root cellar

By now, everyone has heard about the 100 mile diet, which took North America by storm a few years ago when Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon decided they were going to live a whole year eating only food grown within 100 miles of their home. Many of us even before this ambitious project recognized the ecological importance of eating food grown locally, but as Smith and MacKinnon found out, it isn't necessarily easy to do.

This is intended a guide for the rest of us, who would like to get more local food in our diets, but are not just sure how to go about it. The first thing to mention is that going cold-turkey from one day to the next is just insane. Even Smith and MacKinnon agree it was extremely difficult to do, and that it is not for everyone. I believe that cold-turkey is the surest route to failure for most people, which is why I am writing this.

As you may recall, I root-cellared about 30 lbs of carrots this year. That was towards the end of October and so it's been just over 4 months now. I was just hauling some out to make some pea soup when I realised I hadn't written an update yet. I went down to the front corner of the basement and hauled a bunch of carrots out of the box of sand, and put them into a bucket to carry them to the kitchen.

As you may recall, a few years ago I experimented with storing carrots in the front corner of the cellar, but they all dried out really badly over the winter. So this time I packed them in sand with hopes of avoiding the drying problem. It worked pretty well actually, although in hindsight there are some problems with doing this, and clearly from the photos you can see there is room for improvement. But for my first time trying it, I'm actually extremely pleased with the results.

This is just a really quick note about the carrots I put down yesterday. I used to think that the stone basement in this old house would be perfect for storing vegetables over the winter, but a few years ago I tired putting carrots in a bin in the south end of our basement, and they all shriveled up to nothing within a couple of months. I've since done a bit of reading on root-cellaring and discovered that you actually need 90% to 95% humidity in your root cellar! Wow!

The north end of our house - under the kitchen - is just a crawl space with a dirt floor, and I think it may actually be ideal for root cellaring if only there were better access to it. The further north you crawl, the cooler it gets - going right down to very cold in mid winter. And it's also extremely humid in there because of the dirt floor. But it's not very accessible. It's really dirty to be crawling around in there - not something I'd want to have to do when I need veggies. I've actually seriously considered cutting a trap door in the kitchen floor - but I know that Melissa won't go for it for one thing.

So on to Plan B.