What you see here are the remains of an orchard.

An orchard I drive by often, on the grounds of an empty house. Last year, on my drives, I watched as the trees blossomed in billows of white that sent apple-blossom fragrance through the car, watches as the apples ripened, fell unused to the ground, or clung to the branches after the leaves were gone, shrivelling as they froze. I thought a couple times of trying to track down someone who might be able to give me permission to gather and use the apples, as they were likely unsprayed, in their abandoned state.

Now, as winter draws to a close, the grounds of the house are filled with bulldozers. Other large trees on the property have been felled and bulldozed into piles, likely for burning at some point. I looked at the orchard with a sinking feeling in my stomach - surely they wouldn’t bulldoze it? Surely, someone would value a pretty, productive, beautifully laid out little orchard right in their backyard? Surely, a community would not bulldoze an asset that takes years to establish?

But no, the day came when on my drive by, the beautiful little apple trees had been hacked down to these trunk stumps. The stumps have sat like this for weeks now. They must be awaiting the bulldozer. The bulldozer sits quietly beside them. I wonder, why not just bulldoze them, then, and be done with it? Why leave it like a mockery to spring? Was it important to chop the tops off the trees before the buds begin to swell and look alive? Important to start the destruction before the blossoms break and create a reminder of what is being destroyed?

Someday, I am convinced, (some of) our decendants will look back on this time as we do upon historical times of misled thinking, and wonder at how it could have been so. How could a society condone bulldozing trees into piles to burn, rather than at least providing firewood to the community? How could they destroy a productive source of local fruit, then pay in so many ways to ship what they eat thousands of miles? How does this make sense? I am filled with sadness when I drive past this spot.

I wonder what they will name the subdivision. “Apple Acres”, perhaps.

I keep thinking of joining the Dark Days Challenge, but don’t quite. We make locally produced food (much of it our own) a feature of most meals already, rather than a feature once a week. I think our general approach is to eat mostly local food, and most of that is grown by ourselves, or someone closeby we know. But our effort seems to be put into having a significant part of almost every meal be local… rather than having limited times of being completely local.

Brunch today: (A sub-average one for us actually - it’s rare not to have some kind of homegrown vegetable, either in an omolette, or a side of cabbage or brussels sprouts…)

Sourdough bread using the recipe from Jeff Hertzberg, published in Mother Earth News, and using local flour. Eggs produced here at home; quince jelly we made from quinces that grew here. Butter, salt&pepper, and coffee were not local. Milk in coffee from a local source.

It fascinates me to see how many people are photographing their food, and their cooking processes in the kitchen. I feel drawn to do the same thing. When you grow and cook your own food, there is such wholeness to it, such wonder in it. I think it shows what a rediscovery it is, to want to document it.

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.

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.

We sold out of eggs in record time at yesterday’s market. We are so grateful to our clients - who are so happy with the eggs that you come back early and devotedly. We regret having to tell anyone we’ve sold out…. and yet, it is reminding us to consider that it is okay to be “just” a tiny producer.

We think this world would be a healthier place with lots more tiny producers. A small flock of chickens remains naturally healthier with lots of room to move around, with caregivers who know and recognize each one of them individually, with access to good wild food to eat. But there are limitations that come with being a tiny producer…. namely, accepting the ebbs and flows of nature, of normal chicken behaviour, of the effects of declining light, and the realities of the first-come, first-serve, early-bird-gets-the-worm policy! :)

And reality it is. In a sustainable world, there is not an unquestionable endless supply of boxed eggs like at the box store. Sometimes they are there, sometimes they are not. It is part of the lifestyle, the nature of living close to the earth, to celebrate gifts when they are abundant, and accept the seasonality of all things, including the egg.

One of the exciting reasons we have a few fewer eggs is that some of our hens became “setty” this summer, and wanted to stop laying, and brood eggs instead. When possible, we saved eggs with the most desirable qualities from the flock for a couple days and gave them to the broody hen. Three weeks later, this is the lovely result, if all goes well:

five tiny fluffy new home-hatched additions to the flock!