Sometimes our lives are quiet, like reading a local newspaper front to back without looking at the headlines, just reading about what happened to who, day after day.  And sometimes our lives are like headlines and more headlines with no time for details, no time for the articles, no time for who’s who, just go and go and go.

Slowly I’m moving toward a more quiet life, and I’d like to reflect that here on dragonwood.org.  I have succeeded to some extent… the snick! of firewood splitting isn’t so very loud after all.  Our headlines are smaller and more local, terrifically important to us, but hardly momentous. I’d like to think that the headlines of our lives are quieter but more important, messages that set a mood for a period of time, or reflect the mood around us for a season, for a phase we’re in, or just for a spell.

The photo banners at the top of the site are our headlines now, the headlines of our life together, of the seasons of Dragonwood. They tell of our doings or local happenings, or they tell of what surrounds us here, what captivates this moment in Dragonwood time.  Mandy carries her camera out and captures the action, or I pause with my little phone camera and capture a random moment… and a banner appears.

Autumnal Asparagus

Right now it’s late autumn (late because the leaves are mostly down, and mostly not raked up) and the brightest colors are mostly past.  But as we step out our back door toward the garden, on bright crisp afternoons, we are treated to a tiny pyre of bright yellow flames where the asparagus patch has caught fire.  The colors vary with the sun angle, from fiery yellow and gold to damp bedraggled yellow matter custard.  And it’s hard to catch it with the camera, hard for the camera or the eye to find focus and produce an image that shares its feeling.

But in this banner, I managed to catch not just the color of the lacy fronds, but there in the folds a single autumn leaf cradled in the fragile arms of this wondrous vegetable.  Suspended in time, representing this short season of Dragonwood, when quinces smell up the porch (and kitchen), and the last of the cider is being pressed, and the younger chickens and kittens are wondering about the chill in the air, this one browning leaf is kept from blowing away, kept in these thin woven arms, held for me.

Banners of our seasons, seasons of our lives, lives at Dragonwood, lived daily with eyes open wide.

Someone commented to me last night, “Well, so the garden is finished now, right? You’re not getting anything much out of it anymore?”

There is so much. We are so fortunate to still be pulling so much fresh food out of the garden for most meals. I guess, sometimes it’s hard to see beyond tomatoes, basil, potatoes, and zucchini, and recognize what’s still there when they’re gone.

So here’s what we’re still harvesting:

Brussels Sprouts… my favorite at this time of year. They are so good after a couple frosts, and just very lightly cooked until they are bright green. Dress with butter, some chopped chervil, parsley or dill, or balsamic vinegar.

Oh, the chervil, parsley and dill come from the garden still. And green onions. And thyme and sage.

Broccoli (little tiny florets “pre-cut”).

Celery. Beets.   Leeks…tons of leeks.  Radiccio.  Cabbage.  Carrots. Still have some potatoes to dig, just a few.

Parsnips and Rutabega. There are some Turnips there, but have been harvesting greens from them more than liking the roots.

Greens: (Our house salad mix is currently lettuce-free, as the voles ate ALL of several plantings of lettuce)…Mizuna, Chard, Kale of several types, Mustard greens, Arugula, Spinach, Beet greens

Corn salad is coming along, not ready quite yet.    Found a couple self-seeded Radishes.

There is still so much in the garden.

Friday the 13th:  We know now that we’ve been losing chickens this week.  About 10.  About one a day, since about when the leaves fell.  We’ve seen the hawk several times.  This morning I got up early and when it was light walked out in the morning mist.  The weeds and branches were softer in the fine rain, and didn’t cling to me so much as yesterday.  I found three spots, as though visiting shrines on a pilgrimage, where a sad soft cloud of feathers on the ground marked a chicken loss.  The cobwebs dripped teardrops when I brushed them.  And the complicated interwoven circle of life goes on.

Discovering membrillo has been a revelation.

Quince Paste - Membrillo

We found out about it when we were researching what to do with our quince harvest a couple years ago. Quinces are hard, tart, and astringent raw, but cooked they soften and sweeten, and when cooked down, they magically turn from dun yellow stuff to clear, rosy red.

Membrillo is quince paste. Think of some meeting of fruit leather, jelly beans, and apple butter. The flavor is mild and flowery, but in appearance, it looks like a slab of organ meat. The traditional way of serving it in Spain is sliced with manchego cheese as a snack. We do the same with it, but also love it tucked into a hot popover with butter, sliced on toast, or just by itself.

quince pieces and cores ready for cooking

see the pectin-rich goo around the seeds?

We made membrillo by starting with the quinces, washed, and cut up. Most recipes say get rid of the cores, but I noticed that the cores seem to have a huge amount of pectin in them, which I wanted. (Pectin makes things gel!) So I boiled the best cores in a little pan and added that water to the big pot.

