Yesterday was cooler so I tried to spend some time inside doing interesting inside jobs as opposed to the drudgery inside jobs that I do At Speed. So I packaged up more postcards to be sent. 
Then I worked in my new Cave. John calls it the Cellar. The local word for this room is the Fruit Room. As you know one of my goals is to be self sufficient. One day I would like to try and go a whole year just eating from the farmy and buying dry stores like rice and flour and beans four or five times a year. I suggested this to John and he said he would go and live with his mother for that year. 
I said You do know that it will not be long and we will be building your Mother a Nanny Cabin down the bottom of the garden. She is in on this you know! He shook his paper and remained behind it. In my cave I have room for all the vegetables preserved in jars. The pickles, chutneys, honey, vinegars, jams and oils. On the right of the image above you can see the cheese cupboards, there are three along one wall. There are three parmesan wheels in them now. I shall fill it this summer. My cheeses will age much better in there. 
It is all very well to preserve the summer produce for the winter but it needs to be stored in a designated space. And all the jars as they are emptied need to be stored somewhere other than the bottom of my wardrobe. This is a lovely old fashioned idea. A beautiful store-room. A whole winters worth of food is quite a lot of food. The cave is 8×12 foot. It is made entirely of recycled barn timbers. And the scent from the wood is just sublime.
Naturally one wall is for the wine. This room is on the North side of the basement and it is very cool down there. It has a solid door. The floor is the concrete of the basement and the ceiling is also sanded tongue and groove old barn timbers. There is one tiny window, that looks out into the feet of the plants in the garden above. 
This is the magnolia I planted to shade part of the verandah in the summer. I think it is called sunburst. But I am not good with the names of plants.
I am now on the hunt for a door for the root cellar so I can store potatoes, onions and pumpkins, etc. Though the old people say to put the apples and pears in the well house because they will ripen and rot everything in the root cellar and if I cover them in burlap sacks above the well they will be fine in there. So much to learn.
I hear of people going off the grid and filling their houses with batteries and gadgets and generators to make the electricity they previously pulled from the grid. Solar that fills a bank of batteries. Wind turbines that have components made all over the world and shipped across to us. I wonder whether this does not leave just as big a carbon footprint. I sense that I am wandering off into a life that will eventually only need very little electricity and fuel to run it and I do not want to leave a huge pile of rubbish behind when I am gone. A little is OK. A little electricity and fuel is OK. Sustainable.
Imagine if there was no dump and no garbage trucks and all the rubbish and debris we throw out each day was piled like an exclamation mark in our own back yards where everyone could see it. Over the years it would be bigger than the house. I tried to explain this to my visitors last week when they were hunting for store bought water in convenient plastic bottles. I tried to do the maths for them. I tried to explain that water in throw away bottles is a very new phenomena and we should be careful. They just looked blankly at me and said well where do you get your water from then. I handed them the water jug and a glass.
Good morning. It is cool now but fine and will get warmer. The sun is up and I will be outside again today! I love this weather!
celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
94 responses to “The cave”
I will want to see a photo of The Cave again at the end of summer when it is filled with countless jars of goodness. It looks beautiful and useful. It’s surprising that those youths had not heard of water bottles that they can carry and refill — that’s what I do, from taps and water fountains.
The other thing I realised is that theyhave been trained to drink and Throw Away the container. So the idea of carrying around an empty container and returning it to the kitchen or refilling it is quite foreign! they pretty much lost all of my containers while they were here. I am beginning to find them left in the strangest places all over the place. hmm.. c
I love your new “cave”! I could smell the old wood when you were talking about it. What an adventure it will be to stock it for the upcoming winter. I’ve never canned but hope to at least learn how to can peaches this summer. Both my sisters in law and my mother in law can throughout the summer. Mainly peaches, but there’s so much sugar involved it kind of freaks me out. lol I’m going to have to do some research and figure out how to can with as little sugar as possible. If you have any ideas I would love to hear them! I also don’t buy jelly or jams very often for that reason. I try to stick to the organic 100% fruit variety. But I’m thinking, if “they” can make it with natural fruit juices, then why can’t I?
Magnolia trees are one of my favorites! We won’t see them bloom around here until about May or so. They are always so gorgeous seem exotic to me. They look like someone took beautiful flowers and just glued them to the tips of the branches.
We had one absolutely gorgeous day over the weekend. Sunny ALL day and 63 degrees. Hopefully that will be enough to sustain me for a bit as we are back to pouring rain and snow.
Have a wonderful day! ~ April
I cannot believe your miserable weather, you guys have it rough. I do not know how they bottle fruit without the sugar, after all we do not add sugar when we do the tomatoes. We have to be so careful of spoilage and the nasty bacterias. But it is true that we can buy jars and cans of fruit that are sugar free. Maybe they are heated to such high temps that they are kind of pasteurised. In that case we could boil the jars in a water bath for longer maybe. I will do some research.
lets hope you get some more summery days soon.. c
The cellar!!! What farm wife does not like a cellar! I like yours by the way…pretty cool!!
