As we are having another rain day we continue with the "cold room." Some scraps, 2X4s, some 3/8 plywood, a door.Mostly in the big cans is wheat berries, pearl barley, cracked wheat, spelt flour, WW flour, rye flour, amaranth, quinoa, rolled oats, rolled wheat, buckwheat flour, dried red beans, dried white beans, dried black beans, chickpeas, WW angel hair.
Sacks and some boxes; potatoes. Boxes; apples. Jars; dried tomatoes, dried apple slices, dried zukes, dried/or for seed runnerbeans and fava beans, some boughten stuff such as pickles (we buy these to get the gallon jars).
Bowls or bins of eggplant, turnips, beets, onions. Not shown: winter squash, pumpkins (still curing in the living room); ropes of garlic, 16 liters of homebrew, 24 bottles of (we hope) grape wine/cider.
R14 insulation leftover from a project a decade ago finds a home here.
A primer coat on the new cold room wall. Woooo, tired! Head upstairs for Chicken Tomato Vegetable. It's been simmering in the crockpot all afternoon.
You are amazing!
ReplyDeleteAll I managed was a trash can, a bucket of water at the bottom, some scrap wood as a frame, potatoes, and the lid. That in the coldest part of the basement.
For the last five years that was us. Onward and upward! For starters, you have a basement! Oh, joy! We are too near the water table here; no one I know has one -- they are all over on College Hill where th' perfessors live.
ReplyDeleteSharon Astyk, I think, uses an enclosed porch, which was popular with my agricultural relatives, too, as I remember.
If you have enough garden to justify it -- beautiful basement cold room diagrams can be found in Eliot Coleman's book and others. Most seem to be made of cinder blocks, arranged around a window.
If you don't want to do permanent construction, these can be just stacked unmortared, suitable for disassembly at any time.
If you have lots of kids, they'll all find a use for the cinder blocks later. ;)
We looked into a root cellar a la Coleman and we have the ideal spot: north-west, with a window. But the floor is asbestos tiles, which might disintegrate under humid gravel and which we would actually just like to have stripped to get to the concrete. To have them removed is not (yet) within the budget. Maybe next year.
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime I'm looking into the porch. It's screened so it does freeze up, but I could build a kind of straw box...
You might cover the tiles with polyethylene and lay some pallets?
ReplyDeleteOr seal them with polyurethane? We did this in the dining room when we got here and it has held for 18 years.
There were also tiles in the ceilings which we regarded with suspicion (besides being ugly) so we buried them in troweled joint compound and then painted white latex over it; instant "textured" ceiling. The cost for pulling everything out and starting over would have been more than the house is worth.
We need to figure out a way to create a cold room. It's hard to dig down for a root cellar due to caliche (hard clay layer in soil). Keeping any room cold in the summer in the desert is tough. We could swing it in the winter but I don't know that even that would stay cool enough on the warmer days. Ideas?
ReplyDeleteOur summers are hard on the "cold" room too -- we think of it as winter storage.
ReplyDeleteYou could try an evaporative cooler. The principle is drip water continuously on a cloth through which air passes into the storage space. You can imagine what would ensue if everyone around there tried that, though. ;)
This is a completely novice question I know, but how do you cure a pumpkin and what does curing it do?
ReplyDeleteThe picture of your shelves with stored food is inspiring - and so neatly organized!
"Pumpkin fruits are cured at 80-85°F and 80-85 percent relative humidity for 10 days. This is done to prolong the post harvest life of the pumpkin fruit because during this process the fruit skin hardens, wounds heal and immature fruit ripens." [source]
ReplyDeleteBasically, to make them last most of the winter, bring them into the living room for two weeks and then move them to the cold room. They kind of seal themselves up while in the living room.
Hence: [Image on Flickr]