A Tour of my Cold Room
My cold room (read: DIY walk in refrigerator) and root cellar are probably one of the most appreciated and valued parts of our entire farm. Not because they're the prettiest - because (hear me now) - they're most certainly not. And yet still, despite the cold room and root cellar's homely appearances, they continued to serve as the fuel source of our home.
Someday I'll lay brick floors and hang chandeliers. Someday.
Right now within their humble walls lies a winter supply of cheese, root vegetables, and ferments. The cold room is also where we keep our rotating milk supply (we tend to have around ten gallons at a time... thank you Cecelia!) and any manner of produce that we're storing or waiting to preserve on the farm.
(Read: a lot of things.)
The cold room is built out of foam board from Lowe's, a second-hand air conditioner unit, and a Coolbot (a small device that overrides the air conditioner, allowing it to go lower than it normally would). The premise is simple: frame in the size you want your cold room with 2x4s, line the walls with the foam board, seal it all in, and wire in the air conditioner unit. Please don't ask me for details - building is certainly not my forte and lies within Stuart's department of farm tasks. He designed and put together the room for me after I promised to bear him four children.
(Jokes on him. I already did my part.)
We keep the cold room at around 36-38 degrees and it stores our ferments, root vegetables, milk, curing meats, and other refrigerator items wonderfully.
However. I could only take the ugly for so long. I promised myself that before the harvest this year, I'd get the cold room looking fly. Frankly, I was getting pretty tired of walking in and seeing old wire racks, moldy tablecloths, and the remnants of last year's cabbages.
If you've got to make three meals a day, you might as well try to enjoy it as much as you can am-I-right?
I'm right.
Anyway. Checkout my cold room makeover right here:
There is still a few things to take care of in the cold room: the floor needs a fresh new layer of gravel, I need to hunt down some more wooden baskets for vegetables, and then there's the small matter of harvesting and preserving hundreds of pounds of produce from the gardens.
Ya know. Just a few small things.
At the end of the day, the cold room is looking goooood, the gardens are looking gooooood, and I'm feeling goooooood about this year's food supply.
That's a lot to give thanks for!
And Amen.