Linda
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
http://deltacountyhistoricalsociety.wordpress.com
very cool isn’t it and i think the perfect place for a cup of tea on a hot summer day without a/c.. c
What a wonderful ‘cave’! It reminds me of my grandmother’s pantry. There were always shelves laden with the bounty of the garden. 🙂
Perfect ted, I am thrilled that it will be like a grandmothers pantry, that is exactly the generation i am using as a resource!! c
The postcards look fantastic, C! And everything is so organized – not that I’m surprised :).
morning Ksenia, if you saw my bedroom you would be appalled!! Some rooms i can never get quite organised! c
Good morning, Celi! Yeah, I’m with you about bottled water. Granted, if your area’s water is bad, you need to find alternatives but plastic, throw away containers? Do the math, people!
Your cave looks great! It’s certainly beautifully appointed and I look forward to the day when you show us pics of it fully stocked. For one thing, it will mean that you’re well on your way to self sufficiency. Yay!
I am going to enjoy stocking it up but then i have the very real problem of HATING to empty it as it all looks SO GOOD when it is full of colourful food! morning john.. c
I laughed aloud at John’s response to your suggestion of living a whole year off the farmy…but you could surely do it. I also immediately thought of Barbara Kingsolver’s book especially, as well as this one: Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally: Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, which is kinda fun…but this you already do I think! What a terrific cave. I can’t wait to see it filled with all of your goodies. How inspiring!
Certainly raucous!! morning betsy.. c
I just love your cave! I will be so very interested in seeing how you fill it up, and to have a place to store and age your cheese! I can smell it from here. You do a lot to inspire me to think as creatively as possible about how to conserve and be as resourceful in all ways. The whole water bottle craze is troubling…my husband once owned a garbage company…there really should be some blogposts that come from that era of our life–that was twenty plus years ago and the landfills were distressed then! I look forward to each spring morning post, Celi. Debra
you should write about that, it must be a million times worse now, though we are all getting more aware of the problem so lets hope we can all make it a bit better.. c
i want to come and live on your farmy. i would love to have a fruit cellar like yours!
It is a gem isn’t it! c
I think you will enjoy Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – and I also think you should write a book about your own journey – I would pre-order a copy 🙂
I am deeply envious of your cave. I love to make chutney, pickles, jellies etc, but where to put them is always a problem!
Oh, also – did you hear about the editor of the NZ Gardener magazine who made a vow to live off her own suburban garden for a year – spending only $10 a week at the supermarket? She wrote about it in the magazine and has sparked a huge increase in people growing their own veggies here (especially the young ones… some of us middles and most of the oldies were already doing it) She sold/exchanged her excess at a Farmer’s Market…
Morning Janet. Maybe I should get in touch with NZ Gardener and see if they want to have a few articles about the Kitchens Garden! Anything that encourages people to pop a few tomato plants in the garden is a good thing and in most of NZ we can grow something all year round. c
Imagine that garbage dump, indeed. We live on a smallish island, as compared to, say NZ. We have two guest rentals. Out of dozens of people, perhaps hundreds now, who have stayed with us over the past three years since we’ve been in operation, roughly three of them take advantage of recycling. We have bins in the garage. We have a smaller bin and a compost bucket right in their kitchen cupboard under the sink. Still, all the plastic and garbage go into the trash. Where I pick through it like some street tramp, sorting out that which can be redeemed. And though this may gross some readers out, to me it’s better than the alternative – adding to the huge plastic islands of trash floating around in our lovely oceans. Thanks for this post, C – you are ever an inspiration!
Isn’t that hilarious, all those receptacles and they all go for the first throw and out it goes and then they forget all about it! The rubbish is immediately someone else’s problem.. We have no recycling here, we have to sort it and drive it all to another city. Nothing for paper or plastic tho.. So i avoid packaging as much as i can.. hopeless.. c
Whoah, that’s an eye opener. No recycling! We have to drive everything to the town dump, but they do ‘mixed recycling’ for paper and plastic and then we separate out the ‘returnables’ and glass. It works well, and we usually have 2 barrel-fuls of recycling to 1/2 of non-recyclable trash. And we compost.
We burn and add the ashes to the gardens and compost and have the worms for paper too, but plastic is my problem! c
Plastic is EVERYONE’s problem, C. We’ve finally instituted a trickle-down plastic bag ban here, and boy, didn’t people fight it. It’s all I see on the roads, riding my bike.
Ugh.
Mm, no reason why people cannot take bags to the market just like in the old days, plastic bags are a menace! c
Agreed!
I love your new cave 😉
When I first lived in Spain (21 years ago) you could pay a deposit on a large glass bottle (maybe 5 gallons) and take it back to a shop or bodega to be refilled. Two and a half years later the glass bottles were phased out in favour of plastic 😦
so sad that all these sensible ways have ben plasticised! c
I think it would be interesting to live off the land for a year.
I think so too, dogs would love it, they would live on meat and veg just like us!! c
“They just looked blankly at me and said well where do you get your water from then. I handed them the water jug and a glass.” Hahaha~! I love this.
Somehow, I had gotten the impression that your hubby, unlike mine, was behind your self sufficiency 100%. It has been a very slow burn for mine. He is coming round to the idea, but not easily. Oh, and I do love your fruit room! ~ Lynda
He is definitely into being self sufficient, he is just worried I will make him live on beans and seeds for a whole winter!!! He does like his greens! c
Aaaah! That’s better! LOL! 😉
It looks like a wonderful storage room for all your goodies. I know you will enjoy having it.
It is the size of my kitchen and when i am down there I wish it WAS my kitchen! morning karen! c
That is terrific Celi.