Our Earthbag Root Cellar Fails | Addressing the Mud Issue

it has been one year since we built our earth bag root cellar and sadly today we're going to be ripping the top off and filling it in with dirt [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] as you guys can tell we're spreading some gravel around the property today to deal with some mud issues that we have and i got to get these snow machines moved out of the way [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so we're making pretty good progress back here earlier this year we actually had i think 30 or 40 yards of gravel delivered so we did a bunch of the property we did the front of the house we did the driveway but today we're kind of just getting all the spots that we didn't get and then there's a couple areas over next to the orchard that we're going to kind of just be filling in with gravel and kind of extending our land i guess give us a little more room for snow plowing so i think we're done back here and we're gonna head over there and work on that next over here by the orchard this is where we've had our compost pile and then this is the section we're going to want to fill in with some gravel when we built that orchard we lost a lot of room to snow plow so i'm going to try to make some of that up we've got some trees down here we're going to extend it a little bit and hopefully have more area to push snow this winter what i'm going to do over here first is i'm going to take our compost pile i'm going to move it in front of the orchard get it out of the way and then kind of start filling this in with gravel and once we get it where we want it i'm gonna i'm gonna take the compost pile again and push it back in that far corner kind of out of the way [Music] [Applause] do [Music] [Music] do [Music] all right we're pretty much all done with this area for now and i think next up we're gonna head over and start working on the root cellar all right all right guys so we are deconstructing the root cellar right now um eric starting with the dirt first there's about two feet of dirt on top of the logs and on top of a layer of earth bags we put as well as some plastic and so that's all just still intact because it's only been a year so eric's just manually moving these rocks and putting them in the tractor bucket and we're going we're relocating all this dirt rocks on a different part of our property once we get the whole top off we will show you guys what's going on you know down in there and give you a better look east is among us okay guys we officially can see inside the root cellar i'm standing on the logs that we use for the roof we've got a layer of earth bags here that were taken off we have a layer of house wrap that we're taking off we have a layer of greenhouse plastic that we're taking off and then we still got some more dirt on here i think we're just going to work on this section here um get the earth bags and everything off of there maybe pull a couple of these logs off and then kind of go from there all right so we got to a little bit of a predicament we had hoped we were going to be able to pull the shelves out we have three shelves down here two of them are very badly damaged we already knew that one is a little bit damaged but we wanted to you know make use of it but it's just pinched in there way too much um and i just don't think we don't think there's gonna be absolutely any way to get out without you know coming back in here and excavating around the whole thing again and that's just not an option for us so we are at the stage now where we're going to be filling in the root cellar and obviously we're going to be using the earth bags and the dirt since that is exactly you know what they're made up from the ground here and unfortunately there's just going to be some other things in the hole as well so this is what we're working with and the walls have started to you know come in because of all the force on them on the outside and so it's pinched these shelves it's pinched this shelf against that one and really really really bent it pretty severely so if you guys remember when we built this we are sitting at six feet below grade and we have the logs and then you know the earth bags and the dirt on top and there's about three feet of water down there we've had a really high water year um our water table is only three feet three to four feet uh beneath the ground right now so much different than when we built it it was at 10 feet last year um so a really big difference which is partially why this thing is just not working out for us so we're sadly going to keep working on this and it may take us some time we may be out here probably tomorrow doing it as well [Music] hold up just a minute been looking for some help just to find myself yeah been losing my focus like a thousand times before can't take this anymore cause i've been looking for something to change thoughts into motion i've been waiting way too long yeah waiting just for somebody to love and touch around me and to handle my emotions i was out waiting for something and if i close my eyes [Music] it's all been a waste of time [Music] it's all been a waste of time how could somebody be with someone else if you can't be by yourself yeah i got my problems lately i've been fading out holding out waiting just for somebody to look and test around me and to handle my emotions i was out waiting for something [Music] it's all been a waste of time [Applause] [Music] all right guys we are sitting where the root cellar used to be sadly so we're going to talk about that and why we chose to bury it i know that may seem like a shock we haven't really talked about it it's not really a shock to us because we've lived here and we've kind of saw what was going on with the root cellar so we built this thing back in july of last year and we're pretty excited when we built it it was a place for us to store all our canned food and a whole bunch of crops and soon after we built it we did have that fall we had some water come up into the root cellar how much would you say maybe about maybe about a foot about a foot and a half maybe at the max we had our sump pump down there and we were pumping it out and really wasn't too bad at all wasn't that bad we were just thinking that wasn't really ideal right and it was pretty moist down there i mean we were in like the 90s so all winter everything was fine you know it stayed just above freezing i mean we had potatoes and carrots down there in june and we were still eating those we didn't have that many jars left i don't think we had that many jars that we needed to go through and now of course we've started canning again and so about late june was when we first noticed some of the major issues we had went down there there was water of course because of the you know spring melt off i think we started getting water in april actually and we started to see some of the shelves had bent from a lot of the pressure being put on the walls and that was kind of like the point where we were like okay things aren't working out down here so like arrow mentioned earlier in the video when we built this thing our water table was at 10 feet down that's when we hit water with the