Root cellars, sort of.

When I first moved in here, there was a root cellar in the basement.  The basement was drafty as all hell, and damp too, so that kind of worked, except that a basement should not be drafty and wet.  I've had various ideas of digging a "proper" root cellar into a hillside, but that's a lot of work and I've got other priorities.

So I haven't gotten my garlic planted yet.  That should have been done in October or November, but...  So I had a garden cart full of garlic in the barn, and some of it got a touch of frost damage and some of it started to sprout roots in the dirt in the bottom of the cart before I took it all out to the greenhouse one cold night, threw it on the ground in there, threw what mulch I had at hand over it and covered it with a tarp.  A few days ago I went through it and sorted it into the properly dormant stuff and the stuff that had rooted or frozen.  The rooted and frozen went into a cold frame, got buried under and inch of dirt, and hopefully a bunch of it will sprout for transplanting in a month or so.  The dormant stuff went into buckets.

Then what?  Well, I dug a pit, lined it with an off-size cold frame wall, and put the buckets in it.  I covered that with a bit of metal roofing (from the dump) and then heaped the mulch hay over it.

Today I opened it up to check on things.  There's frost in the soil, but the garlic in the buckets looks good.  I left it open for a few hours to warm slightly.

Also, right next to that, in the northwest corner, I've got a barrel half buried and I've got a bunch of sprouted potatoes in it that I got free from the Co-op.  If they can hold in there, I'll know it will store good potatoes, and I'll be able to plant these out come spring.  If they freeze, no great loss.  What I see so far is that the few right at the front, just where the cold air leaks into the barrel, have had their sprouts frozen.  Two inches back from that, they look good.

This gets closed with an old wash tub with mulch hay stuffed in it as insulation.  There are mulch wood chips over the top of the barrel, and the whole thing gets tarped at night for one more level of thermal radiation barrier.  I'm considering my options for closing it up tighter with a wood cover to prevent the airflow that's freezing those ones at the front.

The tub fits just inside the barrel, and it's a pain to get in and out of there too.