$10 Root Cellar

And Other Low-Cost Methods of Growing, Storing, and Using Root
Vegetables

Volume 3 in the Modern Simplicity series

by

Anna Hess

Copyright © 2013 by Anna Hess

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the
author.  The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote
short excerpts in a review.

Visit my blog at www.waldeneffect.org or read more about my books
at www.wetknee.com.

Contents

Introduction

Why roots?

How to store vegetables without canning,
freezing, or drying

Introducing the refrigerator root cellar

Safety

Fridge root cellar

How to make a
refrigerator root cellar

Planning the
orientation

Digging the hole

Dismantling the fridge

Ventilating the fridge

Burying the fridge

Maintaining
temperature

Next steps

Other storage options

History of root
cellars

Very low-tech storage options

Spring houses

Root cellars

The whole shebang

Cave root cellar

Basement root cellar

Basement cut-off

Integrating roots into your homestead

Growing enough roots

How to grow storage vegetables

Filling the root cellar

Eating roots

Feeding roots to livestock

Beyond the potato

Modern Simplicity

About the author

Watermelon Summer

Introduction

Why roots?

The Potato Eaters, by Vincent
Van Gogh, 1885, is currently located in the Van Gogh Museum in
Amsterdam.

You see, I
really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that
these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their
little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands
they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor
and—that they have thus honestly earned their food.  I wanted
it to give the idea of a wholly different way of life from
ours—civilized people."

—Vincent Van
Gogh, in an 1885 letter about his painting The Potato Eaters

The perceived link between peasants and potatoes
was widespread during the nineteenth century and caused many
upper-crust English people to eschew the lowly spud.  Over
time, the stigma associated with root crops seems to have vanished,
which is lucky for us since potatoes, carrots, and other roots make
such useful additions to the self-sufficient homesteader's garden
and pantry.

Root vegetables are easy to grow
and provide plenty of calories per square foot.

If you're interested in maximizing the number of
calories you can grow in a small space, roots often win over grains,
and roots have the additional benefit that they don't require
threshing and winnowing.  In addition, if stored properly, root
vegetables will often last all winter, providing vitamins that
quickly disappear from frozen, canned, and dried foods.

On a more personal note, my husband and I found
that once we started growing all of our own vegetables, carrot
sticks became a winter staple since we yearned for the crunch of
something fresh in January, February, and March.  If your
homesteading experience is anything like ours, you'll quickly find
at least one (or more likely several) roots that make your life
easier, tastier, and cheaper.  Each year, you'll harvest more
and more roots, and will soon will be faced with the conundrum of
where to store your every-growing bounty over the winter.  The
purpose of this book is to make the storage of your root crops so
simple and cheap that even Van Gogh's Potato Eaters could afford to
follow suit.

How to store vegetables without canning,
freezing, or drying

Types of
storage vegetables

Vegetable

Optimal storage
conditions

My storage conditions

My storage location

beets

32 - 40°F, 90 - 95% humidity

cool, moist

not applicable

cabbage

32 - 40°F, 80 - 90% humidity

cool, moist

fridge root cellar

carrots

32 - 40°F, 90 - 95% humidity

cool, moist

fridge root cellar

garlic

32 - 50°F, 60 - 70% humidity

warm, dry

kitchen shelf

onions

32 - 50°F, 60 - 70% humidity

warm, dry

kitchen shelf

parsnips

32 - 40°F, 90 - 95% humidity

cool, moist

fridge root cellar

potatoes

32 - 40°F, 80 - 90% humidity

cool, moist

fridge root cellar

sweet potatoes

50 - 60°F, 60 - 70% humidity

warm, dry

kitchen shelf

turnips

32 - 40°F, 90 - 95% humidity

cool, moist

not applicable

winter squash (including pumpkins)

50 - 60°F, 60 - 70% humidity

warm, dry

kitchen shelf

Storage vegetables (including roots, winter
squash, and some others) are crops that will last for several months
without canning, freezing, or drying.  The table above breaks
up common storage vegetables into two categories: warm, dry storers,
and cool, moist storers.  This is obviously a generalization
since carrots like it wetter than cabbages and pumpkins like it
warmer than onions, but most homesteaders will be doing well to
simply find one cool, damp spot and one warm, dry spot for their
storage crops.

Warm, dry storers can be maintained over the
winter in a slightly cool part of your house that doesn't freeze but
also isn't excessively wet.  We keep butternut squash and
garlic on shelves right in the kitchen, and they carry us through
until spring.  Although I won't be writing anything else about
warm, dry storers in this book, I do heartily recommend these crops,
having found that sweet potatoes generally produce more calories per
square foot than white potatoes in our neck of the woods.  To
read more about vegetables that can be stored on the kitchen shelf,
check out Weekend Homesteader:
October.

Inside our refrigerator root
cellar in late December, carrots are crisper and sweeter than
they ever were at this time of year in the electrified fridge.

Cool, moist storers are the type of vegetables
I'll focus on for the rest of this book since they keep well in a
root cellar.  Although each vegetable has slightly different
optimal temperature and humidity conditions, most prefer levels just
above freezing when the air is nearly saturated with water.

In a pinch, you can keep cool, moist storers for
a little while in a closet or other low-temperature part of your
house, but they'll quickly begin to shrivel.  Alternatively, if
you only have a few, potatoes and carrots store well in the crisper
drawer of the fridge covered with a damp dish towel.  Be sure
to re-moisten the towel once a week, or whenever you take a
vegetable out of the drawer.

As you become more self-sufficient, though,
you'll soon run out of places to keep cool, moist storers in the
average house.  Luckily, a low-energy solution exists—the root
cellar.  If you dig deep enough and provide adequate
ventilation, the earth provides cool and moist conditions with no
work on your part, and adequate air flow keeps molds from forming
despite the damp.  Finally, screening all openings prevents
incursions by critters who would gladly eat your hard-earned
food.  If you're careful to keep these design factors in mind,
a root cellar can maintain roots that like cool, moist conditions
(along with cabbages, many fruits, and even scionwood for fruit tree
grafting) in peak condition all winter long.

The trouble is that a quality root cellar usually
costs thousands (or at least hundreds) of dollars to construct,
making root crops much less economical.  This book suggests
alternative ways to maintain cool, moist conditions for your
overwintering root crops at a significantly lower price.

Introducing the refrigerator root cellar

A $10 structure gives us room to
store plenty of winter carrots, cabbages, and potatoes with
little expenditure of electricity.

My husband and I started our homestead from
scratch.  With gardens to plant, water lines to bury, chickens
to pasture, and a trailer to bring up to living standards, we didn't
have much time or money to put toward a root cellar.

At first, the lack was no big deal.  Even
though our gardens have always been just on the edge of too big for
me to handle, it took us six years to reach the point where we were
growing enough carrots and other storage vegetables to have fresh
food throughout the winter.  In the early years, I had no
problem storing any winter crops that liked it cool and moist in our
normal refrigerator.

Part of the 2012 storage
vegetable harvest.

When the 2012 harvest came in, though, it was
clear the vegetables weren't all going to fit in the crisper
drawer.  We needed a root cellar...and fast.

My inventive husband, Mark, was way ahead of
me.  In 2009, he'd created a cheap, homemade root cellar out of
a junked refrigerator and $10 worth of spare parts, but the project
had growing pains.  A heavy rain caused the earth to slump and
knock the structure over, and we didn't have enough storage
vegetables at the time to make it worth our while to dig the fridge
free and tweak the design.  Three years later, a
wheelbarrow-load of carrots was enough to put Mark back on the job,
and soon he'd built the fridge root cellar described in this book.

So what is a refrigerator root cellar?  More
than just an insulated box, it mimics the conditions in a real root
cellar—plenty of air flow, high humidity, constantly cool (but not
freezing) conditions, and no expenditure of electricity.  (I'll
explain later how we use a light bulb or small space heater to
ensure the contents don't freeze during the coldest nights, so a
small amount of electricity might be used.)

Although we can't use our fridge root cellar as a
storm shelter, it beats many basement root cellars in terms of cool
winter temperatures, and the small size means we can easily build a
separate structure for apples (which shouldn't be stored with
potatoes).  Plus, the project takes a piece of trash out of the
waste stream and turns it into a useful homesteading tool—the
essence of Modern Simplicity.

However, a fridge root cellar might not be the
right choice for everyone.  That's why the the third chapter of
this book profiles more-traditional root-vegetable storage
techniques like spring houses, room-size root cellars, and storage
mounds.  If you use a technique I haven't listed, I hope you'll
drop me an email at anna@kitenet.net and I'll share your input with
future readers of this book.

Safety

The final topic I want to cover before telling
you how to build a fridge root cellar is safety.  There are two
issues you'll need to consider—chemicals and kids.

You've probably heard about small children
climbing into a fridge then being unable to reopen the door from the
inside, leading to their eventual death by suffocation.
Luckily, this problem is only a factor for refrigerators built
before 1958, at which point the mechanical latching mechanism was
replaced with a magnetic seal that is easily opened by anyone who
can apply at least fifteen pounds of pressure to the door.
While a child probably wouldn't suffocate inside a refrigerator root
cellar (since you'll be adding several ventilation holes), it's
still a good idea to remove the latching mechanism from pre-1958
fridges before putting them into place.

Since such old fridges are becoming less and less
common, the most likely safety issue you'll come across with your
own project is chemicals.  Before the 1990s, freon was used to
keep refrigerators cold.  Freon isn't toxic to people, but it
does help rip holes in the ozone layer if it escapes from your
fridge, so refrigerator manufacturers changed over to a less-toxic
suite of chemicals in the 1990s.

If your refrigerator was built during the freon
era, you'll need to make a judgment call about whether any freon is
left in the copper lines behind your fridge and in the
condenser.  Technically, the EPA doesn't allow you to cut these
lines even if you're sure all of the freon has already leaked out
(which is often the case if your fridge is still running but is not
keeping cool).  If you're able to remove the cooling coils
without puncturing them or disengaging them from the condenser, this
is your best option—dispose of the freon-filled coils during one of
the hazardous waste days most municipalities host a few times per
year.  On the other hand, you may decide that you're less
likely to release the refrigerants by leaving the coils in place and
sequestering any escaped gases in the soil while the fridge is being
buried.

Those two safety issues aside, building and using
a fridge root cellar is simple and fun.  Read on to plan and
build your own!

Fridge root cellar

How to make a refrigerator root cellar

Planning the orientation

The second-generation fridge
root cellar.

My husband wasn't the one who initially came up
with the idea of turning an old fridge into a root cellar—we'd read
about refrigerator root cellars in several places before embarking
on our own adventure.  However, none of the authors in question
seemed to have experimented with the conversion themselves, and we
soon learned there was a lot more to turning a refrigerator into a
root cellar than simply digging a big hole and throwing the junked
fridge in.

A vertical orientation makes it
much easier to access the contents of your fridge, but you'll
need to be sure there's plenty of room for the door to swing
open.

