Ann Torrence wrote:
Old timers would dig a root cellar where the temperatures hovered above freezing (prop the door open in the fall, turn a light bulb on in the depths of winter-or a kerosene lantern before electricity-yuck sooty veg). Store the veg in baskets to get good air circulation. Gravel floor to splash water down to keep humidity up.
This is an old post but I have a lot of experience with old-timer style root cellars and keeping them above freezing, so why not?
First of all, a properly-operated kerosene lantern is not sooty. Soot appears when you run it with the wick too high or too low; when you run it out of oil and the wick burns excessively; when it's not well-adjusted, or when you try to run it on diesel, cheap "lamp oil", jet fuel, or pretty much anything but genuine "Pearl" brand kerosene from Chevron (formerly Standard Oil). I know this because I was home-schooled through grade 12 and did all of my schoolwork in a dark cabin in Alaska with no electricity, in a place where the sun did not rise for six weeks straight in December and January. Filling and maintaining the lamps was one of my many chores. My own personal lamp for schoolwork and pleasure reading needed its globe washed about once every six weeks, and typically that was because I got fingerprints on it or toasted marshmallow stuck to it. Sooty? Not an issue.
We had a root cellar dug into the side of a permafrost slope next to our cabin door. We kept 600-800 pounds of potatoes through winters that dipped to 70 below, plus carrots, cabbages, celery, beets, and a few other things. I'm pretty intimately familiar with the mechanics of keeping those vegetables from freezing because it was another one of my chores, as was washing, paring, and cutting the veggies for our meals, which became a bigger task the later the season got as more and more stuff had bad spots and mold.
Because this root cellar was in frozen permafrost, there was enormous thermal stability, but when outside air temps were substantially below the ground temp we would leak warmth through the double doors and through the logs-and-soil roof. A source of heat was required to keep everything from freezing and turning to mush, but it could be very minimal. A kerosene lamp was actually too much heat, and it contributed too much humidity, making the mold problem worse. We did however maintain about a dozen chickens in an 8x8 log coop, and when it got below about twenty below outside their body heat was not enough to keep them from freezing their feet inside, so we would run a well-protected barn lantern in there to help them keep the temperature up. That worked well, although we didn't get many eggs in the dark months.
For the root cellar, the system we used was a pair of 5-gallon metal military-surplus water cans (the kind with the large lid on a hinge and built-in vents). We'd keep one on or near the always-roaring wood-burning barrel stove in our cabin, and swap the hot one for the cold one in the root cellar twice a day. (Another of my frequent chores in the morning, although my dad usually did the "before bedtime" swap.) It worked a treat, although well-vented cans of hot water definitely contributed to the humidity issue in our root cellar.
This, however, was the source of our most horrifying injury during our years living there. On the rocket mass heater forums they talk of "boom squish" any time water is at risk of boiling in a pressurized environment. Well, for some reason my father got to using a metal military
fuel can instead of a water can. These have much less robust vents, typically just one small hole the size of a BB. And our hard well water was prone to mineral flake buildup when it boiled. Sure enough, one night when my dad pulled the hot can down off the stove, it was in a superheated state because the vent had become clogged, and the can exploded. He suffered no mechanical injury from the steam explosion but he got superheated water splashed on his face and upper body, where it was held against his skin by his beard and by three layers of cotton and good Pendleton wool. (Undershirt, thermalweave underwear, wool shirt.) He went screaming outside to roll around in a snowbank at thirty below but it took him and mom quite some time to get his boiling clothing off of his torso. In the end he suffered 2nd-degree burns over about 30% of his upper body.
We of course had no access to health care or money to pay for it. Dad declined a military rescue evac to civilization and a hospital, arguing stubbornly but I think correctly that the risk of serious infection was much worse in a hospital setting. Of course this meant that he would not have access to serious pain medications. But pretty much everybody in that little town gave up their spare oral antibiotics, antibiotic creams, and hoarded painkillers. He healed amazingly fast and with no significant infection, but the pain he went through is impossible to imagine or describe.
Moral: if you're going to heat water on your wood stove in closed vessels for any purpose, be
ridiculously paranoid, and then check your vents every day.
As for the root cellar, though, we kept potatoes through the winter just piled in old garden tubs (leaky galvanized washtubs). Carrots stacked in tubs atop a layer of sand. Heads of celery were wrapped in newspaper (which became damp) and stacked roots-down in tubs. Cabbages we kept in burlap bags. Beets, like the potatoes, just piled in tubs. It all worked fairly well except for that one boom-squish mishap. By about this time of year (late March) everything in the root cellar was getting pretty beat up, with sprouts on the potatoes, lots of rotten and squishy spots, mold on the carrot and beet tops, brown slimy ends on the carrots, mold between the outermost cabbage leaves, that sort of thing. The celery we didn't eat by January turned gray and mush soon after, so it was an early-winter treat only.
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