The Root Cellar

One of my earliest memories of my grandparents’ farm includes a field of potatoes. Row upon row of hilled plants and a lot of work. Years later, the garden next to the house, still contained many rows of potatoes and other root vegetables like carrots and turnips. Root vegetables were a staple food at every meal and keeping those vegetables over the winter was a challenge.

The root cellar in the farmhouse was part of the basement with the dirt floor. The open wood staircase found behind a door in the kitchen. Pots and pans and other kitchen paraphernalia hanging off the wall alongside and the underside of the stairs going up to the second floor.

It was a 5-year-old’s nightmare going down those stairs but at the bottom the old wooden shelves lining the walls and packed full of jars of food was a cornucopia of tastes. Neatly placed canned and preserved fruits, vegetables, and the occasional canned chicken provided my grandparents’ meals over the winter months; all harvested from the farm. Jugs of chokecherry wine tucked away under the stairs. The pile of sand(?) on one side of the basement was the laying ground for the root vegetables, snipped off carrot tops peaking through.

That memory was 45 years ago. Today, planting root vegetables in a small urban garden to harvest enough for a winter can be challenging with so little space. But using barrels (or bags) can provide a few meals of fresh potatoes that take me back, not to the now overgrown garden, but to the farm as it was when I was a child and to the root cellar.

To try this method of planting potatoes, check out Alberta Urban Garden’s container garden potato harvest on Youtube - https://goo.gl/q3ZIX1