there are a lot of alternatives and other methods which we will cover we'll gloss over a little bit here but to do root cellaring right it's it's a big project to tackle and has a bit of expense to get going another con that a lot of people don't realize because we don't have a lot of experience with root cellaring in our culture generally at this point is that the your root cellar and the things inside of it need to be maintained throughout their storage life you've heard that um you know one bad apple will spoil the whole batch that i'm saying that comes exactly from root cellaring from cellaring things is you have to be going through your stores making sure nothing's going bad using up the things that are getting old looking and and continually maintaining them and by continually i'm talking on a weekly basis you need to be getting in checking on your store so there is an ongoing you know it's not like canning where you just stick it on your shelf and it's done right it's not that while it's stable and it's not that shelf stable as is what we're used to and we're just not used to that in our culture and in the homesteading lifestyle there's a lot of different things like that that you you have to bring in a whole nother skill and a whole nother task so to speak and this is definitely one that while it's worth doing yeah you've got to get in there and you've got to be a part of things well and checking on it that non-stable is really one other con is that you know your your foods are all going to eventually go bad in a root cellar they're going to mold there's going to shrivel they're gonna get old and so again they're not in that stable condition like a canned good that might just sit there and last or a freeze-dried good that's gonna last you know 20 years in the same state essentially um you you know it's changing and it is going bad eventually so you know it's not long-term stable right so but when you provide ideal conditions things can last a really really long time so we're going to do a rundown here on the ideal conditions of root cellar and if you were to build one and what your goals are for different foods because for different foods there's different ideals in what you want and then we'll get on to some of the alternatives that just about any of us can apply in some fashion to start sellering in your own home and your own property as you move toward maybe an eventual real traditional root seller yeah like so many things on the homestead you have ideal and you have practical and we want to aim for ideal but we don't want to get hung up on ideal to the point that we're not even doing it and not hitting practical there yeah and there really is very little ideal and i think in today's world where we're taught so many industrial methods that are so technical and so precise and if we try to follow those well we're never going to do something we're never going to get there and make it happen and there is a lot of in between well it might not be ideal well yes things may not store as long you can still store things you can still make things happen even outside of the root cellar discussion if we're willing to let go of ideal and kind of figure it out yeah yeah absolutely cool so okay so let's dive in though this is just going to be some good information about what you can keep in the in the conditions that you need to be able to keep it in in root cellaring okay great yeah and so you want to start with uh cold and very moist yeah so the first class is the cold and very moist and when we're talking about cold we're talking 32 to 40 degrees fahrenheit so you know i mean you're talking your refrigerator cooler sort of range but very very high humidity 90 to 95 humidity realistically the way to get this is going to be having your vegetables in some sort of damp medium sand sawdust historically is very common leaves damp leaves not wet but damp and that's the way you're going to keep that 90 to 95 humidity in an area and likewise to keep it that cool because the earth actually isn't that cool so in this one there is some management because you've got to let that cold night air in you've got to hear have air movement and get cold air in there to to maintain these levels right yeah so the things that store really well under this can into these conditions are going to be things like carrots beets parsnips turnips celery leeks and you can even store broccoli and brussels sprouts like this for a short term you're not going to get the months and months that the other ones are but if they are stored properly you can still be eating delicious crisp carrots six months from now out of your root cellar right it should be great they should be in great condition by the time you're starting to get your spring carrots coming on yeah so it's really good good so the next one we're going to talk about is cold and moist so same temperature levels yeah but the humidity levels don't need to be as high right so we're talking still that 32 to 40 degree range but now we're in the 80 to 90 percent humidity that's still quite a bit that's working distance is pretty moist that's more humid a little more taller your room level but you know you think about root cellars in the ground in dirt you're going to be holding moisture in there pretty well so you may have to add a little bit but the things that would be in that range and would store really well there are going to be potatoes cabbage apples grapes oranges pears some of those things we don't even think about root cellaring in our culture right now but historically they have been cellared for long periods of time right in that kind of storage i mean grapes how lovely would it be to go get a bunch of grapes but if you've ever seen you know in italy they used to have these like chandelier looking things with bunches of grapes hanging off of them in their root cellar areas and they would stay good for months that way and so you can still have fresh grapes stay on your retailer isn't that amazing very very cool one thing to note in these that makes me think on this list too is just there there are some things that need to not be stored together right like the apples and potatoes right cause a problem i forget which way it goes right at the moment do you remember what i do one of them off gas is something that makes the other one go bad yeah generally you want to keep your fruits and your roots separate right yeah yeah good good rule of thumb there so that's something you want to research if you're looking at applying some of these or trying to get this going you definitely want to do some research and understand what works well together okay all right well the next environment we're talking about is cool so we're warming up here a little bit uh 40 to 50 degrees right right and yet still moist still up in that 80 you know 80 percentile yeah moisture level absolutely and these are some really exciting ones for a lot of people because they're cucumbers sweet peppers watermelons and cantaloupe ripe tomatoes did you know these things can store for up to two and three months pretty easily in great condition if you can give them this environment i mean how nice to go grab