The Earthbag Root Cellar, Part 1

Reader Contribution by Kyle Chandler-Isacksen
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Earlier this spring we started excavating a big hole next to our house to serve as a root cellar. We live without electricity and with about 3/4 of the year here in the High Desert having cool, refrigeratory nights a root cellar seemed like a great idea.

Digging a Root Cellar

We are also a fossil-fuel-free urban homestead so digging our roughly 11-by 9-foot hole was done completely by hand. About half of the wonderful clay in the hole was used for our “One-Day Cob House” workshop in May and harvested by workshop participants during that weekend (we’re especially proud of that stacking of functions). The rest we dug piecemeal over several months. While I enjoy digging I never do it for more than an hour at a time unless we’ve created some sort of deadline. We also had an intern with us for a few months this past summer and she got to develop her digging skills in the root cellar quite regularly. In fact, she also dug most of our driveway Hugelkultur beds and several holes in our backyard for tree guilds. Lucky girl!

When we got to about 3 and a half feet deep I called it quits. I’m optimistic that will be deep enough to make good use of the constant coolness of the Earth. We went with earthbags for the walls until above grade and then used Balecob to the roof. Earthbags seemed the perfect fit for several reasons:

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