Our first decision was orientation of the
refrigerator.  Most diagrams show a refrigerator buried on its
back, in essence turning it into a structure like a chest
freezer.  While that method does require less engineering,
we've learned that hard-to-access parts of our homestead don't see
much use.  Kneeling down on the cold, sodden ground to wrestle
a refrigerator door upright sounded like a recipe for ignoring those
storage vegetables until spring, so Mark opted to install the fridge
upright into the side of a hill.

Digging the hole

Mark dug into the side of a hill
to provide a spot for the fridge.

This is the part of the project where you
might  need to get creative depending on the lay of your
land.  The optimal location is in the side of a north-facing
hill that will shade the fridge from the sun and will allow you to
bury the entire structure with the least amount of digging.
Even a south-facing hillside would work, though, especially if you
plant a pine tree or other evergreen in front of the root cellar for
year-round shade.

If your homestead is entirely flat, you're in for
more digging (and will need to make sure you don't chose a location
with high groundwater).  You can dig a hole as deep as the
fridge is tall, widening the excavation enough to create steps for
access and room for the fridge door to swing open.
Alternatively, you can dig perhaps half that depth, using the soil
to mound up around a partially buried fridge.  The latter won't
keep the internal temperature quite as constant, but will be much
less work.

Ventilation holes under the
fridge provide extra air-flow.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, air flow
is extremely important to keep vegetables from rotting in the root
cellar.  Mark used post-hole diggers to create two holes in the
bottom of the excavated pit.  Then he placed a couple of cement
blocks (on which the fridge will rest) on either side of the holes,
creating a larger air cavity underneath the refrigerator's bottom.

Dismantling the fridge

Our junked fridge, ready to be
disassembled.

For best results, you'll want to spend a bit of
time disassembling and ventilating your fridge before putting it
into the ground.  Any fridge will do—we used one that had died
and been replaced, but if you don't have a failed fridge on hand, a
trip to the dump might be in order.

Dismantling the cooling system
of your fridge will give you parts for other projects.

It's not essential to take out the motor and
cooling system from your fridge, but this extra step will make the
fridge lighter and easier to handle and will also provide parts for
other projects.  The dismantling step doesn't take long with a
few screwdrivers or with a hand-held drill.

The bare back of the fridge.

The photo above shows what the back of your
fridge should look like when you're done.

Ventilating the fridge

Holes in the bottom of the
fridge allow air to come up from underground.

Your next step is to create a flow of air from
the cavity under the fridge, up past your vegetables, and out the
top.  Start by drilling lots of holes in the bottom of the
fridge.  The exact drill size doesn't matter, but larger is
better than smaller.

Screening the holes prevents
critters from eating your vegetables.

You're creating a food-filled larder that never
freezes, perfect for mice, voles, and insects to move into.  To
prevent critters from eating your winter food, screen the holes on
the bottom (and any other holes you find or create in the fridge)
with old window screens or with rolls of screening you can buy at
any hardware store.  Mark screwed our screen in place, but
liquid nails would also do the trick.

A metal rack divides the freezer
and fridge compartments without restricting air flow.

If your fridge has a solid divider between the
fridge and freezer compartments, that needs to go.  You'll
probably be able to put one of the fridge's metal shelves into this
spot to make storage easier without restricting air flow.
Similarly, the crisper drawer should come out, as should any solid
divider above it.

Be sure to provide a capped
ventilation pipe.

A ventilation pipe coming out the top of the
fridge will complete the air cycle.  You can use whatever kind
of pipe you have on hand; just draw around the pipe to mark the part
of your fridge roof to remove.  A large drill bit will create a
hole large enough to insert a jigsaw, and the saw can then be used
to cut out the circle.  With corrugated drainage pipe like the
one we used, you don't even need to secure the pipe—just insert it
far enough into the hole so the larger ribs hold the pipe in place.

Once you've installed your ventilation pipe, be
sure to perforate the top with many small holes and cover them with
screen, then cap the whole thing with some kind of waterproof lid so
water doesn't flow in.  A little water running down your
ventilation pipe is no problem, but you don't want gallons to leak
inside during every rain.

Burying the fridge

Our 2009 experiment didn't take
the weight of the earth into consideration.  Don't repeat
this design!

This is the step where we failed the first time
around, so you get to learn from our mistakes.  The photos
above show the initial design, with wooden wings bolted onto the
fridge to hold back loose earth, and with the fridge sitting as
level as it would in a house.  What we didn't realize in 2009
is that all of the loose earth behind the wings would slump during
heavy rains and push the whole fridge over.

What happens if you don't take
the power of the earth seriously.

It's extremely disappointing to have your fridge
root cellar collapse a month after construction.  What was even
worse was trying to pry the waterlogged fridge back upright three
years later once it had completely filled with water.

Extracting the slumped fridge
was hard work.

We decided to be extremely careful the second
time around to prevent the problem from reoccurring, so we doubled
the price of our root cellar to about $20 with the purchase of
mobile home anchors.  We also opted to lean the root cellar
backwards a bit and to leave off the wings in further efforts to
prevent another collapse.  Without the wings, we weren't able
to mound earth up over the entirety of the sides, but losing a bit
of the insulative power of the dirt was worth it for a fridge that
wouldn't fall over.

Mobile home anchors (on the
left) might be overkill.  If so, the smaller and cheaper
anchor on the right (often available as a dog tie-down in big
box stores) might suffice.

In addition to the anchors,
you'll need some heavy wire, a turnbuckle, and a U-bolt.

For best anchorage, you'll want to drive the
anchors into undisturbed soil and to attach them to the side (rather
than the back) walls of the fridge.  As an engineer friend
explained, "Refrigerator walls are often sandwich constructions of
plastic or metal sheets with polyurethane or polystyrene foam in
between.  These sandwiches, as a rule, do not like out-of-plane
loads.  It's better to put the load in plane with the side
walls."

Despite heavy rains, our fridge root cellar
hasn't moved an inch since we changed the orientation and added
anchors.  If you skimp on some of these anchoring steps and
your root cellar still holds up, I hope you'll email
anna@kitenet.net and let us know so we can prevent later
experimenters from going to excess trouble.

Maintaining temperature

Before mounding extra dirt
around the root cellar, temperatures rose to 54 inside during a
warm week.  Low humidity wasn't a problem.

You may recall that optimal root cellar
temperatures range from just above freezing up to 40 degrees
Fahrenheit.  In the midst of the fall harvest frenzy, we
initially mounded dirt only lightly around the sides of the fridge
and didn't cover the top, with the result that warm days brought
inside temperatures up to the low 50s.

The more earth you can pile on
your fridge, the better.

Another round of earth-moving (plus some winter
rye sown on top to hold the loose earth in place) did a much better
job.  By this time, we were seeing outside highs around 70 and
lows in the low 20s and noticed that the ground was freezing solid
for days on end in areas shaded by our north-facing hill.
Inside the fridge root cellar, temperatures ranged from 34 to 36.

If you've got extra space, jugs
of water can provide thermal mass to keep the contents of the
fridge from changing temperature quickly.  The jugs can
also double as emergency drinking water if you follow the tips
in Weekend Homesteader: November.

It's possible our fridge would have stayed
unfrozen with no additional manipulations, but 34 felt too close for
comfort, so we worked a little harder to ensure our harvest would be
edible all winter.  First, I added jugs of drinking water in
the freezer compartment as thermal mass.  Since water requires
a lot of energy to change temperature, the jugs mitigated any rapid
warming and cooling trends inside the fridge root cellar.

To install a light bulb in your
fridge, drill a hole in the side wall, run a cord through the
hole, and wire a plug into the end.  For best results, seal
around the cord with silicone so insects and water can't creep
in.

Next, Mark added a light bulb attached to a
thermocube.  The thermocube is an inexpensive electronic device
that turns on whatever's plugged into it at 35 degrees Fahrenheit
and turns that load off at 45 degrees.  We installed a
kill-a-watt meter behind the thermocube so I could keep track of how
often the light bulb went on, and I discovered that the temperature
in the root cellar dropped below 35 degrees for about half an hour
per night when the outside temperature was in the low-to-mid
teens.  At higher temperatures, the fridge root cellar operated
perfectly with no electrical heat source.

A small space heater turned out
to be more energy-efficient than a light bulb.

The light setup is sub-optimal since storage
vegetables keep best in darkness and since the whole point of a root
cellar is storage without using electricity.  Even though our
root vegetables seemed able to handle the light for an hour or two
per winter (eating up less than 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity),
Mark is still working on a better solution.  In late winter, he
plugged a small space heater into the thermocube in place of the
light bulb, and sure enough, the space heater seemed like an even
more efficient use of electricity.  While the bulb would kick
on for half an hour on the coldest nights, the space heater must
have only operated for seconds or minutes based on the recorded
energy usage.

What do you do if the power goes out and record
lows are forecast?  Luckily for you, we dealt with exactly that
scenario during the fridge root cellar's test winter.  The
obvious solution was to bring the contents of the root cellar into
the kitchen and cover them with damp towels for a couple of days
until the cold spell passed us by.

We haven't had to put any effort at all into
manipulating the humidity—it stayed around 99% from the
beginning.  As a result, I've been thrilled to find that
carrots in the refrigerator root cellar maintain their crisp
freshness for months, much better than they do in the crisper drawer
of our indoors fridge.  In fact, as I finished the first draft
of this book in late April, those carrots were still quite edible
(although starting to grow roots and small leaves).  The fridge
root cellar definitely did its job.

Next steps

Our fridge root cellar is a work in a progress,
and I'll be sure to revise this book with updates when I have more
data.  (Amazon will send you an alert at that time and you'll
be able to read the revised version of this book for free.)  So
far, winter conditions within the root cellar seem to have been
near-perfect, although summer temperatures were higher than I'd
like, ranging from 69 to 83 degrees.  However, since there
aren't many root crops that require summer storage, high summer
temperatures may not be a problem on our homestead.

Meanwhile, we have other experiments on the
horizon.  We'd like to compare a chest freezer buried
coffin-style to the refrigerator root cellar—how much more painful
will it be to kneel on the ground and reach down to retrieve the
contents, will the air flow patterns be as good, and will the
temperature inside be much more constant?  We may build some
earthworks (not attached to the fridge) to allow us to mound up more
dirt on the sides of the existing fridge root cellar, and those of
you living further north might consider stacking bales of straw
against the exposed door for extra insulation.

So far, though, we're very content with the
fridge root cellar as-is.  It was cheap and easy to build and
the carrots and cabbages we ate out of it were crisp, sweet treats
on cold December (and January, February, March, and April)
days.  If you're not convinced, don't despair—the next chapter
suggests other root storage options that have definitely stood the
test of time.

Other storage options

History of root cellars

In Root
Cellars in America: Their History, Design and Construction
1609-1920, James Gage makes the argument that root cellars
were a British permutation of a traditional Native American
design.  Although some reports suggest that ancient Australians
buried yams in pits in the ground and that Etruscans stored wine in
the soil, large-scale food storage in the earth doesn't appear to
have been common outside the Americas.  In Great Britain, for
example, a mild climate made it possible for grains and dairy
products to be kept in lofts, and root crops were often simply left
in the fields and harvested as needed over the winter.  When
colonists reached what would become the United States, though, these
traditional techniques turned out to be problematic—our climate was
too hot in the summer for loft storage and too cold in the winter
for field storage.

