My Root Barrel Experiment

One of the biggest steps a person can make to lessen their impact on the planet is to eat locally. More and more, produce is being imported from across the globe, racking up embodied energy along the journey by boat, plane, and truck from China or South America. When I visit major produce- growing regions like Florida and California, I'm amazed to find grocery store produce sections stocked with avocados from Chile, grapefruit from Texas, and tomatoes from Mexico. Part of the problem is that people want to be able to eat strawberries in December, and part is that consumers want the low prices Third World countries afford. Vegetable and fruit varieties sold in grocery stores are bred not for flavor or nutrition, but for their ability to withstand a long trek across the planet. They are not picked ripe off the tree or vine, but are picked green and ripened with a process involving fossil fuel intensive climatic and atmospheric control. They are flavorless when compared to truly fresh produce eaten off the tree or just harvested from the earth. I really don't understand the appeal, but I have the idea that most people have never tasted real fresh produce, so they think fresh vegetables are supposed to taste that way. I've even heard people raised on grocery store carrots complain that garden carrots have too much carrot flavor.

Food Preservation Methods

Since coming to DR, I've been striving to eat as locally as possible. When I first came here I joined Bobolink eating coop, where we have a rule about eating only locally grown produce. To keep our diet diverse and take advantage of the fruit and vegetables we can get during the season, we can, pickle, dehydrate, and freeze what we harvest from our garden and what we buy from the Ramer's, a local organic Mennonite farm. But these preservation practices (with the possible exception of pickling) are only suited to certain vegetables, can be energy and time intensive, and lower the nutritional value of most foods. It would be nice to have a huge walk- in cooler to store all the vegetables and fruit we harvest locally so that we could enjoy fresh produce throughout the winter, but it would be wasteful for an off-the-grid community to run a walk-in cooler on solar power in the middle of winter.

Fortunately, a walk-in cooler exists that doesn't require any energy input whatsoever to run. It's called a root cellar, and before the days of refrigeration everybody used one to store the season's harvest so they could enjoy fresh produce throughout the winter. Root cellars are simply underground cellars that provide a cool, damp, frost-free environment for the storage of produce. Because they are underground, their temperatures hang just above freezing-the perfect temperature for produce storage— for most of the winter. In nearby Rutledge, MO, almost every house has a root cellar behind it, though now most of these are caving in and none are being used anymore. For Dancing Rabbit, a root cellar could provide refrigeration without the use of fossil fuel, and without draining our battery banks of valuable power (as refrigerators do) at a time of year when sunlight is at a premium and when cold is everywhere. It could also allow us to store large amounts of local produce for the whole winter, instead of having to buy non-local produce every week from the grocery store or do without fresh produce for a big part of the year.

How to Make a Root Barrel

So if it's such a good idea, why isn't there a community root cellar here already? It's not that DR citizens don't want fresh local produce throughout the year, its just that we are so preoccupied with building our houses and infrastructure that building a community root cellar is far down on our to do list.

So last fall, after reading about winter veggie storage in Mike and Nancy Bubel's book Root Cellaring, I decided to experiment with a root barrel, which is along the same lines as a root cellar, but doesn't take nearly as much effort to build. I was having a truckload of sand dumped on my warren for a building project, so when the truck arrived I grabbed a plastic barrel and told them to dump the sand on top of it while I held it in place at a forty-five degree angle. I'd been using the barrel for rain catchment and it already a rectangular door cut in the top of it for cleaning access. This made it easy to fill with vegetables, too. When the sand was all dumped, the top of the barrel stuck out of the sandpile at an angle, and the door was easily accessible.

Bobolink had bought a couple hundred pounds of organic potatoes and was storing them in barrels in Skyhouse, and although Skyhouse can be kind of cool in winter, some varieties were beginning to sprout by early November. I thought I'd experiment with these because I figured if we didn't do something with them soon, they would dry out and shrivel or rot. I also had a couple beds of mulched carrots, beets, and celeriac in the garden that I knew wouldn't make it through the winter where they were, so I dug them for storage in the root barrel. I layered the vegetables in the barrel, alternating them with layers of straw. I finished by filling the top quarter with only straw.

To keep out the critters as well as the elements, I put the door on, covered the top of the barrel thick with straw, put a tarp over the whole sand pile, then more straw over the barrel, then another tarp. I used bricks to hold the tarps down, and accessed the vegetables by removing the bricks and peeling back the tarps. As a way of monitoring the barrel I stuck one probe from a digital min-max thermometer inside it and left the other probe outside in the ambient weather. The thermometer allowed me to see the minimum and maximum temperatures inside and outside the barrel for the previous 6 days.

Root Barrel Results

I was happy to see in December, when we were getting temperatures of 5 degrees F outside, the inside of the barrel stayed just above freezing. I left the village in mid December for a winter trip and told Bobolinkers they could continue to pull vegetables from the barrel while I was gone. While away I wondered about the root barrel. Was the cumulative effect of winter cooling the sand pile, and were the vegetables inside freezing? I got word in late January that Bobolinkers were still pulling carrots out of it and using them in dinners. I was happy to hear it. When I got back in March, the carrots were mostly gone, the celeriac looked like it had just been harvested from the garden, and the potatoes, though a bit frostbitten on top of the pile were still firm and edible underneath. As of now, early April, we are still pulling delicious potatoes and celeriac from the barrel, though the warmer temperatures are causing the potatoes to sprout.

If you live in a cooler region of the country and want to enjoy delicious local produce through the winter without using fossil fuel, you should build yourself a root cellar. At my old house in the city, I was able to convert a corner of our basement into a root cellar by walling it off and creating ducts to the outside. You could do the same, or if you want to go the easy route, you could try making a root barrel.

March Hare Winter 2009 Issue 58

Donor Thank You		Food Forests & More
Root Barrel Experiment		Dumpster Diving
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