Buried treasure
Vermonters rediscover root cellars
Carol Tashie of Rutland stores a variety of vegetables in a root cellar in the basement of her home, including these carrots stored in sawdust.
By GORDON DRITSCHILO
Staff Writer - Published: February 8, 2009
A closet in the back of Robin Chesnut-Tangerman's basement holds about 200 pounds of potatoes.
"That ought to see us well through," he says.
Wax-coated produce boxes sit atop a table in Carol Tashie's basement. One is full of beets that have started to sprout tops again.
"I think that's great," she says. "It looks so neat."
While Chesnut-Tangerman lives at the end of a sparsely populated road in Middletown Springs and Tashie lives near downtown Rutland, both are among the many Vermonters who are finding ways to put root cellars in their homes and eat produce from their gardens through the winter.
Maintaining the right mix of temperature and humidity allows a gardener to preserve several types of vegetables until the next planting season. The technique is anything but new, though Tashie says she came to it only about three years ago.
"When we moved here, we made a really evolving effort to grow as much of our own food as possible," she says. "Given that we live in a fairly small urban plot, the root cellaring evolved out of necessity."
Others apparently share her interest.
Richard Czaplinski, who has used a root cellar for decades at his home in East Montpelier in the hamlet of Adamant, says he is putting together a publication on root cellaring and other food storage techniques for the members of a local sustainability network.
One enterprising carpenter even believes he sees a market for veggie storage space. Michael Goldstein of Addison County has put up fliers advertising his services for making them. He plans to charge only for time and parts, and expects he can build root cellars for $600 to $2,000, depending on the size.
Tashie was lucky and didn't need to build anything to start storing her crops; a section of her basement under an addition to her house was the perfect temperature.
"I went on a Web site," she says. "I don't remember which one, but there's lots of them. All I did was look up what temperature and humidity things prefer."
Tashie's root cellar lies beyond a blue door in the back of her basement but is hard to distinguish from the rest of the level. Without a furnace — Tashie heats with a pellet stove — the room easily stays at the right temperature.
"Your carrots, your beets, your parsnips need to be kept at about 32 degrees — 32 to 34 — but they need high, high humidity," she says.
To assure the vegetables are properly hydrated, many people bury them in damp sand. Tashie opts for an approach she says is cheaper: sawdust from a local mill.
Potatoes, onions and garlic she sorts according to size. Those don't need humidity, so they get stored uncovered.
Squash prefers to be stored at between 50 and 60 degrees, so it sits in a different part of the basement. Tashie says some people do "root attics" for squash, as attics are frequently in the correct temperature range.
The vegetables keep as long as they stay at the right temperature, according to Tashie. As winter ends and spring begins, the area begins to warm up. If you've planned well, you run out of vegetables as the root cellar stops being viable.
She holds up a parsnip. "These come out of the ground probably in October, and they're great. They taste as good as they did when they came out of the ground. They're not soft. They're not mushy."
Tashie learned the hard way not to plant too early. Now she figures out when her root cellar is going to be 32 degrees and works backward to determine when to plant. Ideally, vegetables move from the ground to the cellar with no time in between.
"When it's February and you're taking your own produce out of a root cellar, it's a really wonderful thing," she says.
Chesnut-Tangerman's house is solar-heated and built into the hillside. As he poured the concrete walls for the basement about five years ago, he says, he realized they would serve as a "cold reservoir." When he insulated and paneled the walls, he left a corner bare and built an insulated closet.
"It's just a very simple thing with no controls on it," he says. "I grew up on a farm in upstate New York. We had a large root cellar and always stored garden crops over the winter. It seemed like a natural thing to do."
His cellar holds a selection very similar to Tashie's.
"The real advantage is the convenience," he says. "You don't have to go outside to get food."
Chesnut-Tangerman's house is on a tour of solar homes, and he says visitors usually show interest in the root cellar.
Tashie, a prominent advocate of eating locally, believes there has been a spike in interest in gardening that will lead to more interest in root cellaring. "Last growing season, everyone from the co-op to Noble Ace (Hardware) was commenting on how seeds were flying out of the store."
Czaplinski says almost any house in Vermont could hold a root cellar.
"Most people have a basement already and it's probably got a concrete floor. You can start by finding a cold place to store onions. … You try stuff, see what works for you."
Contractors can build root cellars, with fans, thermostats and humidifiers to control conditions, but Tashie says all that is not always necessary.
"Before you spend money building something, go down there with a thermometer," she says. "You don't need a lot of infrastructure. You can do this in a small house in downtown Rutland."
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