This Prepared Life
Welcome to This Prepared Life, a podcast for women where preparedness feels peaceful, practical, and possible. Hosted by Allison Michael, this show is about creating a calmer, more resilient life through everyday preparedness and intentional living. Inside the episodes, you’ll find realistic food storage tips, Allison’s Three Layer Food Storage system, preparedness skills, homemaking rhythms, and encouragement to help you care for yourself and your family with more confidence and less overwhelm. From emergency preparedness and food preservation to homemaking and building a well-stocked pantry, this podcast offers practical guidance to help preparedness feel more natural in your everyday life. Whether you’re filling your first pantry shelf or have been preparing for years, you can expect simple action steps, honest conversations, and a reminder that preparedness does not have to come from fear. Here, we believe in being prepared, not scared — one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional step at a time.
This Prepared Life
Root Cellaring - Food Preservation - Ep11
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You don't need a root cellar or a basement to store vegetables for months. Join me for this podcast episode on root cellaring. This form of food preservation is the least amount of work, and there are alternatives for those of us who don't actually have a root cellar in our homes!
The book mentioned was Putting Food By by Hertzberg. https://amzn.to/42rJ0Yq
Another great root cellar book is Root Cellaring By Bubel https://amzn.to/495vtYY
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Welcome to this Prepared Life podcast where homestudying and the apocalypse meet. I'm Alison, your host. Hello, and welcome to This Prepared Life. My hope for this podcast, and for you as the listener, is that you will gain knowledge from the information shared. I hope that you gain inspiration and motivation to take the next step in your preparedness journey. I am over on Instagram and you can find me at This Prepared Life. I am daily sharing about our homestead life, our prep journey. And I do this because I think it is so important that each of us prepare for our families. The definition of prepping here is planning for the things to come. Doesn't matter what those things are, whether they are power outages or wildfires or EMPs. You get to decide what prepping looks like for your family. And I hope that these podcasts help you on your journey. Today I am continuing the discussion about food preservation methods, and we're going to talk about root cellars. We have already covered canning, water bath canning, and pressure canning. We have covered dehydrating foods. And over on Instagram, um, the Preppy Redhead and myself covered freeze drying. So today let's talk about root cellars. And root cellars are something that back in the day every single household had in some way, shape, or form. Like preserving the harvest in this way was just normal in what you did. And as we have expanded our houses and improved them and just made them better, we have made them worse for storing food. We no longer have that cold, humid environment in a basement or under some cellar steps that we can use to store food. So, and we have not only moved away from growing our own food, we have moved away from knowing how to preserve it. And so I don't currently have a root cellar. Most of us don't have a root cellar, but I do have a, we live in a 1927 farmhouse, and it has um a really creepy basement that I have talked about and shared some pictures um on Instagram. I think over, you know, the last almost a hundred years and the couple times that this house has been remodeled, that basement has been just drastically changed. And as I, you know, look behind things and I I think I can see remnants of what used to be a root cellar, and I would eventually love to rebuild that down there. But um, for now, we will just utilize other spaces. But um, it's interesting to me how something as like important as root cellaring and being able to store these foods is something that has been removed from our homes. And I think that just goes back to, you know, past episodes when we've talked about how um the system is removing us from being able to provide for ourselves in this way. So anyway, what is a root cellar? And a root cellar is a location that uses the natural cooling, insulating, and humidifying of the earth to keep vegetables fresh. And a root cellar is essentially it's like a six-month supply of quality vegetables that are on hand at any time. They're just there for you to use. And whether you grow them yourself or buy them from a local farmer and put them in the root cellar, six months is typically the time frame that food can be stored in there. How a root cellar works is it holds a temperature, ideally, of 32 to 40 degrees. There are a few vegetables that need a bit warmer, so you'll have to research those. And it also keeps a humidity level of 80 to 95%, and that is high. Like we do not have rooms in our houses right now that can handle humidity like that. And we have built our houses in a way that that just doesn't happen. Another important part of a root cellar is ventilation, and ventilation is moving air and it keeps bacteria and molds from thriving in that environment. And then, just like all food storage, another really important factor of root cellaring is light. So light hastens deterioration, whether that's a potato or a bag of flour. Light, not good with food. So the cool temperature slows the release of ethylene gas from the crops and it stops the gross of microorganisms. And the high humidity prevents the loss of moisture through evaporation. So when you have that shriveled carrot in your refrigerator, it didn't get enough humidity. A couple things to know about root cellars, they usually may not work in hot southern climates. Uh, they also should not be built where you have a high water table and they shouldn't be built near septic systems or drain fields. I'm not