some sweet peppers right but 40 to 50 degrees i mean you're kind of in refrigerator range right there but you're you know maybe a little warmer than your refrigerator yeah you're getting a little warmer in the refrigerator you're still pretty cool but you're pretty cool but you're pretty high humidity and that's the importance and you're still gonna have to get some cool air in there at night you're still gonna have to manage that that's not that 50 to 55 degrees yeah that that earth temperature so there's still some cooling off that needs to happen right okay okay now we're moving now we're going back to that cold but drier you know i don't really think this is dry but in terms of crop storage yeah you cool and dry that 32 to 50 degrees this is quite a right wide range yeah um but lower humidity the 60 percent tile right of humidity yeah so that's that's considered dry right dryer when it's as far as storing to food storage but it's still higher than your average room household humidity right and that's going to be your onions and your garlic that's where those are going to store really really well right is in that that kind of cool very cool it's really quite cold actually 32 to 50. yeah there's just a high tolerance there and they're gonna do best on on these closer to that you know 32. yeah not you don't want to freeze because that's only going to damage them but any of these things that can take those temperatures the cooler the better before you get to freezing they're going to hold longer assuming you've got your humidity in a good good range and so next we've got now we're moving on to a moderately warm we wouldn't call it warm but moving up in temperature to 50 to 60 degrees right and uh still in that 60 percent humidity right level yeah and that's things like your pumpkins and your winter squash your sweet potatoes and green tomatoes will hold for a long time at that time and so you can tell just just by those temperatures right there what things are going to be easier to get started with yes you know pumpkins winter squash if you don't have ideal conditions the sweet potatoes greening tomatoes even onions and garlic those things start moving towards things you can get started with really easily without ideal conditions because that temperature range is a bit higher right exactly so here we're talking about storing things in this really cool temperature for a lot of them but if you can get close to that you can still store things for a long time it's just not going to store as long right so so moving away from that ideal if you go to and this is why root cellars work because your soil temperature is 50 to 55 degrees and so that is a good you can you can do all of this within that it may not be ideal for everything but you can that temperature range will get you there real close and can work across the board for almost everything here that we're talking about so you may not have really crisp delicious carrots for those six months but would you be happy to have them for three months to get you through a lot of places yeah the answer is absolutely yes i would love that yeah well in the winter squashes we've gotten winter squashes six months oh easy and that in the kitchen yeah in that 60 you know degree temperature yeah 60 65 degrees that's getting into varietals and varieties that do real well but you can still go a long way and so you know that we're kind of moving out of that we're talking about that ideal and so now we're talking okay you could do this 55 is a good temperature average but say we just can't get to the root seller you know we still aren't going to get that hole in the ground and get a technical root seller built we're not ready yet what are things that people can do we've done a lot over the years to to um make do yeah yeah well you can one thing that we've done that's worked really well for us is using coolers in a cold space right so we've been able to keep apples in our uninsulated garage here where it gets very very cold but we have them inside a cooler and we've been able to keep them good all the way until the following march and even into yeah six six months yeah in non-ideal conditions and those are just in coolers and big coolers just put right in there cracked open just a little bit so you can find a space that will stay cool but give them some protection from being frozen right so that's a good one another one would be an old fridge yeah in fact we used to have a neighbor who had an old fridge on her porch and she would keep apples and pears in that cracked open all winter long and if it got too cold she'd just go out and close the fridge door and if it was a nice day she would crack it open a little so it could get some you know circulation a little air circulation and that worked really well it did and she was a long time and she grew up right here oh yeah homesteading 77 i think on the same land and she didn't have a big giant root cellar but she had tips and tricks like that that worked yeah and that's really cool got her a long way some people actually take old fridges or chest freezers and dig them into the ground you can certainly do that but you know by the time you're digging into the ground i kind of feel like you might as well just dig a little more and get a reseller yeah maybe but but you know depending on what your storage needs are that's a good way to do it and another thing you could do is is um this is kind of like clamping which we'll talk about a minute but you could stack bales around those around an old fridge or something like that but getting back to just using some of what we have there's a few other things that you can do here that keep you in that 50s range and of course a lot of this has to do with the environment that you're living in right because so you're really just looking for where can i find a 50s range in a in a way that hopefully your vegetables or fruits aren't going to go to through a whole lot of daily temperature fluctuations so a little bit of insulation there one thing that you can do is an exterior closet uh maybe on your porch that either does or doesn't have insulation depending on how cold you get or you could insulate it something like that a shed and insulate it again it's gonna depend on your environment but you can insulate that shut and that may keep it just enough you know in that good environment yeah absolutely really good crawl spaces we've done that yeah you know a lot of times those will be exposed to the dirt so you actually get the benefit of that dampness of the soil from underneath the house and if you don't mind all the spiders and you can protect things from rodents right so this is the non-ideal it's a little harder to access depending on how much you're putting under there and we've done that and you know going down to the crawl space and what do you got you know you got to go out in the rain or whatever and crawl around to get to it but it it definitely especially if the house floor is insulated if it's a house with a crawl space and the house floor is insulated it's going to often stay in those 50s low 60s and can work very very well for you yeah very good i have also seen that