The cut-up quinces go into a pan with a little water, and brought to a boil. They cook until the fruit is soft and can be mashed easily.

processed, ready for second cooking

Drain off excess water, add the little bit of water the cores cooked in, and run the fruit through a food processor until it is a smooth yellow applesauce-y consistency.

Now, according to most recipes, the sauce is measured, and an equal or nearly equal amount of sugar (by volume) is added. I sweeten it by taste instead, and usually end up using 1/2 to 2/3 the sugar recommended.

This all goes into a heavy-bottomed saucepan (pick one that reduces jams and jellies easily, without burning!). Now comes the part that requires a fair bit of patience. The sauce is cooked over medium-low heat, stirring often to nearly constantly, until it thickens, loses moisture, and turns into a lovely shade of merlot red. If you leave it to cook on its own, it will burn to the pan!! It will begin to move and bubble slowly like lava, with steam-holes bursting through, and throwing red bits around your stove, or up to your ceiling, if the heat is too high!

When it’s thickened about until you can swipe the spoon through it and see the bottom of the pan for a moment, or it’s starting to hold shapes you stir into it, it’s ready. Have ready some lightly buttered pans (or line with parchment paper and butter over it). Pour the sauce into the pans, to about an inch thick or less, and smooth the top. Leave this to cool undisturbed at room temperature, and surprise! It magically solidifies into a gel that slides easily out of the buttered pan, and can be cut into squares or wedges. (This year…we’re going to try cutting into small squares and chocolate-covering it…) Another bonus - a big batch can be made and stored in the fridge, well-wrapped, for literally months.

Cooked down and ready to pour

membrillo setting up

We are blessed with a quince tree in the back yard.

It blooms with beautiful white flowers in the spring, and by fall, if it’s a good year, the branches are weighed heavily by fuzzy yellow fruit.  This year was a great year for the quince tree!

We picked quinces a week or two ago on a rainy day when our raincoats exactly matched the color of the fruit.

Quinces are an intriguing fruit that looks like a combination between a yellow apple and a pear.  But if you bite into one raw, the high level of tannins make you feel like the insides of your cheeks are trying to adhere to your tongue!  They need to be cooked……next post!

I do enjoy splitting wood.  I do, I do, I do believe.  It’s good for me physically — it takes about an hour average to split enough for two winter days.  It’s good for the environment, too.  Our use of the wood stove probably saves us about two tanks’ worth of propane each winter, about 5-600 gallons.  That’s a fair bit of fossil carbon not going into the atmosphere, replaced by a renewable biofuel.  Good for our pocketbook… that propane costs real dollars.  Our cost is about 1-2 gallons of gasoline for the chain saw, plus another gallon or so of chain bar oil.  So I like everything about burning our own locally gathered wood.

But this is about splitting wood.  I have a friend who avoids splitting wood if he can.  His woodpile is neatly stacked with thousands of pieces of wood no more than 4 inches in diameter, 16″ or so long, just right for shoving into his little stove.  If it’s big enough to require splitting he just doesn’t bother with it.  Or rarely, at least.  His philosophy is simple:  “Work less”.  Splitting is work, no doubt.  And he avoids it.  To be fair, we’ve worked together at family ash tree fellings, and he surprised me with the fervor of his swinging of the maul and working around the edges of huge ash slices (3-4 feet diameter, 18″ thick), slabbing off wonderful broad wedges of the ash, just right for the stove (some require resplitting they’re so wide, but only 2-3 inches thick).  So it’s not that he isn’t good at splitting, he just prefers not to.

What I really like about splitting is what my friend avoids:  the challenge.  Some days I just want to get some wood split and onto the rack, but other days I savor the challenge.  On the savory days, I start with some easier logs to get warmed up and build my confidence.  Then I move into the knottier pieces that I know will give me trouble.

Obstreperous ash and elm splits.

Yesterday was a savory day splitting wood.  I currently have a small pile of logs ready for splitting next to my splitting stump, collected from an ash tree we felled a couple weeks ago and some elms I sliced up just after that.  I set the biggest and knottiest ones at the bottom of the pile then, and have been slowly working down to them since.

So I started with some of the elm.  These are elms that have been dead for several years, dead of Dutch elm fungus but still standing.  When they fall down, or are leaners in the forest, I take them down the rest of the way.  Elms are great, they give you lots of 3-5″ sticks that don’t need splitting from their long tapering branches, and the wood is strong and stiff.  My friend would approve.  But when elm needs splitting, you’re in trouble.  Elm has an incredibly twisty grain, where one strand will wrap 30 or 40 or even 60 degrees around inside a 16″ piece.  The strands almost seem to weave a 3D fabric-like interior, making them terrible to split with a maul.