going to go into a ton of detail on how to build one because there are so many different ways to do that. And there are also so many alternatives that you can use if you do not have the funds or the means to build an actual root cellar. Start researching that because root cellars really are just fascinating. So one of the beauties of root cellaring is it's it's minimal in the work that is needed. You know, unlike canning our harvest or dehydrating the harvest, we don't have to peel or chop or blanch anything. There's no food prep beyond pulling the food, maybe possibly curing or drying it or removing dirt from the item. Um, it's really minimal in the work. And so that is a huge bonus. We're storing whole fruits and vegetables that we're not changing. And this way also means that it is really easy to see when it's not working because that food will start to shrivel or rot or mold. And as long as we are visually inspecting our root cellars on a consistent basis, we are gonna notice when things are off. If those carrots start to go soft, then we know something is going on in our root cellar and we can start monitoring that on a regular basis. So some of the equipment you might need for root cellaring. You need obviously the place, the storage place, an indoor or outdoor space that you are going to keep that food. You need clean wooden boxes or barrels or large cardboard crates. Um, I know some people use the styrofoam coolers. So something to put the food into. You need clean paper or leaves or peat moss, something for wrapping items or shredding and packing around items. And a helpful item is a thermometer and a humidity gauge because that can give you a picture. I keep one of those in my basement. And um, because I store my food down there, I also, even though it is not the ideal temperature, I use my basement as my root cellar. And so I watch my temperature and I watch my humidity. And I may not get as long of storage out of some of my vegetables because the temperature is a little higher than it should be, but I do get some storage, and so that's that's a bonus, and that's what I'm using because it's what I have. So the easiest way to root cellar, and this is technically not root cellaring, but the easiest way is to just overwinter crops in the garden. If you live in a climate that does not get a ton of snow, the ground is not going to be frozen solid, but it's cool. Can you just store those carrots under a layer of straw and dig them up as needed? Um, when we lived in southwest Washington, that's what I did. Very easy to do it that way. Uh, another option for a root cellar is to build a room in a cool basement. And there are so many great plans for doing this on the internet. They talk about ventilation and windows and building pipes for in and out. And so if you or your husband or someone in your community is able to do that and has those skills, look online and think about building a root cellar in your basement. Another way I have seen people do is by digging a hole and putting a garbage can or some kind of a wood box or a bin in the ground and then covering it. And this is a great way to utilize, you know, the outdoor temperatures and the earth cooling this box, but not having to build a room. Uh, you can also utilize under house spaces or an old shed. And again, you're using like styrofoam coolers or bins of some kind. I've also seen people online just fill pits that they have dug in the ground, and they have had great success. Um, I have never done that, and I would wonder about rodents and how do you protect from rodents in that situation? But if that is definitely something to look into. So a lot of different things can be stored in a root cellar, and some of it for shorter periods of time than others. Um, putting Food By has an excellent section in their book on root cellaring, and it also has a chart for each vegetable that shows its best humidity and where they suggest storing it. And so Putting Food By is a great book, and I highly recommend getting that one if you do not have it. So you can store apples and oranges and pears. Most of the root crops store really well in a root cellar. Potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, parsnips, turnips, things like that. Cabbage and celery can store really well in a root cellar. Pumpkins, winter squashes store really well in a root cellar. Garlic stores amazing in a root cellar. Back in the day, the root cellar would have also held dairy and fermented foods. Anything that needed to be kept cool would have been stored in that root cellar. So you will need to research what to keep with what, as some foods are not meant to be stored next to others. Some people say even in the same room as others, but I don't have two root cellars, so I just don't put them next to each other. So root cellaring is a great way to get started on preserving your harvest and building up a store of food preps. Like I said earlier, it's really a six-month layer of nutritious fruits and vegetables just sitting there waiting for you to use them. It can be done relatively inexpensively with some creativity. And I really hope that this got you thinking about different ways that you can create and utilize a root cellar for your own food preservation. I know that, you know, we do not all have a root cellar, but there are so many different things we can do to try and create that same environment depending on where we live and our land and things like that. So definitely dig in and do some research because I just find root cellaring fascinating. And I would love to one day turn a portion of my basement into a root cellar. So happy root cellaring and thanks for listening. Thanks for listening today, and until next time, remember every little thing matters and a goal without a plan is just a wish. If you have any questions, feel free and find me on Instagram at this prepared life. You can also visit this preparedlife.blogspot.com. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love it if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts.