Dear Santa, A Fifth of Jameson, New Underwear, and A Root Cellar Please

The decrepit house on our property, circa 1865, has it's positive points: it hasn't collapsed yet, it provides great shelter for our guard dogs, and it has an old root cellar.

Once we repair walls, stairs, put on a new door, close off the connected crawl space that extends under the house, empty it, clean it, build shelves in it...once we do those things; we'll have a usable root cellar. In theory.

We did not have such serious root cellar desire last year, as the summer of 2015 was very wet, we'd only been living here a few months and we still had income to buy vegetables. This year, however, we plunged into our garden jobs and thankfully, the land produced good amounts in return.

The problem has been storage.

In our feed shed we have an old refrigerator, unplugged, that served as dry storage for popcorn, and large potatoes, plus we were able to store pumpkins, sweet potatoes, onions and fingerling potatoes in open sided crates stacked on shelves and the floor. We also canned large amounts of other things like tomatoes, beans and more sweet potatoes which have been crammed in our small kitchen. But with the rapid decline in temperatures these last few days (wind chills of -7 tonight)  we knew these veggies left in the feed shed would freeze, so into the Looney Bin they came.

We now have sweet potatoes in coolers under our kitchen table, pumpkins tucked under the stair eaves, potatoes in the shelf unit behind the rocket mass stove and onions braided and hanging off the floor beams.

Feng Shui it ain't but at least we won't starve. Next year, we'll fix and fill the root cellar. It's a plan.