Re-creation of a corn storage
pit at Sunwatch Indian Village in Dayton, Ohio.

Luckily for us, Native Americans had already
figured out a solution to the storage problem.  The Sunwatch
Indian Village historical site shows how villagers stored their corn
for the winter around 1200 AD in large, grass-lined storage
pits.  Each family of six-to-eight people had their own pit,
which would hold 500 or more pounds of corn.

While we're on the topic
of Native American storage techniques, it's worth noting that
the corn crib was probably their invention as well.  These
raised, ventilated storage buildings were found on most American
family farms until recently since they stored the year's corn
crop in a dry spot, out of the reach of critters.  Lining
the inside with hardware cloth in modern times does an even
better job of keeping rodents and raccoons at bay.  The
crib-within-a-crib design shown above solved the raccoon problem
for our neighbor.

European settlers soon took to pit storage,
sometimes digging simple pits like the Native Americans had under
the floors of their homes.  At other times, pits became large
cellars, or even separate buildings like many root cellars are
today.  By 1767, the term "root cellar" had gained enough
momentum that it saw its first instance in print (in an ad for the
sale of a New York farm), and the idea had also traveled back across
the Atlantic to help Europeans preserve their food better at home.

Very low-tech storage options

Carrots overwintering in the
ground in our garden were barely edible by spring.  Other
climates may have more success with this method.

As the history in the precious section suggests,
the lowest-tech methods of root storage have variable success
depending on your climate.  Most haven't worked well for us
here in zone 6, but I've heard good reports from other parts of the
country, so I'll detail some of the more interesting options below.

One technique is to keep vegetables that can
handle a light freeze (like cabbages and carrots) right in the
garden just as the British colonists did at home before reaching the
Americas.  The year we left carrots in the ground (mulched
heavily) for the winter, our natural freeze-thaw cycle pushed many
out of the soil, where they froze and rotted.  The carrots that
survived until spring turned woody with lots of fibrous roots and
were barely edible (although this was largely due to waiting too
long to harvest the roots—overwintering carrots should be dug before
the first top growth begins in the spring).  You may have
better luck with this technique if you live far enough south that
the ground never freezes solid, or far enough north that the ground
freezes once and stays frozen, and if you don't have a lot of voles
living under your mulch.

A clamp is a traditional way of
storing potatoes in the southern United States.

Another method we tried with little success was a
potato clamp.  Straw, mounded earth, and a ventilation pipe
combine to produce a mini-root cellar, but we live a little too far
north for a clamp to provide sufficient frost-protection for
potatoes.  If I were going to try another clamp, I might fill
it with carrots (which can handle a light freeze) and would tweak
the design so the base was sunken a few inches into the ground and
the pipe came out the side rather than the top.  I might also
consider making several small clamps so I would only need to disturb
each one a single time, although, in The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It, John
Seymour recommends building extra-large clamps so that the roots on
the outside protect the interior.  Either way, I wouldn't
recommend building a clamp in zones colder than 6, although those of
you living in zone 7 or warmer might give it a shot.

I haven't had personal experience with simply
burying vegetables directly into the ground, but my father reports
this was a common technique in the 1950s where the Appalachians run
into the Midwest in West Virginia and Ohio.  He recalls a
neighbor burying cabbages in a trench, head down and roots left
above the soil as a locational marker, while another neighbor buried
celery for the winter in a similar manner.  Even containers of
ice were often stored in pits in the ground to be used as summer
refrigerants.

Aimee Leforte stores her carrots
in containers of damp sand in the bottom of her closet.

The sand keeps the carrots crisp
from October through April.

If you have a cool closet, you can follow the
lead of Aimee Leforte, who uses plastic storage bins and sand to
emulate root cellar conditions.  She wrote:

"Even though my
house was built in 1918, there is no formal root cellar or even
the remnants of one.  Instead I have experimented, with
fantastic results, using a downstairs closet and totes of
sand.

"This particular closet has two walls that are
also outer walls, and two walls that are inner walls.  I have
found in the late fall and winter that this closet is fairly cold,
but definitely above freezing.  If I had to guess I would say
its in the 40-45 degree range; I haven't actually measured
it.

"With carrots, parsnips, and turnips, I have
taken each and topped them.  Then I will take a tote and
layer the bottom with slightly-dampened sand.  Layer in a
layer of veggies so that they are not touching.  Add sand to
build up a layer, mist lightly with water, then add veggies
again.  I do this several times until the tote is
3/4-of-the-way full.  I add the lid and store in the bottom
of the closet.

"Every once in awhile, I'll check to see how
they are doing.  I've never had any go bad until at least
late March, and have had farmer's market carrots from October
clear until mid April.

"I think that this method, and a little
experimentation, would work well for anyone who has a crawlspace,
closet, or attached garage.  Very simple to do.  And I
already had both the sand and totes, so for me it was free.
But to buy these items you may have less that $15 to 20 dollars to
set up one fair-size tote."

Similarly, Carol Deppe (author of The Resilient Gardener and a
major potato-eater) reports good results with storing potatoes in
paper bags in her garage.  She lives in the Pacific Northwest
where winters are wet and cool, which keeps her garage at about 45
to 55 degrees Fahrenheit with 90% to 98% humidity.  Deppe
simply fills paper grocery bags with about ten to fifteen pounds of
potatoes apiece and rolls the top closed, which keeps the tubers
fresh until spring.

The trick with making any of these simple root
storage methods work for you is to understand your own
conditions.  Do you have a location in your house that stays
damp and cool but above freezing?  How about in the
garden?  The trade-off is usually less time and money invested
in building your root storage location, compared to more time spent
monitoring and tweaking the conditions so your crops don't spoil.

Spring houses

This photo of the spring house
at The Hermitage in Tennessee was taken by mikebfotos and is
used under a Creative Commons License.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebfotos/5536814846/.

Sometimes known as a "dairy," spring houses were
common in parts of the U.S. where water naturally wells up out of
the earth.  Small houses are built on top of the springs, with
concrete or rock channels diverting the water to the outdoors.
The combination of the high-thermal-mass rock and the earth-cooled
water keeps foods placed near or in the spring cool.

Food can be lowered into a
hand-dug well for cool storage.

Although you could probably store root crops in a
spring houses, these structures were more often used to keep milk or
meat cool in the summer rather than to keep vegetables from freezing
in the winter.  If you're not lucky enough to have a nearby
spring but do have a hand-dug well, you can also lower containers of
perishables down into a well to get the same effect, but be sure the
contents won't spill and sully your water.

Root cellars

The whole shebang

If you don't have a spring or well handy, and
clamps and refrigerator root cellars aren't working for you, it
might be worth building a more serious root cellar.  If so, I
highly recommend hunting down some other resources to design your
structure.  The case studies below are included to give you an
idea of the investment (and reward) to expect from creating certain
types of root cellars, rather than as blueprints and building
guides.

Cave root cellar

Frank primarily uses his root
cellar to store homegrown potatoes.

Our neighbor, Frank Hoyt Taylor, took advantage
of the backhoe rented by a friend for grading a house site to dig a
root cellar into his north-facing hillside.  When the
excavation was completed, it became clear that Frank had opened a
hole into a cave, so he decided to gain some extra geothermal
cooling by running pipes from the back of his root cellar into the
cave.

Frank's root cellar is built
into a north-facing hillside.

Frank started with a sixteen-inch-wide and
eight-inch-deep, reinforced-concrete footer, then added eight-inch
block mortared together without any reinforcement.  The root
cellar was initially built a couple of feet in from the earth bank,
then after the concrete had cured for a month, dirt was pushed up
against the walls.  The finished structure has inside
dimensions of ten feet by nine feet by eight feet tall (at the
highest point).

The ceiling consists of
between-three-and-four inches of concrete reinforced with rebar
and remesh.

Before pouring the concrete,
Frank built a plywood form, then laid down a couple of leaves on
top to create imprints in the finished ceiling.

The ceiling consists of reinforced concrete
poured onto a plywood frame.  Like the walls, the ceiling also
had earth pushed over top after curing.

Two railroad ties running
perpendicular to the rest hold the bank supports in place.
A rebar pierces and connects each perpendicular tie with the one
above and below it.

To allow partial coverage of the front wall with
earth, Frank built a retaining wall out of railroad ties.  He
placed two ties perpendicular to the rest and pinned them in place
with rebar in order to counteract the force of the earth and ensure
the wall won't fall in over time.

This homemade door is made from
plywood sandwiching a 2.25-inch-thick piece of foamboard
insulation.

Most of the front wall isn't
insulated by soil, so Frank added a layer of foam insulation on
the inside.

To keep the temperature inside the root cellar
constant, Frank built an insulated wooden door, then added foamboard
insulation to the inside of the front wall.  Although summer
temperatures may rise and winter temperatures lower, the cave root
cellar stays steady for most of the year between 50 and 55
degrees.  Ice does occasionally form on the inside of the
exposed front wall.

The cool-air intake pipes are
channeled in two different directions—two tap into a cave while
two go directly to the outside.

The real beauty of Frank's root cellar is the way
he has created a very low-budget geothermal system by tapping into a
naturally-occurring cave.  The cool-air intake involves four
drainage-tile pipes, two of which go directly to the outside and two
of which dip into the cave.  Unfortunately, the outside-air
pipes were crushed when the backhoe pushed soil up against the back
of the root cellar, so Frank feels the root cellar could benefit
from more ventilation.  He is considering adding vents at the
bottom of the wooden door, but is happy with the outlet vent at the
top of the cellar.

Frank built the root cellar with the help of his
friend Jim around 2003.  The pair didn't keep track of their
labor (which was extensive) and didn't have to pay for the backhoe
since it was already on-site.  Those caveats aside, they
estimate they built their cave root cellar for about $200.

With so many potatoes on hand,
Frank doesn't mind losing a few to the mice.

The root cellar is over-sized for its current
task of storing homegrown potatoes, but it is clearly doing a good
job since the potatoes were still in good shape when I came to take
photos in early March 2013.  The shelving along one side of the
root cellar can currently hold up to 14 bushels of potatoes, and
Frank has considered building an air-tight partition down the middle
of the cellar to allow him to store apples on the other side.
He grows far more potatoes than he can eat, so doesn't mind losing a
few to mice.

Frank enjoys the way cave salamanders share space
with homegrown potatoes, and he notes that the structure could
double as a tornado shelter if necessary.  When the
backhoe-driver came to check up on the cellar a few months after
construction, he opined "That root cellar is worth a fortune," and
Frank agrees.

Basement root cellar

Canned goods share space with
root crops in this basement cellar.

My father's most recent root cellar was
constructed as a basement to a new room he added to his South
Carolina home a few years ago.  The 14-by-12-foot cellar added
about $3,000 to the cost of the structure, a figure which includes
both materials and labor.  The walls are block, the floor is
poured cement, and stairs lead up to the dwelling above.