people take their porches and create spaces underneath them insulating with things like hay bales right and just create kind of a mock root cellar underneath their porch in the shaded cool side of the house yeah it won't work you can even take the cool side of the house and stack up bales you know against the house so the inside that's getting a little bit of uh you know heat from the house but not that much and then stack up you know straw bales or hay bales and make a little room so you can really get creative with these things there's a lot that you can do but another one that's really good what we're currently using is a basement yeah our basement if your basement is not heated it is down in the earth yeah and ours gets a little warm because the floors aren't insulated you know so it can get a little bit warmer but it generally stays in the low 60s yeah sometimes the 50s depending on how it's doing and that's a great space especially if you can section it off and here's what we're doing this year is we're actually going to create a little section and i'm taking a four inch vent pipe and gonna bring in with a fan and bring cool air in at night as we needed to get those temps down yeah that's going to be a step up for us and in our system until we can get to that actual root cellar so lots you can do in a basement and to pick up the humidity if you live in a dry area i know in general you know basements kind of are notorious for being damp but sometimes they actually aren't damp enough to be in that higher humidity area you can always bring in buckets of water and just set them there and let them evaporate into the area some people go down daily with spray bottles and just spray around you can hang a sheet on the inside and dampen that every day i guess if you wanted to get really fancy you could do a very simple mister there you go tristan would love this my son he likes all the tech stuff yeah you could actually put a humidifier in there with a little mister and it just comes on a little bit when when you need a little humidity so we could probably put a digital controller on it for humidity we're getting one for temperature for the fan is what we're going to do to help with that so you can really get creative working with what you have and which is what we've done over the years to do your best to mimic these spaces and yeah okay so we're not we're not hitting the ideals we can really really stretch out storage if you just get creative learn a little bit and get very creative about thinking yeah about the space that you have and how you can use it there are some old-fashioned outdoor techniques some of which are like storing in your rows actually not harvesting your root vegetables but insulating over them you also have a clamp system where you would pile up your vegetables and thickly insulate that with some straw and those things can definitely work depending on your environment but i think any of these systems that you want to come up with as an alternative you have to keep in mind your top priorities when it comes to root cellering number one the first priority is temperature right okay you've got to get it cool you've got to get it cool and you've got to keep it cool and you want to keep it as temperature stable as possible so you don't have a lot of fluctuation well and if you can get that start cellaring however you can start don't don't worry about the next one if you can't nail it if you can't get that just right if you can just get those cooler temperatures and even down into the low 60s yeah you're gonna be able to to take some of these foods and extend your storage without having to can them or dehydrate them or something else and just start playing with it yeah absolutely and then the number two priority is gonna be your humidity levels that's the second thing to try and dial in the best you can number three is going to be air flow right and of course all of it it has to be accessible so you got to think through accessibility how are you going to get to it if it's covered in snow or if it's raining out or you know all of that you need to kind of work through those issues because certain weather conditions in the winter can actually throw you off quite a bit from being able to access it but that's uh if you can work out those top three priorities then you have a great alternative to a traditional reseller absolutely and so one last item yeah which is maintenance is maintenance and that is going through at least once a week during your storage period and sorting through things now that's going to kind of change once a week is kind of that rule of thumb but that's going to change as the season wears on at the beginning when you just put your apples into storage in a bin you're pretty sure they're not bad because you were careful to put them all in right well i got to say though hopefully you're careful to put them all in and depending on how you're harvesting who's helping you sometimes we've got a lot of kids helping so quality control isn't always at its tops and so you just you you've got to know what you're putting in and you may need to start you know right away going through them okay so i have to say that i'm really excited that this winter we are planning maybe we're hoping we're sure designing and making plans um implementation we'll see for a real root seller our first ever complete root system next year we're hoping to put that in next year we'll see we've got a lot of projects we're trying to do a lot of infrastructure projects on the property and that's one of them that we really want to get in because you can store a lot of food really quickly in a retailer especially when you have a well-designed one and so you know culturally there was a lot more root cellaring going on because you had to survive off of what you were producing yourself a lot of times on the land and that is a really really good way to do that a lot of the things that root cellar kind of survival crops right potatoes carrots uh squash things like that that you can really get a lot of healthy good calories out of for your winter time so i'm really excited about that addition to the food program here on the homestead it really is and and but they're so important that's why there are all those alternative methods so find a way to get started yeah yeah and and jump into it and start learning now and get in on that journey yeah even if it's not ideal just find please think about it think about what you could do on your homestead and give it a try and some experimenting this year yep absolutely you guys it's been great hanging with you this time and we will see you soon goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 99,959

Keywords: Food Preservation, food preservation techniques, food preservation hacks, root cellar food storage, root cellar in basement, root cellar build your own, root cellaring natural cold storage of fruits & vegetables, root cellaring carrots, root cellaring beets, root cellaring potatoes, root cellaring apples, root cellaring natural cold storage of fruits & vegitables

Id: IFyhq8HsIRU

Length: 30min 56sec (1856 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020