Well we have hot and humid here too but we also have basements - something I read isn't really possible in Florida, right? A corner of a basement can easily be converted to a root cellar. So in part, for you it simply may not be possible but anything you can do to isolate the produce from the heat such as some sort of insulated containers - like totes with foam on the outside - and anything you can do to reduce the humidity - like the use of desiccant packs, silica gel, even dried milk packs - will be of great help. Got a dark corner on the floor of a closet someplace? House on a concrete slab? That would be cooler. If all else fails, is it possible to dig a hole in the back yard or make a berm/soil mound with room inside for storage. Many root cellars are above ground. About all I can think of. Sorry. Dave

Liv2learn, mold needs two things, moisture in the form of condensation, and food. Pretty much anything will suffice for food. Gypsum and steel excepted. Moisture in the form of condensation is caused by basically, having a cold surface that water can condense on. If mold is not currently a problem in the basement, as long as the cold room is well insulated, vapour barriered and well ventilated, mold will not be a problem. You need to make sure that there is a vapour barrier on the warm side of the cold room. For the ceiling, that means 6 mil poly wrapped around the joists and across the underside of the floor, then out across the king studs and taped to the exterior foam sheathing. With out a vapour barrier, the insulation won't do much for keeping areas warm (R5 instead of R14 for example), and will provide that perfect surface for condensation and mold growth. For the walls, the foamboard on the warm side of the basement needs to have its seams glued and sealed, Tucktape or foil tape if mylar clad will do the job. That will provide a good vapour barrier. It's a good idea to wrap the kingstuds and rim stud, along with any studs that contact the wall, with 6 mil poly and pull it outside, (into the basement) and tape it to the foam to prevent air intrusion along the concrete and ceiling. Acoustic and vapour barrier mastic, ( a black, gummy caulk) laid in beads along these studs before they are installed will also help a lot. Spray foam injected into the interior door will help insulate it, but by the time you add up the costs of a proper door frame, weather stripping, spray foam, labour,....... well, I can get a cosmetic damaged exterior metal clad insulated door and frame, for $69, suitable for use anywhere in Canada but the high Arctic. Might have a dent in it, more likely the primer coat will have been scratched. Galvanised steel studs will still rust. The rust will start where the screws penetrate the galvanising and will rot them out in, (in housing terms) no time. 5- 10 years in a damp basement. Keep in mind as well that basements often flood. While floods will ruin carpet, wallboard, etc, they will not damage timber studs, metal studs however will be toast. Neglected in my prior posts was ventilation. You need 2" of passive, or 1" of active ventilation for roughly every 32 square feet (4' x 8'). Active ventilation is easy. All you need is a cold air inlet near the floor, and a hot air outlet near the ceiling. For an 8' x 8' cold room, the easy way to do it is drill two 2" holes through the sill plate to the exterior. Run a lenght of ABS or PVC pipe through these holes. For the hot line, run it from just outside the exterior cladding to just inside the foundation wall. Cut two small 2" circles of metal screening. Place them each inside a 90 degree elbow and glue one on each end of the pipe, inside and out with the elbow pointing down, so that the screen is wedged between the pipe and the elbow. The screens will keep out pests. On the inside, run just enough pipe from the 90 elbow down, to pass through the finished ceiling of the cold room. Do the same for the cold line, but run it from the inside foundation wall, almost to the end wall of the cold room. Add the screened 90 elbows. Then glue a pipe that almost reaches to the floor. Warm air will rise out the hot line, and cold air will flow in the cold line. Natural convection will power the ventilation system. Recycled Cotton batting (Denim batts) will do fine for the stud voids and joists, just make sure that on the inside and outside of the cold room you sheath the walls well. The one major drawback of cotton is that rodents find it to be an exceptional nest material. A lot of people think, well, I have a cat who is an excellent mouser,..... and while that is great for killing the resident rodents, it does nothing to repair the damage that the rodents made trying to nest. Trust me on this one. I had to replace all the wall insulation and ceiling insulation in a house due to rodent damage. In one 24" x 8' wall cavity, there was less than 24" of insulation left in the wall, after the mice had finished shredding it for nest material. Half of the walls and all of the ceiling were like that. A R20 house was left with essentually 0 insulation when the mice were done. Might as well have been a tarpaper shack.

Boy…time flew by and now in retirement and no honey bees with more time on hand…I’m finally finishing! I’ve added a extension (walk in) insulated the top half and protected with insulated tarp so no worries for damaging when back filling.. I’ll post some pictures later, I’m heaving trouble loading, haven’t been on this site for years.

