Bubel Nancy - Root cellaring.: natural cold storage of fruits & vegetables

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Cover design by Carol Jessop

Book design by Jerry OBrien

Illustrations by Keith Heberling

Photos by Mike Bubel

Text Production by Cindy McFarland

1991, 1979 Mike and Nancy Bubel

Ebook production by Kristy L. MacWilliams

Ebook version 2.1

August 16, 2017

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bubel, Mike.

Root cellaring: natural cold storage of fruits & vegetables / by Mike Bubel & Nancy Bubel.2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-88266-703-4 (pbk.)
1. Vegetables Storage. 2. Fruit Storage. 3. Vegetable gardening. 4. Root cellars. 5. Food Storage. I. Bubel, Nancy.
II. Title.

TX612.V4B79 1991
641.452 dc20

91-55012
CIP

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to reprint copyrighted material from the following sources:

Countryside Magazine: Energy-Free Food Storage by Jerry Minnich. Copyright October 1977. Reprinted by permission.

Bookcraft Inc.: Passport to Survival by Esther Dickey. Copyright 1969 by Esther Dickey. Reprinted by permission.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: Food for Thought by Robert Farrar Capon. Copyright 1978. Reprinted by permission.

Houghton Mifflin Co.: Basic Baskets by Mara Cary. Copyright 1975 by Mara Cary. Reprinted by permission.

Funk and Wagnalls: Diary of an Early American Boy by Eric Sloane. Copyright 1962 by Eric Sloane. Reprinted by permission.

Doubleday and Company Inc.: My Friend the Garden by Fernand Lequenne. Copyright 1965 by Fernand Lequenne. Reprinted by permission.

Doubleday and Company Inc.: The Countrymans Year by David Grayson. Copyright 1932 by David Grayson. Reprinted by permission.

Shambala Publications, Inc., 1123 Spruce Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301: Tassajara Cooking by Edward Espe Brown. Copyright 1973 by Edward Espe Brown. Reprinted by special arrangement.

Crabapple Press, Meadville, Pennsylvania: The Farm Cellar by Eupha Shanly, page 86. Poor Joes Pennsylvania Almanac 1979. Reprinted by permission.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to William H. Matchett for permission to reprint a portion of his poem Packing a Photograph from Firenze, from Water Ouzel and Other Poems, published by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright 1955 by William H. Matchett. Reprinted by permission.

Wed like to dedicate this book
to the memory of Mikes mother,
Mary Bubel.

This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Slowly we are carving a new lifestyle. To some it might seem to be one that is looking backward, for it cherishes the homely, the rude, the unpackaged, the unmechanized, the careful. We do not think of it as a blind shutting out of any visions of the future, but rather, for us, the right way to face the future. The carving is not easy. It is often painful. But in it are the seeds of sanity, of joy.

Mara Cary Basic Baskets

Our interest in root cellars goes way back to the years when our children were young and we were driving the back roads of central Pennsylvanias lovely Buffalo Valley in search of a farm to buy. On one of our rambles, we discovered a real beauty a classic stone-faced root cellar dug into a hill. We wished, as only a land-hungry young couple can, that it belonged to us. In a way, that splendid old root cellar does belong to us, because Mike took a picture of it a picture that we still enjoy looking at now that weve found some land of our own and settled in. In another sense, the cellar belongs to us because living with that picture has influenced us. It has said something to us about forethought, preparation, and generous provisioning and about building a pleasing structure for even the most utilitarian purpose.

We have, in fact, come to see the root cellar as a true expression of folk craft a thing people make to serve their everyday needs. It is one of the few (mostly) unregulated things you can build in most communities today. The appropriate use of found materials to suit a particular site and family delights us with its varied, sturdy, homey results.

This is the old root cellar in Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania, that got us started collecting root cellars.

Although weve done the usual sightseeing with our family Williamsburg, the Smithsonian, the Liberty Bell, Yellowstone Park, Broadway, and the beach we must confess that what really has most often intrigued us in our travels has been the little backyard gardens, homemade birdhouses, and north-slope root cellars weve seen along the way. When we finally realized that these are the things that have meaning for us, we started to take short rambling trips to search them out.

Our previous rather casual game of collecting root cellar ideas intensified when we started to plan a brand-new root cellar for the small house we intended to build here on our farm. In our search for the best root cellar plans, we consulted books and fellow gardeners and met many warm and interesting people along the way. We found so much good information that we decided it should be shared.

Thus this book has grown out of our interest in what people are really doing, on their own, to keep vegetables and fruits from the fall harvest for winter eating. We will tell you what a conventional root cellar looks like and show you how to build one, but we will also show you all kinds of improvised and ingenious systems that people have figured out for themselves, and that work.

There is something about a root cellar, for those who have experienced childhood winters of dependence on such stored bounty, that calls up associations of home and security. More than a few of our older informants grew misty eyed as they told us about root cellars they had hand-dug or once owned (including a built-for-the-ages masterpiece roofed by a century-old brick arch), or to which they had been sent as children to bring up the potatoes for dinner. One young contractor even told us how he left a big boulder exposed in the wall of a basement room of a house he had built because he remembered his grandfathers stone-walled root cellar and hoped that perhaps someone would appreciate that room.