Root cellars in the basement of a building have
both pros and cons.  On the positive side, it's very easy to
walk down into the basement to grab a handful of carrots, which
makes the structure see more use than standalone cellars sometimes
do.  In addition, you don't have to install a separate roof on
the in-house cellar, which cuts costs.

However, basement cellars often have sub-optimal
temperature and moisture conditions.  Most builders don't want
the upstairs to be damp, so they seal moisture out of the cellar,
leading to conditions a bit too dry for the best long-term root
storage.  In addition, heated air from upstairs may drift down
to warm your roots.

My father kept track of his root cellar
conditions for the first year and notes that average temperatures
were around 40 degrees in the winter, although interior lows did
sometimes drop to 35.  Extremely-hot South-Carolina summers
have raised basement temperatures into the low 70s on the middle
shelf, although it's always a bit cooler near the ground and warmer
near the ceiling.

It was impossible to build a root cellar into a
hill in his South Carolina location, but my father fondly recalls a
former root cellar built in that manner.  The walls were built
from cinder blocks, the door was insulated steel, and the roof was a
six-inch concrete slab that doubled as a patio.  The contents
were moist but not wet, and although he never recorded the
temperature, carrots, potatoes and canned goods never spoiled in his
in-hill larder.  Perhaps his words are only a rose-tinted view
of the past, but my father termed that older structure "the perfect
root cellar."

Basement cut-off

Emily's original basement
included an eight-foot-by-eight-foot area that she decided would
make a good root cellar.

If you already have a basement, you may be able
to convert a small section over to root-cellar conditions at a
minimal cost.  Emily Springfield spent $220 creating a root
cellar in her Michigan (zone 5b) basement.  By opening and
closing the window to the outdoors, she could keep potatoes and
other root vegetables in good shape all winter long.

Separating the root cellar area
from the rest of the basement required Emily to build one large
wall and one small wall.

"The basement had an area eight feet wide with a
casement window in the foundation," Emily wrote.  "Then there
was a four-foot-tall wall separating the full basement from the
crawl space.  So I built a wall across the eight-foot space
(this had the door in it), and filled in the space between the
half-wall and the rafters.  I added insulation, plywood
paneling, light and shelves, and that was pretty much it."

Fiberglass insulation in the
ceiling prevented house warmth from seeping down into the root
cellar.

Emily used pieces of rigid-foam
insulation to block off the area between the ceiling joists "so
air won't flow in sideways through the batts.  This also
looks a lot neater."

Emily was able to buy most of her construction
materials used, keeping project costs to a minimum.  The table
below shows where her money went:

Materials

Cost

Door and hardware (used)

$45

3 sheets of 3/4-inch, rigid
insulation

$50

2 rolls of fiberglass
insulation

$15

2 sheets of 1/4" plywood

$30

Low-temperature fluorescent
light.  (The original light wouldn't turn on when
temperatures dropped below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.)

$15

Lumber for shelves

$35

1 gallon Killz paint

$15

Tape, "button" nails, Liquid
Nails, etc.  (Nails with plastic washers were used to
hold up the rigid-foam insulation.)

$15

Total

$220

The majority of the foam
insulation was used to insulate the walls.

This paneling was later taken
down to prevent the growth of mold.

After filling the area between the wall studs
with foam insulation, Emily covered the outside with used paneling
and the inside with plywood.  "But I had to take the paneling
off the outside of the cellar before I even put food in it," Emily
explained.  "This was pressed-wood-fiber-type paneling, got
cheap at the re-use center.  It was pretty, but even though I
took great pains to keep it from touching the floor or walls, it
started absorbing moisture and got very moldy very fast.  I
pulled it off and didn't replace it with anything, so the outside
wall of the cellar is bare studs and you can see through to the
rigid-foam insulation.  While my aesthetic side is sad, it
doesn't change the functionality at all, and I really want to avoid
starting a mold farm in the basement."

As you can see in the previous photo, water
sometimes trickles across the cellar floor during heavy spring
rains, which isn't a problem since root cellars are meant to be damp
environments.  In a continued effort to prevent mold from
forming, Emily painted the walls with Killz paint and made sure that
no insulation or paneling touched the outside walls or floor.

The original ventilation system
involved making an insulated door to replace the glass window...

...and installing pipes for air
to move through.

Emily's original goal was to ventilate the
root-cellar area with two drainage-tile pipes going through the hole
where the window used to be.  First, she blocked off the
majority of the window with a homemade door made out of foam
insulation sandwiched between two pieces of plywood, glued together
with Liquid Nails, then sealed with exterior paint.  Next, she
added two pipes—a short pipe stopping at ceiling height to let out
warm air and a long pipe extending down to the ground at the
opposite side of the room to let in cold air.  The pipes were
screened to prevent mice incursions, and Emily built caps to close
the pipes as needed.

However, she soon found that the pipes weren't
allowing cold air to flow in fast enough to keep the root cellar
chilled.  Emily's solution was to remove the pipes and simply
open and close the whole window as needed.  A thermometer in
the root cellar with a remote readout in the kitchen made it easy to
learn the way the root cellar responded to weather.

"Temp has been fluctuating between 45 and 55,"
she wrote in November 2011.  "I've just been opening the window
at night and closing it during the day if it's going to get over
50.  If I close the window, the temp tends to go back up to
55—makes sense, as the earth surrounding 3.5 of the planes of the
room is 55 degrees."

Later in the winter, she reported some
changes:  "[Opening and closing the window as needed] worked
really well until about mid-December.  Then I got to a point
where having the window open was too cold, but leaving it closed was
too warm.  (The cellar holds around 40 with no
ventilation.)   So I took the window out completely and
put the board back into the window.  (There's a screen to keep
critters out.)  This board is about 4 inches narrower than the
window frame (it had held the vent pipes in place) so it effectively
closes off 85% of the window but leaves it open a bit for some air
to get in and out.  I can leave it like that night and day
unless we have a series of lows near zero and highs below 15 degrees
Fahrenheit—then I need to put the window back in or it gets too cold
in the cellar.  It's a 5-minute chore to open the window, or to
swap the window and the ventilated board, so no big deal there."

Homemade shelves built from 2X4s
allowed for plenty of ventilation.  Emily propped them up
on bricks to keep their feet out of the water that sometimes
flows over the floor.

Successful storers included
potatoes, apples, and rutabagas.  Emily had moderate
success with beets and cabbages.

Emily's biggest trial with her in-basement root
cellar was humidity.  "I can't seem to get the humidity in the
room to stay above 50% now that winter has set in, even with bins of
damp sand on the floor, so instead I’m trying to keep the local
humidity around the produce high," she wrote.  She experimented
with storing produce between layers of newspapers, straw, damp cedar
shavings, damp peat moss, and damp sand.

The flower pots full of carrots and parsnips
layered with straw didn't last long.  "This will be compost
soon; my parsnips had all split and are starting to get moldy
already," she explained early in the winter.  Beets lasted
longer, but were sensitive to the lack of moisture and did best when
layered in damp cedar shavings.

On the other hand, Kennebec, Russet, and Pontiac
Red potatoes lasted a long time in all storage situations, seeming
to prefer being stored between layers of newspaper in a
basket.  Cameo apples kept well under the same conditions as
potatoes, with only a few on the edges going mealy by
February.  Rutabagas were more like beets (although a bit
hardier), preferring the damp cedar shavings.

Emily discovered that the biggest factor
determining how long her cabbage lasted wasn't storage method but
variety.  "I have three different varieties of cabbage, and
it's clear one is a better keeper than the others. The problem is,
it's hard to tell varieties at the market and the sellers often
don't know the variety.  So by buying from a couple different
places, and looking for the hardest, most dense heads, I even the
odds that something will be a long keeper."

In February 2011, Emily concluded "Overall, I am
very pleased with the root cellar I built last spring.  It's
keeping temperature well, not showing signs of mold or infestation,
and most of the produce is in very good shape."  She added that
the root cellar was really far too big for a family of two (a
3-by-8-foot structure would have been sufficient), but that "it was
actually easier to do it this way than to make it smaller."

Since that report, Emily and her husband have
moved away from their homemade root cellar.  She wrote: "I love
our new house (lots of passive solar features!) but I'm having a
hard time living without a root cellar now!  Anything stored in
the unfinished-basement utility room is sprouting or going bad (too
warm).  I'm having better luck with stuff hanging out in
cardboard boxes in the workroom (unheated detached garage), but I'm
afraid if we get a cold snap it'll all freeze.  So I may have
to rebuild this root cellar at the new place.  It'll be a
little more difficult because I'll need to make a hole to the
outside somehow, and that makes me nervous.  But a cold room is
so awesome to have, I may just have to figure that out!"

To read more about Emily's adventures, visit her
blog at http://eatclosetohome.wordpress.org/.

Under-floor root cellar

This simple root storage pit is
under the dining-room floor.

Flickr-user lieber_matthew photographed
this under-floor root cellar in the Gokyo Valley in Nepal.  He
explained: "This root cellar mainly stored potatoes, and it was
underneath the floor of a dining room of a small Inn (or 'Tea
House,' as they're known in Nepal).  When the chef needed more
potatoes, he would go to the dining room, ask some of the diners to
move their chairs, and open the root cellar to retrieve the
potatoes."

While no information was available on how or when
the pit root cellar was built, my guess is that a hole was cut in
the floor, the pit hollowed out, and a door added on top.
Obviously, adding this type of root cellar would only be possible if
your house was built without a concrete foundation, but potatoes in
the dining room definitely do sound handy.

Integrating roots into your homestead

Growing enough roots

So how do you grow all of the roots to fill up
your new root cellar?  When learning new skills, I believe in
starting small rather than trying to do it all at once.  If
you've never had a vegetable garden, I highly recommend planting a
small plot and expanding each year at a pace you're comfortable
with.  On the other hand, if you're already a gardener and are
ready for the challenge of growing all your own roots, this section
will help you plan your campaign.

Nutritional

information of common root-cellar vegetables.  (Please rotate to landscape mode to
more easily view this table.)

Significant vitamins and minerals

Percent of calories from protein

Calories per pound (raw)

Calories per square foot

Potential yield (pounds per square foot)*

Beets

vitamin C, iron, magnesium,
dietary fiber, folate, potassium, manganese

4

192

209

1.09

Cabbage

thiamine, calcium, iron,
magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin C,
vitamin K, vitamin B6, folate, manganese

2

112

62

0.55

Carrots

thiamine, niacin, vitamin B6,
folate, manganese, dietary fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C,
vitamin K, potassium

2

186

143

0.77

Parsnips

potassium, dietary fiber,
vitamin C, vitamin K, folate, manganese

3

336

?

?

Potatoes (white)

dietary fiber, vitamin B6,
potassium, vitamin C

10

352

194

0.55

Turnips

vitamin B6, folate, calcium,
potassium, copper, dietary fiber, vitamin C, manganese

2

128

29

0.23

*
Yield will depend on your growing techniques and on the
variety you plant.  I've used "good" yields from the
North Dakota Extension Service document Vegetable Maturity Dates,
Yields and Storage for cabbage, carrots, potatoes,
and turnips, the U.S. average from USDA's Crop Production 2011 Summary
for beets, and have left parsnips blank since little data on
this crop seems to be available.  Growers using
intensive backyard methods may see yields as much as twice
as high as the ones in the chart.  I average about 1
pound per square foot for carrots, for example.

The table above provides some nutritional and
yield information for common storage vegetables.  Based on the
information above and assuming a 2,000 calorie diet, you could
follow the techniques of poor Irish farmers from a couple of hundred
years ago and subsist on cabbages and potatoes, depending on a bit
less than a tenth of an acre of the latter to provide the majority
of your calories.  However, you'll notice that most roots are
very low in protein (and that the protein they contain isn't as
balanced as the protein you get from meat and dairy), so I recommend
considering your root crops a supplement to foods that provide more
protein.

A good way to determine the quantity of each type
of vegetable to plant is to keep track of how much your family
actually eats in a year.  For our two-person family on a
high-protein diet, we plant about 30 square feet of cabbage and 90
square feet of fall carrots for fresh winter vegetables, along with
90 square feet of potatoes for year-round carbs.  We're
definitely below-average potato-eaters since Americans consume about
140 pounds of potatoes per person per year, but we eat about five
times as many carrots as the average American, who only chomps
through 9.6 pounds.  I've resisted including the average
consumption of each type of root vegetable in the chart above
because you're likely to be abnormal in your own particular way as
well.

How to grow storage vegetables

Once you figure out how large of an area you want
to allot to root crops, the next step is to carve out a spot for
them in your garden.  The chart below sums up basic growing
information for the seven main vegetables likely to be stored over
the winter in a root cellar.

How

to grow root-cellar crops

Beets

Spacing: 3-4 inch spacing in rows 12-18 inches
apart

Planting date: 55 to 110 days before the first fall
frost

Harvest information: Greens are best harvested when
small and roots are tastiest when 1.5 to 2 inches in
diameter.  Leave one inch of leaves on the roots when
storing.  Harvest before or soon after your first
frost.

Notes: Soak seeds the night before planting to
improve germination rates.  Multiple seeds sprout from
each seed cluster, so you must thin.  Be sure to eat
the greens as well as storing the roots.

Cabbage

Spacing: 12-24 inches apart in rows 36-44 inches
apart

Planting date: 100 to 140 days before the first
fall frost.  (Transplants can be set out as much as a
month later.)

Harvest information: Harvest when heads are
firm.  Leaves on top of the head might begin to dry
up.  Cabbages should be harvested before or soon after
your first frost since they can't stand hard freezes.

Notes: Cabbage sets (small plants) are often
available at farm-supply stores in late summer, or you can
start your own inside.  If growing cabbage from seed,
choose varieties suited for storage since these will produce
denser heads.

Carrots

Spacing: 2-3 inch spacing in rows 12-18 inches
apart

Planting date: 90 to 120 days before the first fall
frost

Harvest information: Wait until after at least one
frost to harvest since cold weather sweetens carrots.
However, if you wait too long and experience a warm autumn,
carrots will split and may rot if left past their prime.

Notes: Seeds can be scattered on the soil surface,
but care must be taken to keep late-summer plantings moist
so seeds will sprout.  Seedlings grow slowly, so weed
carefully for at least the first month.  Varieties
designated for winter storage will be larger and will last
longer, but aren't as sweet as other carrots; we've found
the smaller, sweeter varieties still last for months and are
more to our taste.

Parsnips

Spacing: 2-4 inch spacing in rows 18-24 inches
apart

Planting date: 90 to 120 days before the first fall
frost

Harvest information: Dig roots when they are 1.5 to
2 inches in diameter and 8 to 12 inches long.  Wait to
dig until after at least one frost.

Notes: Germination is often mediocre, so you may
need to seed thickly and then thin.  Otherwise, growing
parsnips is much like growing carrots.

Potatoes (white)

Spacing: 9-12 inch spacing in rows 28-34 inches
apart

Planting date: Potatoes prefer cold weather, but
the tops (which emerge about two weeks after planting) can't
handle freezes below 28 degrees.  Unless your summers
are cool, you'll want to start your potatoes 20 to 50 days
before your spring frost-free date.  (Note that this is
the only root crop I don't recommend planting in the summer,
at least in our area.)

Harvest information: Wait until two weeks after
the tops have died back before harvesting.  You can
also grub out new potatoes much sooner, but these won't last
long and should be eaten right away.

Notes: Potatoes are grown from pieces of other
potatoes, cut into chunks containing at least one eye and
weighing at least 1.5 ounces.  These seed potatoes can
be given a jump on the season by spreading them out in a
warm place inside a week before planting.  After
planting, hill up dirt around the stems of young plants once
they're 6 to 8 inches tall, repeating throughout the season
to prompt the plants to produce more tubers.  Don't let
tubers sit on the surface uncovered or they'll become green,
producing a mildly poisonous substance.

Turnips

Spacing: 2-6 inch spacing in rows 12-30 inches
apart

Planting date: 60 to 90 days before the first fall
frost

Harvest information: Harvest at 2-3 inches in
diameter, before or soon after the first frost and before
the turnips become woody.  Leave half an inch of stem
on the turnip when storing.

Notes: Turnip tops are a tasty green, but choose
storage varieties with less-tasty tops if you want to eat
the roots all winter.  The related rutabaga requires an
extra month's growth, gets larger, and can handle colder
weather before harvest.

Notes:

Spacing information on this chart is for traditional, row
cultivation.  In a high-density planting with permanent
beds, you can use the between-plant spacing in all
directions and ignore the between-row spacing.

Not every day within the planting date range will be
appropriate for each variety.  For a more accurate
planting time for all crops except potatoes, decide on your
appropriate harvest time, count back the number of days
listed on your seed packet for the specific variety you're
planting, then subtract ten to twenty more days for
safety.  For example, this year we are growing Nectar
carrots, listed at 72 days to maturity.  Our average
first-frost date is October 10, so we want to harvest our
fall carrots around the middle or end of October.
Using a harvest date of October 20, I count back 72 days to
August 9, then another ten to twenty days to provide my
planting window of July 20 to 30.

In addition to the specific information above,
it's worth mentioning a few ways in which root crops differ from
other vegetables.  When I plan my garden rotation, I always
save our deepest, lightest, least-waterlogged soil for root
crops.  If your plot is a well-drained loam or sandy soil, you
won't have to worry about this, but those of you gardening in clay
will want to follow suit.  If you don't have any light soil on
hand, raised beds are one good method of keeping root crops out of
wet, compacted ground.

Over-mature

carrots will split down the middle, especially after heavy
rains.  You may also opt to harvest early if small mammals
begin eating your roots while they're still in the ground.

Another factor to consider with root crops is
planning ahead for storage.  Most root crops keep best over the
winter if you plant them as late as possible (while still allowing
enough time for the crops to mature before excessive cold weather
slows growth).  While we can direct-seed carrots starting in
March in my zone 6 climate, I don't plan to grow enough spring
carrots to last through the year, but instead make a second (larger)
planting in July for winter storage.  A neighbor uses a similar
technique to plant his white potatoes as late as May (rather than
the usual mid-March planting) for winter storage, although I've
found that summer heat produces low yields for late-planted potatoes
in my own garden.  Some trial and error on your part will help
you determine the perfect time to plant each root crop so that it
matures late enough to keep well through the winter.

The final factor to consider with root crops is
soil nutrients.  High nitrogen levels in the soil can make
potatoes watery and more prone to rotting in storage.
Similarly, lack of potassium in the soil can cause spoiling
problems.  On a homestead scale, it probably isn't worth
treating soil for your root crops differently from the rest of your
garden, but you might consider using less compost for potatoes or
otherwise tweaking your planting method if crops don't store as well
as you'd hoped.

Two common pests found in crops
grown for the root cellar—tiny flea beetles on potato leaves and
a plump cabbage worm on a cabbage leaf.

In my experience, if you get the soil right, most
root crops are relatively trouble-free.  The toughest part for
us is usually making sure summer-planted seeds germinate.
(Check out Weekend Homesteader:
July for tips on fall planting.)  Flea beetles nibble
on potato leaves, but seem to be merely a cosmetic problem in our
area, while blight can occasionally wipe out whole potato
plantings.  Cabbage worms often eat the leaves of our cabbages,
but are easy to hand-pick and are much less prevalent on fall than
on spring crops.  The rest of the root-cellaring crops seem
unaffected by pests and disease.

You'll need to pay particular attention to roots
again once it's time to harvest.  White potatoes are ready to
harvest when the tops die back and cabbages are ready when the heads
are dense and full; for the rest of the vegetables covered in this
book, just wait until the crops have reached a mature size.
Dig roots carefully and sort out any injured tubers since
accidentally-sliced carrots and potatoes won't last long in
storage.  And don't forget to handle root crops carefully
during harvest—although potatoes look as hard as rocks, tossing them
around will form bruises that will drastically reduce the longevity
of your stored crop.

Filling the root cellar

It's also worth putting a bit of extra effort
into storage technique within your root cellar if you want your food
to last as long as possible.  First, flip back to the chart at
the beginning of this book and make sure you're storing cool, moist
storers, not warm, dry storers.  Sweet potatoes, onions,
garlic, and other vegetables that like it dry are going to rot
quickly in a root cellar, so stick to carrots, turnips, and other
cool, moist storers.

Lightly hosing off roots before
storage removes the largest chunks of dirt without damaging the
skin.

Most root crops will store best unwashed, or at
most lightly hosed off rather than scrubbed.  Cut off leaves
but allow half an inch or so of stem to stay behind on crops like
carrots so that you don't injure the root.  For cabbages, just
peel off the biggest outer leaves and cut off the roots.

Unlike warm, dry storers (which often last
longest if properly cured), most cool, moist storers will do best if
taken straight from the ground to the cellar.  The exception is
white potatoes, which some sources recommend keeping at 50 to 60
degrees Fahrenheit and 95% humidity for two weeks before moving to
the colder temperatures of the root cellar.  If you're
harvesting white potatoes in early fall, your root cellar
temperatures will probably be slightly elevated, so you can just
toss your white potatoes in and let them cure inside.

Next, focus on air flow.  Wire or plastic
baskets (like the ones that often come out of junked freezers), mesh
bags (like the kind you'll buy oranges or onions in), and even
wooden crates with plenty of room between the slats are a good
choice because they allow their contents to breathe and let air move
upward through the storage container.

Stacking vegetables more than a few high is a
recipe for bruising, which leads to rotting.  To prevent this
problem in a fridge root cellar, put the wire shelves that came with
your fridge back in, or fill bins only partway full so the next bin
up doesn't rest on your fruits or vegetables.  In a larger root
cellar, you may want to build shelves for your crops.

