That Root Cellar Wasn't A Prize

    Back in 1977, we had saved a lot of money from teaching in remote one, and two-room schools, but we didn’t have a home of our own in Canada.  After quitting that last teaching job, we decided to look around for a place to buy, settle into a community we liked, hoping that I could find a job there and that things would work out for us.

    We were in to the whole “Back to the Land” movement, and bought a five acre “hobby farm” in McBride.  The property gave us a house, a barn, a garage, a wonderful garden, a greenhouse, and a root cellar.  We were quite happy that our new property included a root cellar; a place where we could store the carrots, potatoes, and other produce that we would grow in our garden.

    Unfortunately, the enthusiasm we had for possessing a root cellar, was premature.  It wasn’t the prize we had thought.  Most root cellars are dug under the insulating ground, where the soil kept the produce cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  Unfortunately, ours was built above ground which made it pretty ugly looking, like a giant weed-covered loaf of bread, and it was not as well insulated as those built underground. 

    It had other problems too.  Here is a story I gleaned from my November, 1991 diary entries:

        I went into our root cellar to get get some potatoes.  I had always liked the fact that we had a root cellar but over time, I saw that it wasn’t much of a benefit.  Shaped like a big loaf of bread covered with soil and weeds that were difficult to cut, it was ugly.  The door was always difficult to open, and during the winter it became even more difficult because blowing snow drifts built up in front of the door, so every time I needed to get any of our produce out of the root cellar,  I had to first, shovel away the pile of snow.  

    On this particular day, seeking some potatoes, I discovered that the dirt floor of the root cellar was flooded.  The burlap bags of our potatoes, were sitting there like islands, in a foot (30cm) of water.   I was flummoxed about what to do with the potatoes, since we had nowhere else to store them, so I just left their bags in the water after I had gotten enough potatoes to keep us for a few weeks.  

    About a month later, when I once again went into the root cellar to restock our supply of potatoes for in the house, the bags of potatoes were still sitting in a foot of water, and I knew I had better do something before the potatoes began to rot, so after I managed to lug the two wet bags of potatoes out of the root cellar, I stored them in the crawlspace under the house.  The crawl space didn’t stay as cool as the root cellar, but it at least, kept the potatoes from freezing (and flooding).

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