please note that i am not much of a writer and most of the text was stolen off my wifes blog,so if it looks like i didnt write it,its because i didnt..


this was far and away our most labor intensive project here.

please note at the end there is a link to a video/picture blog that will make it easier to follow along. we have found it much easier just to do the videos and post the links rather than paste ALL the pictures when we do a thread..


We originally began to dig in to the land for the root cellar nearly 5 years ago now.All good things take time.

When we began digging way back when we were simply going to dig in to the side of the hill and then once we had it dig in were going to frame in and brace it etc. Things did not go according to our plans however and the folks that had been staying here and helping got a bit crazy a few years back and cut off the top of the cave and made us a cliff instead of the cave. This made for a huge change in plans ...

we let the cellar sit for a couple winters while we decided just what we were going to do with it. We had this gaping wound in the side of the hill and we have no tractor or other earth moving equipment besides a shovel and wheel barrow. The earth taken from the hill had been moved for whatever reason to odd places on the land and resembled something like ski moguls but in really bad places.

What we came up with
We had some pieces n parts of various old chick incubators (what the chicken coop ,feed shed, tool shed and part of the goat pasture is made from) still left over and we had the spare parts left of the ones we had already used laying around as well. We decided that although it was going to make a whole lot of manual strenuous labor we would have to build the root cellar out of those materials and some others we had laying around and then manually move the earth back around it once it was built.

Although this was not an ideal way of going about things as it is very labor intensive as well as time consuming, we needed a large root cellar for last years crops. The ways we had been doing things was simply no longer enough for storage of our produce.

We simply finished leveling it out and then began to assemble the panels within the dug out area. Sounds much easier than it actually was since the earth here is made mostly of clay and ,limestone type material (A pick came in very handy throughout the whole process.) The panels we needed to have down in the holler are very heavy and bulky and weigh between 200 and 350 pounds apiece. They were also up top here and we had to find a way to get them down the hill closer to where we needed them. We moved one of the three panels by hand, flipping it end for end which proved to be all but impossible and it did horrible things to our backs as well.

We have a 4 wd however it is a blazer so we could not simply throw them in the back of the truck to move them. After another month or so of sitting, pondering and recuperating ( the backs were very sore and manthing tried toe amputation and weather issues) I came up with an idea of making a skid type device and attaching it to the car and skidding the panels down to where we needed them . IT WORKED GREAT!

The panels are 8 x8 are coated on both sides with metal and are two inches thick of wood walls between the metal. We only had three panels of these incubators left and we wanted to try a shot at earth bag construction and see how it was to work with, so we decided the front wall would be bagged earth. The roof as you can see in the picks are something sort of resembling steel girders. They in fact are steel but were also out of the incubators as were the sheets of metal that fill in the small gaps between the beams.

We coated all parts in tar and then we coated them in black plastic before placing them where we wanted them in order to help preserve the pieces n parts. As mentioned the front wall is going to be bagged earth and then we have a door to hook on where it is framed in, also from the incubators.

the next time we worked on the cellar this is what we did

I spent all morning working on the front section of it. We are earth bagging it in the front then will cob over the top of it in order to make it a bit more pleasing to the eye.. I am using fifty pound dog food bags that we have been saving over time. They are the plastic on the outside with burlap plastic type stuff on the inside. The bags basically have to be filled in place or very near where they are going since a lot more than 50 pounds of dirt fits into the bags. Once they are filled and folded over and secured shut (duct tape) we simply laid them on there side and fit them in between the frame work and flattened them out as best as we could.(my butt sitting on them and bouncing around works quite well. Any small areas where the dirt in the bags didnt quite mold like we wanted it to ( around the frame work and outer edges) were filled in with your typical double bagged plastic grocery bag. It is actually quite fun using the smaller bags. Almost like building a sand castle but instead of molds i used bags. As the front went up I also began filling in the sides of the root cellar , just to keep the small bags from bulging off the ends too much.

progress was very slow but we are progressing. The front is almost finished except for the bags that will go up top to keep the dirt from falling forward. The door is now hung. The retaining walls and dirt on the sides is slowly filling in. We will begin covering the bags hopefully this weekend with a cob type mixture on the actual root cellar portion. It needs to be finished so i can begin actually using it.

As of now the inside is keeping a good steady 20 degrees cooler than outside temps and nothing but the back and front wall are complete. There is still a whole lot more dirt that will be going on top of and to the sides of the cellar.

The manthing worked on filling in the back of the cellar all day long. I asked him how many five gallon buckets he had put behind it at the end of the day and he didnt have any idea. I guess he doesnt count while doing repetitive tasks like i do.

The small hole in the front toward the bottom is a vent hole. We put an adjustable crawl space vent in there so that we can adjust the amount of airflow into the cellar.

After about 5 hours of moving dirt our arms began feeling like they were going to fall off so we called it a day. Anytime i went back down to the garden to work over the remainder of the weekend manthing went and hauled a few more buckets or wheelbarrow loads to the cellar. By our estimates, the back and sides are a bit over half way done.

This is where we should have stopped, taken the bags out and made sure they were packed better and made more level for the front to be cobbed.. but we didn't so we continued on...

we covered the front wall of the root cellar with chicken wire and the time has came to begin mudding the front. The mud mix is basically an adobe mix with a bit of mortar mixed in to it as a stabilizer since it will be out in the elements..

I found the mud takes a bit of work to get it to stick to the chicken wire on the front and it is requiring a whole bunch of mud. You need to get it in behind the wire to the bags n then go from there for the final layer of it over the wire. I am figuring this will take two two three coats of mud in order to have a sufficient amount of mud over the face of the cellar(inch to inch and half of mud). This is also going to be a long slow process, nothing about this root cellar so far has been fast and easy lol....

Once we finished the mud the previous fall we left it for the winter and used it through out
and then last spring...

first I must say our first attempt last winter worked well until this spring and the front wall had some major issues... It has some really unlevel spots in it and with our rains here it started to lose its soundness..

soooooooooooooo

We learned from the experience and knew what needed to be fixed and we ripped it down and redid the entire front... and rebuilt it.

The top has about 19 inches of dirt on top after settling. we will be adding another 6-8 inches of dirt on top when the weather cools a bit.. The dirt on top actually starts about half way between the top of the door and what looks like is the roof..

The inside through the summer months is staying between 60 and 65 during the hottest parts of the day.. We have a vent in the front of the cellar and one on top to control air flow and humidity...

We have not concreted or mudded the inside portion of the front wall, I dont know as if it is necessary but we may do it at some point. We didnt do it to make it pretty but something functional. The door will be covered in a brownish beige mixture so it doesnt stand out as much as it does in the pictures. If that was brown, unless you were actually looking it would be hard to pick up and see at a glance..

We use large shelving units from old incubators as our racks on the inside. These have holes like screen so veggies always have airflow around them... We have the shelves suspended on wire and then the lowest ones are sitting on bricks so as not to touch the ground. We have 12 racks this way and then 4x4 area or so for other containers holding veg...

anywho, hope this helps those in need of ideas.. These projects around our homesteads do not have to break us when doing them,, be creative try a different method and scavenge up what you need to build them.. Sure they are a lot of work but when it comes to sustainability and survival they truly are needed...

here is a link to the video/picture blog of the construction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C32MqyE26w4

i hope you enjoy..
any questions,feel free to ask..

Nice thanks for the link

very nice.
The link was helpful but I like to savor the writen word