The morning meeting broke up with a decision to meet again after supper to hash out our postal plans. After all that was an important opportunity for us to grow and prosper, as such it would have a separate framework from the township itself. The hope was to leverage this into a multi-decade or even century-spanning revenue stream.
That was all for later. Next up, I was touring our root cellars and food warehouse. I was stunned to learn that we had an actual warehouse, quite a large one at that. It was an earth covered long house and it was pretty damn big; it included root cellars dug out underneath at the edges to store the various vegetables separately by storage need.
The crude foundation was made from clay bricks to prevent water damage and keep out most pests, the rest was structured from young trees bound together to form the ribs. The building was layered in sapling staves and finally covered with sod. Small windows dotted the walls to allow in whatever light was available. Of course all of the windows lacked glass but they had functional shutters to keep out the worst of the winter. This was all explained to me before I ever stepped foot inside that impressive building.
There were open areas on each side of the warehouse set up for sorting, curing and prepping the food for storage. There were ten women and kids deep in the business of preparing an incredible amount of root vegetables for storage while two men operated crude two-wheel carts. Hand carts were being used to move the food into and out of the warehouse and halfway through my tour/tutorial a freight wagon filled with barrels and clay pots pulled up. It was a load of salted meat, sauerkraut and clay jugs of eggs preserved in lime water.
I was blown away by the variety and amount of foods we had stored, my limited knowledge of food preservation came from old family recipes and woodsman/survivalist guides. Basically I knew next to nothing in the art of long term food preservation. Heck, I didn’t even know you could pickle fruit!
The tour finally took me inside so I could see the actual stores, up until that point all I knew were the calculated numbers of how many weeks for how many people at what consumption level. Apparently I had given Sonya and her little crew far too much processing power because I was being buried in statistics and charts on a weekly basis. At that point it was projected that we had 30 weeks at moderate food consumption. That meant a lot of food when you considered how much each of those almost 200 people needed in a single, normal day.
The warehouse itself had large doors at front and back, big enough for a wagon to pull into if necessary. Side doors half-way down the long Quonset hut looking building were large enough to allow a hand cart to enter. The entire building was lit by tallow oil lamps hanging just above head height down the center aisle, giving off a meager light even during the daytime. Sconces were built into the walls for use at night but for the most part the entire area was cloaked in darkness excepting the main aisle and the office which sat in the middle.
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The office itself wasn’t much to look at, it had shuttered windows and was basically mud slathered over small logs making up the walls. It was enough for now and would keep a person working or standing watch warm. There was no serious thought given to warming the entire warehouse although there were several charcoal braziers installed in the main aisle to use for warmth during the worst of days.
Those braziers were also where the cats were fed and watered, although truth be told the cats weren’t fed too much and only once after morning had broken. A cat who isn’t hungry won’t hunt and if our warehouse cats didn’t hunt and eat the critters our grain was all but done for. So the policy was simple, feed them a small meal of raw meat in the morning before they slept for the day and let them hunt at night. They were fat and healthy cats.
A full half of the warehouse was stacked bags of grain of all sorts; we had harvested and bagged what we could of our own crops; the rest had been purchased on our supply runs down south. I spent a lot of money prepping for the winter and grains were a big part of it. To feed almost two hundred people a half pound of grain products every day it would require at least two bags a day.
The remainder of the warehouse was full of barrels and jars of goods that didn’t need to be kept cool but could withstand freezing. They hoped to avoid freezing temperatures inside the warehouse but that was no reason to push our luck. Salt, tallow, lard, dried meats and other such didn’t care about being frozen; salted meats could handle it as well.
The tour from that point moved on to the root cellars, there were four of them and each met different requirements.
The first cellar was the cool and very moist storage for potatoes, carrots and most other root vegetables. They were all sorted into crates and woven baskets stacked or placed on shelves in a very orderly manner. If additional moisture was needed a pot of water with heated rocks could be placed in the room to create steam without raising the temperature.
The second cellar held vegetables and goods requires cool, dry storage such as onions, garlic and certain preserved meats. Meats such as sausage and curing hams.
The final two cellars were for fruit one moist and cool, the other dry and cool. Fruit absolutely could not be stored with vegetables.
There were a few weird outliers such as sweet potatoes, those were simply stored elsewhere.
The most amazing point of the entire setup was that each of the communal lodges had much smaller versions of the same thing attached. Each holding enough food to keep fifty people fed for a week in the event of blizzard or true calamity.
I began to feel pretty damn good about our winter preparations at that point.