Some root-cellar keepers like to pack their crops
in sand, sawdust, or newspapers to prevent bruising and to keep the
moisture levels high against crops' skins.  This technique
seems to have originated when root-storage pits were located under
the floor of the kitchen, in which case foul odors often wafted up
into the living space.  I've tried storing carrots both with
sawdust and without and had similar results inside my high-humidity
fridge root cellar, but your mileage may vary.  Flip back to
the "Basement cut-off" section for a comparison of storage in
newspapers, straw, damp cedar shavings, damp peat moss, and damp
sand in a less-humid, basement situation.

My final piece of advice is to try to check on
the contents of your root cellar at least twice a month.  If
you catch vegetables as they first begin to go bad, you can pull out
the few ruined roots and quickly cook up the rest.  It's also a
good idea to keep track of how much of each type of crop you put in
the cellar in the fall and when you ran out in the spring so you'll
know whether to grow more or less next year.

Eating roots

Now for the fun part—eating those delicious
roots!  The first option for eating up winter roots is to take
advantage of their freshness and consume them raw.  In our
household, sliced carrots or cabbage served with hummus makes a
great side dish, but you might prefer grating the vegetables, adding
a dressing, and turning them into coleslaw.

Green Bean and Potato Salad

2 c. potatoes (new potatoes or Yukon Gold
work best)

2 c. green beans

1/4 c. fresh basil

1/4 c. green onions

salt

pepper

2 tbsp. balsamic vinegar

2 tbsp. olive oil

2 tbsp. lemon juice

1 tbsp. sugar

1/4 tsp. dried mustard

1 clove garlic, minced

Cut potatoes into bite-sized pieces.  Boil in a small
amount of water for a few minutes while breaking the ends
off the beans, stringing them if necessary, and snapping
them into pieces.  Add the beans to the potatoes and
water (or place them in a steamer over top) and keep boiling
for a few more minutes until potatoes and beans are tender
but not mushy.  Drain off the water and put the
vegetables in the fridge to cool.

Chop the basil and onions and mince the garlic.  Mix
the herbs with salt, pepper, vinegar, oil, lemon juice,
sugar, and mustard.  Pour the dressing over the bean
and potato mixture.  You may choose to increase or
decrease the amount of dressing to taste—we recommend using
only enough to lightly coat the vegetables.

Serves 2-3.

Speaking of salads, potato salad is a classic
that's easy to tweak to suit the more advanced palate.  Rather
than mixing your boiled potatoes with mayonnaise, why not try out
the recipe above, which dresses up your roots using balsamic vinegar
and herbs?

Roast Roots

2 medium onions, diced

4 carrots, sliced into half-inch sections

4 potatoes, sliced into bite-sized cubes

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1/4 c. fresh parsley and/or 4 sprigs of
fresh thyme

oil, salt, and pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Chop the
vegetables, toss with oil, salt, and pepper, and place in a
roasting pan.  Bake, stirring occasionally, until roots
are soft, about 40 minutes.  For an even tastier dish,
bake the root mixture underneath a roasting chicken.
Other roots, like beets, turnips, and sweet potatoes, can be
used in place of some or all of the carrots and potatoes.

Serves 4.

Another very easy way to prepare roots of any
kind is the Roast Roots recipe above.  Or, if you want to keep
things simple, you can cut sweet and white potatoes into long
strips, coat them with oil, salt, pepper, and paprika, scatter them
a small distance apart on a cookie sheet, then bake at 400 degrees
Fahrenheit to make homemade, baked fries that are crispy on the
outside and soft on the inside.

Harvest-Bounty  Soup

1 quart homemade chicken stock

1 quart water

2 onions, diced

6 cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 head of cabbage, chopped

2 quarts of fresh tomatoes, chopped

1 large handful of fresh parsley, chopped

4 carrots, chopped

4 potatoes, chopped

1 quart of fresh green beans, broken into
pieces

4 ears of sweet corn, cut off the cob

salt and pepper

Prepare the soup base by simmering the stock, water, onions,
garlic, cabbage, tomatoes, and parsley for at least one
hour, until the tomatoes have lost their shape and the soup
is slightly thick.  Add more water, if necessary, then
put in the carrots and potatoes.  Cook for half an
hour, then add the green beans and cook for ten
minutes.  Turn off the heat and add the corn, stirring
well.  Salt and pepper to taste.

To turn this soup into a protein-rich meal, include
precooked beans (great northern are best) with the sweet
corn, or add raw beef chunks at the same time as carrots and
potatoes.

Serves 4-6.

Since you'll be eating up many of your roots over
the winter, they make a perfect addition to soups and stews.
Both chicken soups and tomato-based soups become heartier when you
add cubed potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and turnips about forty
minutes before serving.

Potatoes, especially, are so utilitarian that
whole cookbooks have been written about their preparation, so I've
just hit the highlights above.  Feel free to email
anna@kitenet.net with your favorite root recipes, and I'll consider
including them in later editions of this book.

Feeding roots to livestock

Mangels are a root vegetable
often raised for livestock but seldom eaten by humans.

Photo credit: Nita.

Winter was once a harsh time on European
farms.  Without enough grass to keep their livestock fed,
farmers dried off dairy animals and slaughtered all but the breeding
stock among meat breeds as soon as cold weather hit.

In The
Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It, John Seymour
reports that the popularization of turnips spurred a culinary
revolution during the Middle Ages because the roots provided enough
supplemental feed to carry cows, pigs, and other animals through the
cold months.  Soon farmers were adding fodder beets, rutabagas,
mangels, carrots, parsnips, and potatoes to their livestock gardens,
and meat and dairy became a larger part of the year-round diet.

Dairy cows require more
nutrition than they can consume on winter grass, so roots make a
good addition to their daily ration.  Photo credit: Nita.

More recently, roots as livestock food have
fallen out of favor.  Until the twentieth century, grains were
a staple earmarked for humans because of laborious processing, but
heavy machinery and chemical fertilizers now make it easy to grow
enough wheat, corn, and other grains to feed to livestock.
Roots provide fewer calories pound-per-pound than grain, so it's
cost-prohibitive for agribusinesses to transport carrots and beets
across the country to confinement animal operations.  Despite
human health problems that stem from eating grain-fed meat,
economics maintain the current status quo.

On the homestead scale, though, roots make just
as much sense for livestock food as they do for people food.
Most backyard growers lack equipment to thresh and winnow their
wheat, but a shovel is all you need to dig potatoes and
carrots.  For many of us, keeping our livestock healthy and our
farm ecosystem cyclical is a top priority, so we're willing to put a
little extra effort into growing parsnips and mangels.

Nita uses roots to replace most
of the grains in her dairy cow's winter diet.  Photo credit: Nita.

Nita is a modern expert on overwintering dairy
cows on roots.  She and her family grow most of their own food
on 180 acres in the Pacific Northwest, depending on rotational
grazing to feed their beef cows over the winter.  However, as
Nita notes, "A dairy cow is a horse of a different color nutrition-
and production-wise."  Dairy cows need supplemental nutrition
during the winter, and that supplement usually comes in the form of
grain.

Nita's beef cows subsist almost
entirely on grass year-round.  Photo credit: Nita.

"I only had to look back in history a little ways
to get away from grain," Nita explained.  "Roots.  Root
crops for fodder is a practice brought to the United States with
Northern European immigrants.  Cool climates not conducive to
growing grain are perfect for various root crops for fodder.  I
live in a climate like that.  Getting corn to ripen here is not
the easiest thing to do.  Root crops?  No problem.
Storing grain or green chop?  Ugghhh.  Storing
roots?  Easy.

A variety of roots (plus
blemished apples) makes its way to the dairy cow's trough.
Photo credit: Nita.

"We were looking for roots that would suit
multiple species, namely us, the family cow, and the laying
hens.  All of the root crops we chose would work well for
sheep, goats, and rabbits too.  The roots that we settled on
were carrots, beets, parsnips, and rutabagas.  We had grown
mangels (fodder beets) before, but found that they were large and
because a large portion of the root grows above ground, they did not
meet our criteria for easy storage.  The only references I have
seen concerning problems is for feeding beets and mangels to rams
and wethers.  Some believe mangels and sugar beets can cause
calculi in the kidneys and bladder."

Mangels require curing out of
the ground for a few weeks before feeding since they are mildly
poisonous when first harvested.  Photo credit: Nita.

Every farmer tends to develop favorite root crops
to match their specific growing conditions and their livestock's
needs.  In Feeding Poultry,
Gustave Heuser recommends giving 0.04 to 0.05 pounds of mangels,
carrots, turnips, rutabagas, or potatoes to each chicken per day as
a supplement to their regular diet.  John Seymour prefers
feeding rutabagas and fodder beets to his livestock, while Nita
usually provides her milk cow a mixture of carrots, parsnips, and
beets.  She grows Red-cored Chantenay carrots, Harris Model or
Andover parsnips, Lutz/Winterkeeper beets, Laurentian or Joan
rutabagas, and Golden Eckendorf or Colossal Long Red mangels for
animals and humans, along with Jerusalem artichokes, celeriac, and
daikon or salad turnips for the table.  "Brassicas are a no-no
during lactation unless you want cole-flavored milk," she warns.

Nita hoses her roots down on top
of a raised screen before sorting them into livestock or human
food.  Photo credit: Nita.

"In our zone 7 garden, we are able to hill soil
over our root crops and leave them in situ," Nita said.  "We
harvest weekly as needed from fall to spring.  After washing,
we sort, and any damaged or small roots go to the barn, and the rest
are stored in plastic buckets on our north-facing porch, where they
stay cool."  Her whole family enjoys the unblemished roots,
which are also used as dog treats.

Mixed roots as they come out of
the automatic chopper.  Photo credit: Nita.

Nita uses a mechanical chopper to cut up the five
pounds of mixed roots she provides for her dairy cow each winter
day.  She notes that the chopper processes the day's roots in
one minute, versus five minutes with a knife.  Alternative
methods for processing roots for livestock include cooking
(essential when feeding potatoes to non-ruminants like pigs and
chickens), grating, or feeding whole and raw.

Nita has to be careful or her
dogs will swipe carrots and other roots.  However, their
help in the garden is worth the trouble since the dogs catch
voles that enjoy eating her overwintering roots.  Photo
credit: Nita.

"While the roots won't replace all the grain for
your stock, they can play a bigger part of their winter diet, giving
variety and giving you more control in what you are feeding your
animals," Nita concluded.  "Growing and harvesting roots has
made us feel closer to our goal of self-reliance.  And we find
as we eat more of these types of in-season vegetables ourselves, we
rely less on labor- and energy-intensive food-preservation
methods.  While I'm not giving up my canning and freezing, I
find that I'm storing less food that way, and actually providing
more variety in our meals."

For more information, visit Nita's photo-rich
blog at www.matronofhusbandry.wordpress.com.

Beyond the potato

As you've probably realized by flipping through
this book, root cellars—and the roots we store inside them—are a
simple but effective way to increase a homestead's
self-sufficiency.  But even though I've focused on vegetables
that can be stored in root cellars, the structures come in handy for
a variety of other purposes too.

