Homestead Resilience: Root Cellar for Long-Term Storage

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we kick off a critical food-security project on our Arizona desert homestead: digging the root cellar! With warmer weather approaching and family holidays behind us, we excavate a deep trench for a 16ft sphere (insulated with Air Crete and pond liner) that will stay naturally cool underground—perfect for storing canned goods, freezers, and preserved harvests away from the summer heat. We explain the plan for easy ramp access, earth-bermed walls, and why this is essential for self-sufficiency as we scale up gardening and animal husbandry. Meanwhile, Donna tends her thriving raised beds, and we continue fine-tuning infrastructure like the powered workshop and water systems. Join us for hands-on progress toward long-term food storage and desert resilience! Peace.

Transcript:

Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the landlord. What we’re doing today. Donna’s got to go into town, do some real estate stuff. She’s a real person. She’s got a thanks you got to do. And, we need to start the bus and, go ahead and get the air compressor to air up the air bags on the suspension to lift the chassis up.

You see, you know, it’s, you know, now, you probably wouldn’t know, but it’s a lot higher. It’s like ten inches higher the chassis. Now I’m going to use that bottle, Jack. That’s what it takes to lift even a corner. This on the axle. Get that up then put the jack stands under it. I need to get the tires just off the ground a little bit.

Maybe take some air, add a little bit. I am last a lot longer because we need this to be able to go where it needs to go. And one of the things is, you know, then we’re going to go ahead and cut this wood as a base for the jack standard. It’ll just go down into the ground. Now I needed to replace the batteries because out here in the desert and after years of whatever, it just wasn’t holding charge very well.

So I had a need to do that. So we change the batteries on that and you know, get it started and let it raise the chassis. And I’m letting it do that just then it’s getting up to height so you can see. Yeah, it’s a big step up now, but put the corners up, put the jack stands up, get the wheels off a little bit and so I can when I got time I got tools for it and so on.

I take the tire off and the, disc brakes that this thing uses, then deglaze them because it’s not stopping as good as I want it to. And it’s not because it doesn’t have enough pads, it’s just that the the brake pads are glazed. And I hear here tell take some 60 grit sandpaper or tool and kind of rough that up and deglaze it and put it back and it’ll stop a lot better, which I want to do now.

One thing I did with the tractor months ago. Yeah, there goes Donna. Yeah. She’s got to go play real estate. So, I hit it with the bucket. I had the bucket up. I was making a turn. I wasn’t looking up. And it goes took. And I went, oh, you some bitch. Fortunately, it was already cracked, and, we had gotten the replacement windshield years ago, 2 or 3 years ago.

And it’s been in the back of the bus in the closet. Donna’s been yelling about that, you know, constantly being paying her. But but yeah, it’s not really in the way, but it’s in the way. So what we’re going to do is we’ll go ahead and get the windshield replaced and we need to put, replace the awning.

A storm came and the ultraviolet just beat the crap out of any cord, and we had a nylon cord strong enough until it wasn’t, you know, worn out. A gust of wind hit, and it’s gone. But it lasted longer than I thought it would. It was kind of war from the beginning, and, it worked now, you know.

So we’re glad to have that. But we need to get a new one because I want one that is going to be electric. You know that. Well, I can deploy it. And then Donna saw what I was going to do. She goes, well, can we put it on the other side of the bus, too? And I’m like, oh yeah, but you know, or we could just finish the dome, so we’ll go ahead and do that.

The, you know. Yeah, you can see that. Has it lifted up the chassis, start pulling on the saw, you know. So yep. I gotta check on that. Well it going it’s working fine. Everything’s great. We just need to we’re going to start getting warm. I’m going to bring over the evaporative cooler that goes in the window on the other side of that there.

And then we have, a window shaker on the other window on the other side in the bedroom there. That we put a air conditioner. Now, you can see we got used to having, you know, the bed is right at that level. You know what? The bottom of the black there. So we just see the entire desert out here in the evening all the time.

And we really like that, which is why on the dome over there, the headboard on the other side, there is going to be a big window that we can look at. And, and one for the kitchen coming up this side. So that’s what I’m doing today. Donna’s gone I had A0I got caught in. Yeah. You can see that that got caught in between a a bolt head.

And anyway it pinched it and I couldn’t reach the tool to get it undone. And I’m calling Donna run out of here and save me. So she came out and, you know, I got unstuck. And now I put, colloidal silver on. You have any break in skin? You put colonial silver on it, man. It’s amazing. It just freaking heals by the next day.

I don’t know, there’s there’s some, you know, electron 3D printing skin thing going on there. I’m telling you, it heals stuff really, really fast. More faster than anything else I’ve ever done. So colonial silver, unbroken skin. Boom. First first first first aid. The, But she left. So I’m here by myself, getting under the bus. I’m going to die.

I’m just going to be reaching in there. So it’s not going to fall on me, hopefully. But, it’s always good, you know, not to be out by yourself doing this kind of stuff, you know, heavy equipment and everything. You know, sometimes you just need somebody to save your life. And that little pinch on the finger was a good, reminder of that.

So I’m not going to get too stupid. I’m going to be climbing up on that or anything. We’re probably going to be getting, harness, you know, for we’re going to be climbing up and around and over a bunch and, that’s going to start. So I think I’m going to do a harness. You know, it’s just because I don’t need to be dead, you know, or laid up for a long time.

So I had to start the bus to, get the air bags up to lift it up so I can do the jack stand. So that’s what we’re working on today. Pace.

Well, it’s starting to warm up for the spring and I have to tend to my garden. When I got back, it was pretty overgrown. Neighbor watered it, but, it’s really warming up, so things grow faster. So this is actually trimmed back from what it was. I still have some things that need to be harvested. There’s some celery, different lettuces, kale and and the cabbages.

And things are doing really well, but, we’re just at the point where I need to trim back a few things. Actually, a lot of things. And replant for the spring, which I did. I did plant some new things over here, some carrots, ginger there just looks like dirt right now. But that’s what I planted in there.

And some radishes and garlic. And this is, the stuff that I cut off and do things I, I can use, like these onions. I can use a little bit of that broccoli. I’m sorry. Cauliflower, but, yeah. So that time of year.

All right. We need a root cellar, and we’re doing a lot of the, getting the building ready to go in. We got the dome on top of it and ready to go. But, you know, with the news the way it is and wars and rumors of wars and so on. We knew that we needed to get a food production thing going on.

So we have the chicken coop here. Donna’s garden’s doing well, and, we can expand that, of course. But where do we put the food that we. Donna’s experienced in doing preservation, canning, jarring and all that kind of stuff, but we really don’t have, a place to put it. And even if we did, it’d be too hot.

So what we’re going to go ahead and do? The house is over here. So on the other side of that wash. So that’s where we’re building the home. And you see that big pile of dirt there that’s coming from here. Because we got to bring that up another foot or so anyway, and then have that compacted and so on.

When we start doing the main home build. But what we’re doing here is going down. I want to use the, earth coolness when it’s 120 degrees. What you get I mean, you’ll go 100 days above 110 out here often. So what we’re going to do is go down. We’ll drop a 16ft sphere down in there, but it’ll be hard fenced around.

It’ll have mesh on it. We’ll concrete it after we get that. Then we’ll drop it in there with a pond liner because you don’t want, to insulate it from the soil. You want it in contact with the soil. So we’re going to have the pond liner. Then we’ll have it propped up a couple of inches. A few inches, you know, with brok stone or whatever.

And, put the sphere down there. Then we’ll start coating it with cement. Now we’re probably going to do, certainly the bottom half of it is just going to be regular concrete, probably going to, you know, 4 to 6in. And then as we get up, higher, we’re going to be using Air Crete because we want it to as it gets closer to the surface, it’ll be warmer.

And we want to keep the cold down in there because we need to put at least one, if not two freezers or stand up refrigerator and freezer or what we need to get cooling down here where we can put our jars and so on. And then, you know, cook and also we have power that Donal will have in this area that we already have it all.

We’re just gonna put it together when we get to it. No food production that we’re doing, and we’ll go ahead and have a place to put our stuff. So what I gotta do is dig this out. No, we have the backhoe on it, and I started it with. But to go deep and you gotta have an access to it.

I want to easy access to it. We just have a ramp. We’ll walk down to the door. That’ll be about two feet, lower than that. And, you go into it easy to take the, chest freezer to get in or be able to get in and out. This will be the area that is during food prep and everything anyway.

So we’re going to do it here. And I could have probably put it back further and I may do that, you know, but we’ll make it work and we’ll go ahead and get this done and it’s going to take a while. I just did this in a few hours that night. Last night I just went until dawn.

I came home and, got quite a bit done. This. If I just focus on this, it’ll take me a couple of days. I got shows on the next couple of days, so hopefully by the end of the weekend we’ll have this done. Then I can go and start, finishing the maintenance on the stamp press, start making the struts.

Then we’ll go ahead and make the sphere. We’ll cover it, will plop it in there. So now it’s going to be, you know, a couple of weeks know project. But I really want to get this done. I’m, I’m, we’re finding the bus. We want to keep going with the home build. But we got to worry about this food thing.

I’m just saying, you know, I’m concerned. So we’re going to go ahead and focus on that. Now, if you look over here as you can see, you know, it’s not just Clay, it’s this is the soil that we’re dealing with. This is a good example of how much gravel and sand there is in there. And that’s another thing we need to get the trommel built so I can process this and separate it out.

And I have gravel and wash sand and so on for doing the concrete. And then you do a concrete pad over there for doing, steel fabrication of the frames for the windows, doors and things that I want to do for the build. So there’s just one thing after another. I didn’t anticipate doing this, but I need to get this done before it gets too hot.

You know, other stuff we we did most of it in the heat anyway. So, you know, it’s not that big a deal, but, so we’re going to focus on this for a couple of days. Donna will probably put a time lapse. You can see me play with the dirt, and then, she may need to walk over there and show where we’re putting it.

Then I have the backhoe on. Will leave that on, and I’m going to need that for a little bit. But then this kind of leaking and so on and it’s new. So I got a know while I still got on the track, I need to take it in and take it off at the, where we bought it and have them work on that, make it pretty perfect.

Not leaking any more. I mean, is that leaking? Leaking? But it’s not. Do you know, I have put 20 hours on it, so we’re going to go ahead and have them do that. Then I’ll be able to with the back plate on fresh up the road, get ready for the next rain. You know get things situated here. Great.

Around fill the dome up there. So there’s so many things to do. It just kind of got in the middle of it. So this is going to take, you know, a few weeks for us to get this done. But we have to have a place to put food. You’re saying occupy the land.

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