excavator and that was last year it was extremely dry year this year has been an extremely wet year it's we almost haven't even had a summer i mean we get a nice day here and it's a rarity so we've had so much rain uh we've had flash floods hail storms thunder and lightning like almost every other day it's been pretty crazy so our water table right now is only three feet below the ground where we're standing so major difference from last year when we built this thing and i'm gonna say that's one of the main reasons that this thing failed was all the water moving in the ground you know the water freezing in the ground from winter into spring and i think it just was too wet down there and what ariel means by the shelves bending when we went down there the earthbag walls um two of them probably mostly started to kind of bow in in the middle kind of pinched our shelves in there and we first noticed because when we went down our hatch our ladder had actually bent in a little bit and was crooked pretty obviously yeah it started small and then it got greater and that obviously is a safety concern because those earth bags are like bricks so if any of it's compromised if you get away from the straight wall then you're just going to lose the structure entirely eventually so it wasn't that dramatic but we kind of knew that it wasn't going to be something that was going to last for much longer it was dramatic enough that we decided we were gonna pull every single thing out of the root cellar that included all of the canned food we had left over and also all of our empty jars that were being stored down there yeah so it was a tremendous loss um as far as storage definitely food storage that's the whole purpose of it for us for this year yeah we pretty much don't know what we're going to do we're going to be storing a lot of our canned food and our crops inside which is not ideal it might just not last as long for us but another thing that sucks with losing the root cellar is we lost you know our ability to use it as a refrigerator for you know curing meat and brining meat and things like that and that was one of the main reasons why we built the root cellar was for the root crops and we'd really need potatoes and carrots to store in that ideal temperature for them to last that long and we're just not going to get that in the cabin um but that's just that's what we're doing this year because we don't really have you know another option we haven't figured out a good one and looking back we spent a lot of energy on that earth on making the earth bag shelter and i mean there was such a good experience for us i feel like we learned so much about the ground and about food storage and i really don't regret it i wouldn't change it in the fact that we learned from it and we just believe in doing things and learning from them learning from our mistakes and i feel like from here we can just move forward you know start start fresh go back to the drawing board as they say yep and as far as what we're going to do if we're going to continue to grow our own food and grow vegetables and and hunt and preserve meat we're definitely going to need to do something so the wheels are turning into our minds we have a few different ideas definitely nothing's going to happen this year we have we have too much on the table this year we're too busy so like errol said we're just gonna be keeping our stuff in the cabin it's not gonna last as long this year a side note getting rid of the root cellar that big hump on the ground has given us more area on our property to park trucks snow machines you know the boat and it's also giving us more room to snow plow this year with that being said um i wanted to show you guys the woodshed because we got it all filled up with wood we built the woodshed to handle or fit eight cords of wood and as you can tell we have way more than that by the time we took all the wood off the property split it and stacked it we got about 10 cords of wood so we had to stack some out front of the wood shed this year we're going to be using that first and if you come in we have some extra wood sitting right here this is a whole another row that's kind of not supposed to be here and then from here back that's all the main storage on this side also this whole stack right here is not meant to be here so this is an extra row but we definitely got this thing filled up and we probably have about two plus years of wood in here so still loving the wood shed i'm going to show you guys around the property and what we did with the gravel and keep in mind what our goal was with the gravel this year was to minimize the amount of mud that we get in the spring and also to kind of open up some areas and clear some things out and give us some more room when we're doing snow removal this winter we did have a tree that was right here that unfortunately was attacked by the beetles so that one was dead we took that one out and we extended this area a couple feet and this is going to give us a big open area to snow plow and a little more room you know going off the edge to push the snow pretty much from here forward was just no gravel um we've never had gravel in here in this area so it was extremely muddy and then over here this is actually an area that we wanted to extend to have more room to snow plow but as you can tell we didn't have enough gravel to finish that so i'm going to smooth that off a little this year and then next year we'll probably bring in a little more gravel over there let's head over to the other side of orchard where we did some major extensions of the property this is the era we're going to try to make up some room for snow plowing since we put in that orchard and we can't snow plow there anymore so we used about 10 yards of gravel here and kind of extended the property out into the bog a little bit we also put our compost pile over there as you can tell we have a ton of extra room now we can park our ranger here park our truck here we're also gonna be parking our trailer over here quite a bit of our property goes back that way into the bog and then there's a hill back on that back side and we want to have a path out to the bees and this is going to be it this is the area that we walk and we drive out to the bees over here is a bandit's pond he's done some major excavation work over there this year we have talked about putting maybe like an outdoor hangout kitchen area over here not gonna happen anytime soon and things are always changing with us as far as plans go but it's pretty much gonna be it for this video we are definitely happy to have this gravel in and it's gonna go to good use this year we'll see you guys next time [Applause] you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 315,043

Rating: 4.9229622 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: Ss2AaCHHNpc

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/earthbaghero]

I don't think the bags failed at all. Looked like a bit of poor planning. Water and gravity are the main enemies of a building. If they are not accounted for, the building won't last.

[u/rom1nux]

All this work in trash, I'm sad for you...Thank for documenting this case...Saddly this is how we learn...