Sustainable Building Program and Courses at The Endeavour Centre

More Trent University students may be able to eat locally-grown produce year-round at The Seasoned Spoon cafe, now that their subterranean earthbag root cellar is nearly complete.

This project is very unique, using local low-impact materials to create a food storage structure that will be able to house a range of vegetables at proper temperature and humidity levels year round, without energy intensive cooling or heating equipment.

Here is a complete set of progress photos, showing the building from start to finish:

Endeavour would like to thank the Seasoned Spoon for the chance to be involved with such a great project. Thanks also to Trent University for accommodating the build.

Tim Krahn of Building Alternatives was the adventurous and participatory structural engineer on the project, and Ben Parkes was the lead builder, with lots of help from Justin McKeiver and lots of volunteers.

We’ll post a final look at the root cellar when it’s all complete.

The Endeavour Centre has teamed up with The Seasoned Spoon Cafe at Trent University to build a buried root cellar for the over-winter storage of vegetables grown at Trent gardens and destined for yummy dishes in the cafe.

The walls of the building are made with earthbags. In this technique, a soil mixture that has good compaction qualities (lots of different sizes of aggregate and slightly moist) is placed into long polypropylene tubes and tamped in place. Also known as “flexible form rammed earth” this technique is just about the simplest, cheapest, most sustainable and most effective building techniques we use at Endeavour. While it requires a lot of grunt labour, it is satisfying work with immediate and satisfying results.

Once the building has its roof in place, the whole thing will be buried in the ground and will become a small, wildflower covered hill on the Trent campus, very close to the Seasoned Spoon. The earthbag arch entryway will be the only visible feature of the building.

Inside, the building will have both a damp and a dry room, for the storage of different vegetables. The dry room will be separated from the ground by a vapour barrier, while the damp room will have a floor that is not sealed from the ground beneath. The two rooms will be separated by a compressed earth block wall. Both rooms will be ventilated by earth tubes, which are long pipes buried deep around the building with an inlet that draws fresh air from outside and a solar fan that provides exhaust. The air in the tubes will be cooled to earth temperature in the summer and warmed to earth temperature in the winter, providing the root cellar with a fairly constant temperature of around 10C.

We will continue to post the progress of the root cellar as it moves toward completion.

If you are interested in volunteering on the root cellar, The Seasoned Spoon is relying heavily on volunteers to help with construction. You can contact us to find out more about volunteer opportunities.