But if you let elm season in the forest before you harvest, it gets wormy.  Elm perfectly seasoned this way has just enough worm/larva trails running through the wood to make it split really nicely, but the wood is still quite hard and ready to burn. Less seasoning than this, and you’re in trouble trying to split it by hand.

So I started out with a couple elm pieces that were more than seasoned.  In fact, the first one had a wormy core that was a goner.  I kept the nicely seasoned outer couple inches, but the core was light and falling apart, so I tossed it over the fence.  The second one was smaller and just about perfect, with some incipient splitting already apparent on the log end.  Snick!  One stroke splits it in two.  Snick! Snick!  Four perfect quarters, and a warm spot in my heart.

That was the end of the easy logs… I’m nearing the bottom of my pile.  So next I went for two 12 inch diameter ash logs.  The other ash logs of this size had been near the top of my pile and had split easily early.  These went to the bottom because they were knotty, at least three good knots on each.  You can’t just go through the middle of fresh ash this size (or bigger).  My friend’s ash splitting technique of working around the edge is the only way, and makes an impossible job fun.  But with knotty ash, the edges are no more fun than the middle.  The grain weaves elm-like around the knots, and refuses to yield.  Our ash is not well seasoned, of course… the Emerald Ash Borer beetles went through our stand just a year or two before we moved into Dragonwood, killing all the ashes bigger than 3″ diameter.  And this ash was 60 feet tall and still standing strong until a couple weeks ago.  No leaves at all this summer, so it’s finally fully dead, but not seasoned in the least.

I line up and pause for zen centering, envisioning the Snick! as my maul dives through the log.  I see the maul traveling all the way through the ash, knocking a nice spall off from the edge.  I wiggle my toes and settle my stance once more, then swing my 6 pound splitting maul back, and around and down hard and fast on the log.  The log is upright about 16″ above ground level, perched on my splitting stump, and inside an old tire.  The stump puts my ash log just about at waist level, perfect for my swing, and the tire helps steady the ash.

This is obstreperous wood.  Noisily and defiantly stubborn wood.  I swing fast and hard and my aim is right on, but I am disappointed.  It’s a loud one; the log and the stump reverberate with the stroke… the chickens pause momentarily, having forgotten for a moment that I was splitting wood nearby.  But my modest maul buries only a quarter inch. I have made a small dent, without a hint of the fracturing that is needed for a split.  It is flatly impossible to dent your way through a log… it must split, fracture between the strands of the grain, find its own path of least resistance through the wood.  Your job as splitter is not to force a new path but to find the path that already exists, the one that has grown into the grain, that has been there from the beginning, waiting for you to find it.  I have not.

There is tremendous pleasure in finding the fracture that has been waiting for you all these years.  Tremendous pleasure indeed when it is found on the first stroke.   The seasoned elm gave me that pleasure, and warmed me to this task.

About six noisy, reverberant strokes later, I have one small fracture appear.  It is a splintery mess, looking more elm-like than ash-like, but it is a fracture.  Three more good strokes and I almost have it… a dowdy 4 inch wide spall down the edge of the log, held in place at the bottom by wrapping around a 1″ knot.  That branch stub is stubborn, and I have to work to get this scrawny, 1″ piece of ash loose and into the pile.  But it’s a start.

That log was obstreperous, but I burned some more of it this morning.  I see a split of it here next to me in the wood bucket, a nice split with a centered 2″ knot about half way down.  The top of the split facing me has no fewer than nine minor dents where the log refused to recognize my maul’s annoying tapping.  That ratio seems about right.  That log and the next several that filled my barrow took about 10 maul strokes per split, and the splits are splintery and “ugly” (see pic).  Nothing pretty about them.

My last three logs were my favorites of the day.  The first was an elm that I cut down two years ago, and couldn’t split at that point, so I gave up and set it aside to season.  Last year I tried again, and got no further in our negotiations.  Yesterday it succumbed to my reasoning, with perhaps even less resistance than I expected.  I love burning elm, it catches quickly and heats up the stove fast.

The last two were “Woodies”.  We have a friend Woody who has an enormous wood stove that can burn anything.  Woody shows up with his truck at family tree downing events, and takes all those impossibly resistant forked logs and pieces with 8″ knots that can’t be mauled or wedged or dented.  And welcome to them.  I had four woodies that I had set aside in earlier weeks when I could no longer spall anything off the edges of these knotty pieces, and they were too big for our stove.  But yesterday was special, and after tackling the hard part of the pile, I went after two of the woodies and found the fractures that had been waiting for me these 30 years or more.

Thud!  Thud!  Bonk!  Thud!  Snick!

I love splitting wood.