Here’s an interesting project by Chris Magwood and crew. They used a steel quonset hut to build a large earth sheltered root cellar in Canada.
“Our 2013 project at Circle Organic farm involved constructing a large, root cellar-style vegetable storage facility attached to the vegetable processing barn. Our research showed us that small subterranean root cellars have a long history, but that the principle has not been applied on a larger scale. Julie and Andrew at Circle Organic want to be able to store a number of different root crops on a scale that would allow them to run their CSA (community shared agriculture) program year-round.
More at Endeavour Centre.org
Huge: barn, gothic greenhouse, and root cellar. Sweet place!
There are a number of documented quonsets straight up buried/sheltered. Wish I could afford one, instead I just get to torch a bin down the middle, roll it onto a trailer, and flip it on it’s side. The joy of being impoverishedly creative.
Owen is correct that concrete cloth is very expensive.
The far more economical version is to use ferrocement to accomplish the same thing. It’s drastically cheaper, but it will take longer to build.
Yet another proof of the time proven axiom.
Good, Fast, Cheap — Pick two and only two of those options.
Couldn’t they get the same effect a lot cheaper with chicken wire or almost any other kind of mesh and light concrete?
Yes, that would be ferrocement. Apparently they figured the extra expense of the cement cloth was a better choice than doing ferrocement.
Concrete cloth? what is that? something they made or is it a commercial product?
It’s a commercial product — very expensive concrete impregnated cloth.
They could have saved a lot of time and effort by buying a thicker steel quonset hut.