aka_peggy, I'm smiling with joy for you at such a wonderful find! I read through the Bubel's book late last winter and it really opened my mind to food storage and year-round gardening. In fact, I am greatly increasing my fall/winter garden this year thanks to the book. Meanwhile my wife and I are making plans to build a root cellar in the next few years. Of course, since we live in Oklahoma, it will double as a storm shelter:) One thing I learned from the book is that different foods have different requirements in temperature and humidity. Since I live in zone 6/7 most of the root vegetables which require moist and cool conditions should stay fine right in the ground. Therefore, I'm planning my cellar more towards the warmer, dryer type storage for nuts, seeds, garlic, onions, and winter squash. Lastly, my best advice is to read the book in its entirety before you do a single thing to that wonderful discovery of yours. The book will help you design in the changes you really want...BTW, I'm still grinning.

When you say one 3 inch is adequate...but then when you say placed on opposite corners?...how can you when you have only one? I was speculating on why you wanted two intakes. I don't know much about rooet cellar ventilation. I was thinking in terms of oxygen and survival. It seems root cellar ventilation can involve several issues such as humidity control, temp control and ethylene evacuation. I would guess the 4 inch vents would better cover your bases with an option to constrict the flow if necessary or fan assist as previously mentioned. I still don't understand why the intake needs to be larger. In the case of a fan assist exhaust larger intakes would make sense. I hope you are using a LOT of properly spaced rebar in the concrete roof. That's a major load and the roof has to be designed as a beam. Standard floor slab designs won't work. Or are you using an arch?? You must me living in a tinder dry climate that a shelter is needed Most of the time it is beautiful here. However we have experienced a couple of major fire storms in the last decade. When the winds shift and come off the desert the consequences to dry brush can be rather dramatic.. First I built a water resevoir with a fire pump, hydrants and external water spray system which took me about two years. Now the shelter/root cellar or perhaps shelter/wine cellar:) Zeuspaul

I like Seedmama's suggestion if you don't mind doing the upkeep on the grapes. They'd need regular pruning and might need occasional spraying to prevent some of our common grape problems like anthracnose. If you want to shade it with something that is somewhat easier to maintain, we have ours covered by several "Madame Galens" trumper creeper vines. In the summer they are just a big mound of green with orange flowers. I do have to trim the vines back from the door about every other week so that the door can be opened quickly in the event a tornado threatens, but that only takes a minute. After the trumpet creeper loses its foliage in fall, I cut it all back to the ground and heap mulch on top of the ground to keep winter weeds from sprouting there. I love the big green mound of foliage in summer. People don't even realize there is a tornado shelter under there until you show them the door. If you have the kind of soil where trumpet creeper runs wild, you might want to go with a less aggressive vine like American Cross Vine. In our soil, and because we mow regularly in the area near the tornado shelter, the trumpet creeper hasn't gone wild and tried to put out runners or shoots and take over the whole yard. I think it is likely that the regular droughts keep it under control too. I have it growing in very dense red clay and I don't water it or fertilize it. It grows like gangbusters. I am afraid if I did water it or feed it, the vine would swallow up the house, garage, garden shed and greenhouse, all of which are nearby. I've also seen some people really landscape on at least three sides of their in-ground tornado shelters, putting in rock gardens, cactus gardens, perennial beds or annual beds filled with flowers. I think you should do whatever you feel will fit in with your landscape and will be low-maintenance. If you don't like the way it looks after it is done, you can just wait for the next drought to burn up everything and then you can try something else. That's how I garden here. If something survives, it stays. These days, plant survival is a lot harder than it used to be just a decade or so back. Dawn

Being a 61 year old born and raised Okie, from my view, I've seen the interest in storm cellars change over my lifetime. Growing up in the 50's and 60's, our family always had a cellar ( or a " fraidy hole " ) as my Grandmother called them. And we spent a lot of time in the cellar. My Grandfather worked for the Carter Oil company in Seminole ( which eventually became Exxon ) . He moved there around 1930 when the Seminole oil field was booming. Back then, the oil companies would build camps for their employees to live, because there was no housing, and the Carter Oil camp had two big concrete cellars installed by the company. One of them right next to my Grandad's house. But everybody had access. Then when he retired and moved into Seminole, he had a cellar built . On stormy evenings, my parents would take us to Grandad's and we spent the entire evening there, with my Grandad watching the clouds. Our warning system consisted of the men of the Seminole Civil Defense, who would take positions out on the outskirts of town and watch for tornados and would give word to blow the sirens. Some neighbors would show up and it became a social event as everyone chatted and passed the time. Around late 70's , my parents built their own cellar, but also that was the time when TV warnings were getting much better. They started using radar. And in my adult life, up till now, I'd never thought a cellar was a good investment because the warnings kept getting better and better. From other people I've talked with, they did the same, and houses with cellars become fewer than back in the 1940's and 1950's. My plan had always been to leave the house and go to a sheltered place, like Crossroads Mall. But after the debacle last May 31, when I got caught in traffic because everyone else had decided to get out of the storm's path, I then decided I needed a shelter. Its like we've come full circle, from a time that lack of any warning made a cellar almost a necessity, to warnings making cellars less important, to a time when the warnings are so good, we need a shelter again. This post was edited by LCDollar on Thu, Jan 23, 14 at 20:16