One of my concerns about putting a vapor barrier down on the dirt floors in my old house's cellar has to do with the risk of creating a super-saturated zone right at the foot of my dry-laid walls (some rubble, some much more carefully selected and laid, but all w/o more than chinking mortar.) The vapor barrier, in my view, is there to stop the inexorable rising of water vapor from the soil. (It rises due to constantly changing atmospheric pressures that no one can do anything about.) Blocking it at the cellar-floor surface level won't stop it rising, but it could channel it all outward to the edges of the barrier. If the barrier is tightly sealed to walls (as it ought to be) then where does all that accumulated water vapor go? It seems to me it will create a lot of sogginess in the soil at a very bad place: where the foundation of my house rests on what I assume was undisturbed soil at the time of construction c 1845-ish. I think it's important to differentiate between free water that comes in during periods of high soil water or the result of poor local drainage from roofs, flooding, etc, and moisture that comes from rising soil moisture vapor. The free water part may be containable, managable, or mitigated, but soil moisture vapor is probably not something you can stop. Moisture arising from the soil in very old houses may be a natural phenomenon that we have lately defined as a problem, or that has become problematic because of material changes we have made to our buildings by installing central heat, insulation, double-glazing and even running water. It may also be that our expectations have changed to cause something previously deemed "normal" to be seen as a problem in need of action to eliminate. Before there was electricity and air-conditioning technology I doubt that people were much pre-occupied with removal of air-borne humidity by dehumidification. But the fact that we can do it, may now make us feel that we have to do it. I also disagree with the notion that keeping cellar rooms closed up during the warm months is the best course of action. I do see the logic that keeping warm, summer, moisture-laden air away from the soil-cool stones of a foundation avoids condensation on the walls. But I am less concerned with condensation coming from warm-air atmospheric moisture, than with venting soil moisture vapor to the outside of my building envelope. Old people around here who lived in old houses like mine have told me of the careful attention they paid to opening up the cellar and airing it out after the winter. Since most of them lived and worked on the farms they were at home to attend to this and paid close attention to the direction of the wind so to maximise the flow-through pathways by opening different windows, doors, etc. I practise this as much as possible and it results in a dryer cellar, even though I still get some condensation on the walls, especially in the early Spring. In the years when I can pay the most attention to active cellar ventilation, my cellar - and consequently the rest of my first floor - stay the driest. But it often takes multiple changes during the course of a day, and I have to have my whole outdoor cellar stairway open all the time (during the day, it's generally closed at night to avoid dew-laden night air), which many people couldn't or wouldn't do out of fear of intruders. My cellar walls show evidence of multiple layers of white-wash (quick-lime and water). This is an effective preventive, curative and aesthetic disguise for dampish stones. It does nothing to reduce humidity in the air (adds to it for a few days as it dries off), but it makes the cellar seem less grungy. I struggle with this issue, a good deal, because I think a lot of the best-advice from old house "experts" may not be the best for the building's long-term survivabality. Info dump: My house is located in northern, NY. Foundation as described above, otherwise timberframed, two-story, wooden structure with its original plaster walls intact. Wall cavities are mostly filled with two separate layers of backplastering on wooden lath. Two layers of 5/4" X 10" T&G sheathing with clapboards nailed on top. Slate roof. Still no central heat, though now only two modern, more-effective stoves rather the original 4-6. Electrified (but not in every room) just before WW II; minimal indoor plumbing installed in 1960. In short, a oddly long-term survival of 19th technology, which I am slow to alter. If you're going to put vapor barrier down, and going to the trouble of sealing it properly, you should use material specifically intended for the purpose, not construction poly. I haven't solved this problem to my satisfaction, yet. Lately, I have been thinking that I should undertake a more active course of observation (recording indoor and outdoor temps, humidity and wind direction and speed) along with a program of trial openings and closing to gather better information to form a more thought-out moisture vapor reduction program. (I expect this was all empirically known a hundred years ago, but even old timers now have forgotten the details, alas.) This summer has been dryer than normal so perhaps this would be a propitious time to start. There is a guy, an engineer, (located in eastern MA, I think) who owns an old house and he has basically sealed up his entire cellar walls and floors from within. I'm drawing a blank on his name, but a frequent poster, Worthy, often posts links to his work so if you search for Worthy's posts on this forum you should turn up the link. I have read this guy's writing on his website, but remain unconvinced that it's what I should do with my old building. I don't think he's a crank, or anything - and he may be right - but what he does is essentially non-reversible. That irreversability is what's stopping me. L.