Look to Your Cellars

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 29, 1872

Look to Your Cellars.

Those who have in charge the care of the household should frequently think of their cellars. No vegetables, except potatoes, should be stored in the cellar. Especially should cabbages, beets, celery, and turnips be excluded. A cellar should be thoroughly whitewashed at least once a year, and swept and put in order twice a month. The air in a properly kept cellar will not become impure when the weather becomes sufficiently cold to render necessary the closing up of the open windows, while on the other hand, the air of a cellar so closed up, which is untidily kept and filled with vegetables, some of them in a decayed state, may be well imagined. All cellars, however, should have the outside doors thrown open for an hour or two in mid-day, upon clear days, when the temperature is above the freezing point.

An excess of water, or too much dampness, in some instances arises from surface water, and in others from spring veins that crop out in the cellar. Sometimes the bottom of the cellar will often be covered with water.

The correct way to avoid a wet cellar is to lay a tile drain entirely around the outside of the excavation, nearly a foot lower than the bottom of the cellar, before the foundation walls are laid. But after an edifice has already been erected, and water appears on the cellar bottom, the most satisfactory way to render the bottom dry is to sink the channel nearly a foot deep entirely around the cellar close to the wall, and a course of drain-tiles in the bottom, which will cut off all water-veins, and thus render the cellar quite satisfactorily dry, by conducting the water into the tiles before it can work along toward the middle of the cellar.—Scientific American.