Fruit-tree producers store scionwood in their
root cellars between their midwinter cutting and the early-spring
grafting window.  After bench grafting, they also put the small
trees back into the root cellar for a few weeks to allow their
wounds to callous before planting each tree directly into the ground
outside.

Fruits, of course, can be stored in the root
cellar right alongside vegetables.  Apples and pears are the
most common root-cellared fruits, but you can also extend the life
of oranges, other citrus fruits, and clusters of grapes by keeping
them in your cellar.  Be aware that many fruits produce
ethylene, a gas that promotes ripening of other fruits and may
prompt nearby roots to sprout or spoil prematurely.

To some extent, a root cellar can even take the
place of a summer refrigerator, although interior temperatures may
be cool rather than cold during the warm months.  And if you
build a room-sized root cellar, it can serve as a storm shelter.

But don't get bogged down too much in planning an
extensive structure that could take years to come to fruition.
If you get started on something simple today, you can always expand
as your garden bounty grows!

Modern Simplicity

I hope you've enjoyed this installment in the Modern
Simplicity series!  If so, I'd be very grateful if you took a
moment to leave a review on Amazon—your reviews help others decide
whether to take a chance on my work.

Then, if you're looking for more ways to incorporate
appropriate technology into your life so you have time to pursue your
passions, the Modern Simplicity Five-Book Bundle should be next on your list.  Learn to create an online business homestead-style, dumpster-dive your
living accommodations, turn a junked fridge into a root cellar, build a
low-cost sunroom add-on, then enjoy the tale of how two homesteaders
fell in love with each other and with a farm.  Over 400 pages of
homesteading wisdom from three authors will jump-start your own journey
toward self-sufficiency.  The ebook comes alive with over 290 photos and
illustrations.  Save 36% when you buy the bundle!

About
the

author

Anna Hess lives with her husband Mark Hamilton
(plus two spoiled cats, a hard-working dog, and a varying number of
chickens) on 58 acres of swamp and wooded hillsides in the mountains
of southwest Virginia.  The duo spends most of their time
homesteading—Anna likes to putter around the garden while Mark uses
his inventive streak to build chicken coops and deer deterrents out
of a handful of screws and whatever is lying around in the
barn.  They make a living selling POOP-free chicken waterers
(www.AvianAquaMiser.com) and blogging about their adventures
(www.WaldenEffect.org).

In addition to the Modern Simplicity series,
which is a joint venture between Anna, Mark, and Anna's father, Anna has several other ebooks on Amazon.  Homegrown
Humus provides tips on incorporating cover crops into a
no-till garden, and the Permaculture

Chicken series is devoted to making backyard
chicken-keeping cheap, sustainable, less smelly, and more fun.

Anna's popular Weekend Homesteader series provides one fun and easy project for each week of the year to
guide beginners onto the path of self-sufficiency.  A
full-color paperback version of The

Weekend Homesteader was published by Skyhorse Publishing in
fall 2012, and each month can also be bought separately as a 99 cent
ebook.

Anna's most recent book is a work of fiction—Watermelon Summer
details another young woman's journey to an Appalachian farm.  Flip to
the end of this ebook to read the beginning of Watermelon Summer for free.

All of Anna's ebooks are available at
www.Amazon.com.  Visit
www.Wetknee.com to learn about future books, and to download a free copy of Best Books for Homesteaders when you sign up for our email list.

Watermelon Summer

Keep reading to enjoy an excerpt from Anna's new work of fiction, Watermelon Summer...

Chapter 1

If I'd known I was going to fall in love that day
for the first time in my life, I would have taken the attendant
trials and tribulations in stride. But I didn't know, so I spent far
too many minutes considering whether my parents would buy me a
ticket back home to Seattle if I called up and begged.  The
remainder of my stay in the West Virginia airport was devoted to figuring
out how to get to Kentucky, which meant trying to break through the
Appalachian language barrier.

You'd think that, since I mastered Spanish in
high school and picked up a smattering of French from Canadian
visitors, I would have had travel within the U.S. covered.  You
also would have been wrong.  Stopping by the information desk
at the airport felt like a Peanuts cartoon—you know, one
of those scenes where the teacher is talking and all you hear is "wa
wa wa, wa wa, wa wa."  The ancient attendant's excessive
head-shaking seemed ominous, though, so I decided to try my luck
elsewhere.

I didn't remember my new smartphone (and the
airport's free wireless) until the nice lady at McDonald's laughed at
me for suggesting bus or train service to the Pikeville area.
She, at least, seemed to speak English, albeit with a mountain
twang—perhaps the problem at the information desk had merely been the
old guy's lack of teeth?—and she was quite ready to give me
driving directions to Kentucky.  Until, that is, I mentioned my
lack of wheels.  Then the lady started to look concerned and to
call me "sugar," so I made up some excuse about having family who
could come and pick me up after all, then retreated to a waiting
area to figure out Plan B.

Now, before you take my parents to task for
stranding me in no-bus-service West Virginia, let me speak in their
defense.  Actually, I probably should back up about a week and
explain what a suburban girl like me was doing stranded in an
Appalachian airport.  It all started before I was born, when my
mother hopped in a VW bus with some friends and drove south from her
Massachusetts home to join a commune.

"It wasn't a commune," Mom said, correcting my
wording just like every other time I'd ask her about Greensun.
"And I wasn't a hippie."

"Sure you weren't, Mom," I'd either say or think,
depending on how nice I was feeling at the moment.

"It was an intentional community," Mom reiterated
a week before I ended up stranded in West Virginia.  The flier
that had restarted this conversation hit the trash can as Mom
continued her historical whitewashing.  "You can call it a
community land trust if you want, but not a commune."

I wasn't buying it, but I knew what Mom was
trying to say with her adamant denial of hippiedom—she hadn't
smoked pot (supposedly) and I'd darn well better not either.
That message was coming through loud and clear, so I decided to
humor my  mother on the semantics issue.  "Sure,
Mom.  You spent a solid year living in an intentional
community.  Got it."

I'd been begging to visit the Greensun community
since I could pronounce words of four syllables, but Mom never saw
any reason to fly across the country to grant my wish.  Never
mind that my biological father still lived there (I thought) and
that I've never met him.

(Oh, yeah—I'm a love child.  Still not a
hippie, Mom?)

"You think you want to go there now, but you
really don't," Mom replied.  (I decided to let it slide that my
mother seemed to think she knew my wishes better than I did, so I
stayed silent.)  "When I left, there were plastic doll heads on
all the fence posts.  Your father said they scared away
deer, but they mostly just scared away people.  Very
creepy."

"So, I'll wear my doll-fighting gear," I
said.  "No problem.  I'll even bring a wooden stake if
it'll make you feel better."

Mom smiled despite herself.  "Forsythia—"  (Naming your child after a flower—another sign of
being a hippie.  Just saying.)  "—Do you really want to
spend your Europe money visiting an abandoned commune?"

At this point, I couldn't hold my tongue any
longer, so I crowed: "Ha!  You admit it's a commune, which
means you're a hippie!"

Mom plowed right past that remark and continued
trying to talk me out of my plan.  But even though I yes'ed
and no'ed appropriately, I was already at Greensun in my mind.

A summer spent among aging hippies might not
sound like fun to most going-on-eighteen-year-olds, but the truth is
that this felt like a do-or-die situation.  Greensun had sent
out a call to all of its past members (thus the flier) asking for a
commitment of time and money if we wanted the community to
continue.  And as much as I had to agree with Mom that sleeping
in an old farmhouse with holes in the wall large enough to see
through wasn't so appealing, the alternative was that if the community
shut down, I'd never
know what I was missing.

And I might never meet my bio-dad.

Which is all a long way of explaining how I ended
up in southern West Virginia, which apparently had the closest
airport to Pikeville, Kentucky, which was relatively close to
Greensun.  (You know you're going to the boondocks when
specifying locations involves lots of "It's near"s rather than an
actual town's name.)  Mom had given me the phone number of a
neighbor who could come pick me up, and she'd even offered
to book a room at a nearby hotel so that one of the previous
Greensun inhabitants could drive me down when he or she arrived.
But
I wanted to get there early to see the place all by myself, and
I also wanted to travel on my own.  After all, if my
trip had turned out to be a tour of Europe instead of Appalachia,
I'd have been figuring out transportation as I went along, and I
didn't want to miss out on that experience.

On the other hand, now that I was in West
Virginia (aka the land of no public transportation), I was starting
to suspect that I really couldn't get there from here.  While
researching options for where to go on my post-high-school and
pre-college trip, I'd initially chosen Europe (before throwing that
voyage away for what was currently seeming like a very bad idea)
since its extensive rail system made it easy to get around for
those of us too young to rent a car.  Why couldn't Greensun be
located on an Amtrak line?

Chapter 2

The smartphone Mom had given me (along with
strict instructions to call her as soon as I got to Greensun)
provided the depressing information that there really were no
trains, buses, or even taxis running between Huntington and
Pikeville.  I was seriously considering throwing away my pride
and calling Mom's old neighbor when a voice disturbed my brown
study.

"Excuse me."  The words came from a guy
about my age, who didn't seem to understand that
person-you-don't-know-frantically-pushing-buttons-on-a-phone is
American for "Do not disturb."  The interrupter of my solitary
frustration was easy on the eyes, and if he'd been the kid next
door, I probably would have been thrilled to be spoken to.  But
since I was in an airport all by myself, I couldn't help thinking
that the guy was probably a rapist or a serial killer.  So I
merely frowned at him and went back to my agitated button-pushing.

But the stranger was undeterred by my lack of eye
contact.  "I couldn't help overhearing that you're having
trouble getting to Kentucky, and I think I have a solution," he told
me.

"Hmmm?" I replied noncommittally, unwilling to be
totally rude by ignoring him but hoping my tone would send him away.

"I'm Jacob," the stranger said, thrusting out a hand, which
I reflexively shook.  "And you're in luck because I'm the sole
owner and driver of the Mountaintop Taxi Company.  I just came
up here from Pikeville to drop someone off, and I'll give you a 50%
discount so I don't have to ride back empty."

(I know what you're thinking.  I start off
by telling you this is the day I fall in love, and now here's a cute
guy standing in front of me.  Not only is he no serial killer,
he's also the love of my life, so I should definitely accept the
ride.  Come on.  Could you be a bit less conventional and
pay more attention to the dangers of my situation?  And, for
the record, I didn't fall in love with Jacob...at least not that
day.)

On the other hand, dangers aside, my options
appeared to be severely limited.  "Hmmm," I repeated, trying to
decide whether accepting a ride from this guy was as bad as
hitchhiking, and whether I could walk ninety-odd miles before my
shoes wore out.

"Okay, I know it probably seems a bit dicey to
accept a ride from a stranger," Jacob said, unfazed by my
monosyllabic replies.  "But if it'll make you feel better, I
have character references.  Wanna call my mamaw?"

"Your what?" I was startled enough to
reply.  And before I could glue my eyes back onto my
smartphone screen and make another go-away hum, the stranger had
speed-dialed his mamaw (which seemed to be a sort of grandmother) and put her on speaker phone.

