The Memory Store: All the doors face east…

[Music]

[Image of Don Johnson and Terra Barrett standing in front of a hillside root cellar]

[Don Johnson standing inside the doorway of a hillside root cellar]

Don Johnson: Also as part of our initiative for Tourism Elliston, we have advance green energy, which we have resources where we can show people how to build a root cellar.

We did research with old people, the old guys, who built these cellars, and even now they say there’s a lot of things they could tell us about root cellars, the door is facing east, little things like that.

All the doors of the cellars usually face east where the winds won’t carry frost. These winds are storm winds, Westerlies, Easterlies, so they won’t bring frost, which is good in the winter. And it’s a moist wind.

So the only entrance to the cellar, you can see this sort of airlock. There’s an outer door and this inner door so you open the outer door, come in, close it, then open the inner door and come in. Half door keeps the rodents out, the outer door will have perhaps really low doors, and a bottom door that’s kept closed in the winter as ice builds up against it and then you don’t have to shovel every time you come, you can open the top door and step over.

All kinds of little tips like that we gathered in our research and all these little things we have the resource here, so if anybody wants to build a root cellar, we’re the come to people. 

[Image of two hillside root cellars]

[Music]