"Jacob?" a female voice answered.  "Did you
get your uncle to the airport on time?  Will you be home in
time for supper?"

Now it was Jacob's turn to look a bit chagrined,
which actually made me feel a lot better.  If he still lived at
home, he probably was as young as he looked, and no one my age could
be a serial killer, right?  "Um, Mamaw, I'm still up in
Huntington, so I'll probably be late...."

"Well, could you pick up some milk on your way
home?  Your brother drank it all, and we need some for
breakfast.  And maybe some bananas and eggs?"

Wow.  I didn't know it was possible for
someone's face to turn that shade of red without his air passage
being restricted enough to make him pass out.  "Mamaw," Jacob
tried to interrupt her as the grocery list continued.
"Grandmother!  Yes, I'll stop by the store, but there's a girl here who
wants a ride down to Pikeville, and she needs to know I run a real
taxi service."

"Well, now, I don't know if I'd call it a real taxi service," his grandmother
replied.  It occurred to me at this point that her accent
was thicker than Jacob's and the McDonald's lady's but that I was
understanding her just fine.  Progress, right?  "After
all, that's my minivan you're driving and I pay for your
insurance.  But you did buy the magnetic sign yourself, so that
makes it a bit official, I guess....  Be sure to invite her to
supper if she's from out of town!"

"Never mind, Mamaw.  I've gotta go," Jacob
replied, ending the call and turning away.  Having endured more
than my share of parental embarrassments, I figured he was going to
flee and pretend he'd never made his offer.  But somewhere in
the midst of the conversation just past, I'd made up my mind and
decided Jacob wasn't an ax murderer.

"Wait!" I called, gathering up my bags.
"I'll take you up on that ride, with just one caveat—I drive."

Okay, there were really two caveats, the second
of which was price.  You see, I wasn't exactly flush with cash,
and the longer I could make the contents of my wallet last, the
longer I could explore Greensun.  I'd saved up quite a chunk of
change working as a park ranger for the last two years (which sounds
much more glamorous than it really was—mostly I rented out
paddle boats and told people where to find the bathrooms).  But
the Greensun meeting came with a pretty hefty price tag attached.

"Uh uh," Dad had said over dinner the night I
first floated the idea of attending Greensun's (maybe) final
meeting.  "No way are you promising two grand to a cult in
Kentucky.  This has 'scam' written all over it."

Oh, did I not mention that I already have a
father?  I'm not one of those poor, fatherless girls with an
Electra complex or anything.  Mom married my step-dad soon
after she left the commune...ahem, community land trust...and he'd
always felt like a father to me.  I even titled my half-sibling
"brother"...except when he was being really annoying.  Wanting
to meet my bio-dad...I can't really explain it.  But the hole I
was trying to fill (if there was one) wasn't a paternal gap.

Surprisingly, Mom was the one to defend my crazy
notion.  (Her words, not mine.)  "Well, that's the one
thing I can promise you, honey—it's not a scam," she reassured
Dad.  "That's how we always dealt with money at Greensun.
We'd throw it in a pot and then decide what to do with it.
Unfortunately, it never seemed to extend much past buying beer and prayer
flags, but no one ever ran off with the kitty."

"So that means I can go?" I asked.  My
younger sibling, Johnny, calls this my "Daddy voice," meaning that I
use it when I'm trying to wheedle something out of the paternal
unit.  It really worked, too...until the darn kid pointed out
the technique in Dad's hearing.

"No," Mom said, at the same time Dad (to my
profound surprise, but maybe the Daddy voice still works after all?)
chimed in with his answer: "Yes."

My mother raised her eyebrows at my step-dad, who
shrugged.  "Hey, I was trying to follow your lead," he muttered
under his breath.

"Maybe," Mom said after a long pause.  "That
means a definite maybe."

I won't bore you with the details of how I
managed to wrap Mom and Dad around my little finger.  Okay, the
truth is I have no clue what decided it—they talked that night
and the next morning told me I could change my ticket from Heathrow
to Tri-State Airport.  (I'm making a concerted effort here not
to take it as a bad sign that it required three states to muster
enough population to merit an airport.)

Dad rolled his eyes when I wrote out a check to
Greensun—"What, they don't take credit cards?  You know,
then at least we'd be protected if this turns out to be a
scam.  Okay, okay...."  I already had a tent and all the
trappings from my plan to spend the summer before college camping in
every park I could find across the Pond, so I wouldn't have to sleep
in that drafty old farmhouse with who-knows-how-many-other people.
And, after $2,000 went into Greensun's kitty and I paid the
ticket-transfer fee, I had all of nineteen bucks left in my Europe
fund.  While taking me to the bank to withdraw that measly
amount of money, Dad slipped in an extra hundred—"Just in case
you have to take a cab or something."  And then Mom pressed $50
into my hand at the airport for the same reason, and I refrained
from calling her cheap.

But $169 only gets you so far, even if you're
doing Europe on $5 a day (which, by the way, would be $37 a day now
if you consider inflation).  Which is why the real clincher on
my "taxi" ride was Jacob backpedaling to the point where I only had
to pay for gas.  Done and done.

Chapter 3

A two-hour ride with a stranger gives you plenty of
time to ponder, and what I was thinking about was...mountain
men.  Mountain men (Mom's term) were one of the top-ten reasons
my mother had left Greensun and my bio-dad for the hip Seattle
suburbs and my computer-programmer step-dad.  She wasn't very
specific about whether my bio-dad was, indeed, a mountain man, but
Mom spent the better part of an hour right before my adventure began
regaling me with the pros and cons of the typical Appalachian
male.  Apparently, I had a genetic predisposition to be taken
in by them, and forewarned was forearmed.

At first glance, a mountain man looks
perfect...but then you scratch the surface and see the rough
interior (or so Mom told me).  Sure, a mountain man will likely
stop and change your tire with a smile if you end up with a flat by
the side of the road, but you'd better bring a male of your own
along to the mechanic if you want to get any details about a more serious
problem.  "Don't worry your pretty, little head about it" might
not be uttered, but the sentiment is no less true for being
unspoken.

While most of Greensun's compatriots drifted in
from far out of town, the mountain ways seemed to seep into their
previously-liberal brains.  I'd inherited a love of gardening
from my mother, and I couldn't quite understand how she could trade
in two-hundred acres of potential for a postage-stamp lawn...until
Mom explained that it was frowned upon for her to spend much time in
the garden at Greensun.  The vegetable plot was a communal
affair run by the men, who brought the produce into the kitchen for
the women to turn into bountiful meals (and then to do the dishes
afterwards).  Not that Mom didn't like to cook, but the
division of labor rubbed her the wrong way.

Which is a long way of explaining why I had
planned my trip so I'd arrive a solid month before anyone else was
likely to show up.  Mom had made some phone calls and
discovered that the farm was entirely vacant at the moment, and I
wanted to experience the land in all its glory before the former
inhabitants came home.  I had a sinking suspicion I wasn't
going to like these old frenemies of my mother and wanted to give
Greensun the benefit of the doubt before they arrived.

"So, what are you doing in Pikeville?" Jacob
asked, dragging me out of my thoughts after we'd gone about an hour
down the road.

"I'm going to a...um...meeting at Greensun," I
said, while my mind turned to pondering whether or not Jacob was a
mountain man.  His grandmother's menu of soup beans and biscuits
(she'd called up again to regale him with the details and to extend
another invitation to me) suggested that Jacob was, in fact, typical
mountain material, but my own mother had pointed out that mountain
men won't shake a woman's hand without a pointed pause, so maybe he
wasn't.  Heck, for all I knew, mountain men might have gone
extinct in the last seventeen years, and the new generation could
have a completely different set of unpleasant traits.  Worst-case
scenario, they could be like the guys at my old high school.

"Greensun?  Are you sure that's near
Pikeville—I've never heard of a town called Greensun," Jacob
replied, starting to look a bit worried.  He pulled a map out
of the glove compartment and tried to spread it out, a tricky
project in the confines of the passenger seat.  (Yes, I'd meant
it about being the one driving.  Even if Jacob wasn't an ax
murderer, one of Mom's hard-and-fast rules is that I never ride in a
car driven by anyone under twenty-one, myself excluded.  After
a few clandestine, and very harrowing, excursions with friends, I
decided Mom was on the right track.)

"It's pretty close, actually," I told him.
"And I've got directions if you need them."

I handed over the paper that had been waiting,
folded, in my hip pocket, and seconds later Jacob started to laugh
uncontrollably.  "Hippie Holler," he finally gasped out when
the chortles subsided.  "You're trying to get to the hippie
farm!"

It turns out that Jacob's mamaw might have been
dubious about inviting me to supper if she'd known my final
destination (which was no problem because I wasn't planning on
dining with complete strangers anyway).  You see, Greensun had a
bit of a bad reputation among the wider community, and parents warned
their offspring away from what was commonly referred to as "Hippie
Holler."

"Which just means we wanted to go there even
more," Jacob explained after his laughter died down.  "There's
not much to do way out in the country like that, so after you spend
some time at the Ghost Lady's house waiting for a sighting, then
knock down a few mailboxes, Hippie Holler is the next stop."
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and backpedaled.
"Not that I knocked down any mailboxes," he muttered.  "Usually,
I was the one driving...."

"So that means you know where Greensun is,
right?" I asked, that being my primary concern since the day was
already starting to dim.  "Will we get there before dark?"

"Actually, we're almost there," Jacob
replied.  "Which is a good thing because you don't want to be
walking down the hill to the house at night if you aren't familiar
with the lay of the land.  You do know I can't drive you to the
door, right?  This place gives a whole new meaning to the word
'remote'."

Since Jacob had warned me several minutes before
to call my mom before cell-phone reception disappeared ("In case
your mother is overprotective like my grandmother is," he added), but he hadn't
mentioned the r-word then, I figured his definition of "remote" must
be pretty extreme.  I wasn't ready to throw in the towel,
though.  "That's okay," I reassured him (or maybe
myself).  "I'm ready for anything."

"You know, you could stay at my mamaw's place
tonight and go to Greensun tomorrow if you want," Jacob said after a
pause.  "I didn't really mean it about her not inviting you to
dinner because of the hippie thing.  She'd probably wring my
neck if she knew I dropped you off there alone at this time of day,
and we live just down the road."

Ah, so there was a bit of mountain man in Jacob
after all.  Instead of being creepy the way Mom had portrayed
it, though, at the moment the trait struck me as sweet...and
tempting.

Still, I wanted an adventure, right?  And
what's an adventure without a little uncertainty and danger?

"Well, we're here," Jacob said, motioning for me to
pull into a hayfield with no structures in sight.  "There's a
path over there."  He pointed toward the trees at the edge of
the field.  "And about half a mile down is the house.  So
what do you think?  Now or later?"

"Now," I replied, hauling my huge backpack out of
the car, then waving Jacob out of sight.  As his taillights
disappeared in the distance, I realized I was completely alone with
no company except the the quiet sounds of birds settling in for the night.