In Search of Inner Timber

We are building a hand-tooled timber frame structure.  When I say "we" I mean that Josh B. is masterminding the operation and the rest of us are eagerly measuring, squaring, marking out, sawing, drilling, chiseling and generally being in awe of this project.

Josh is a talented man.  At the Farm School, he's our program director, but he's also a stonemason, a chef, a carpenter, a disciple of the Grateful Dead, and has about as much energy as a person could possibly have.  This will be the ninth timber frame structure he's built.  It'll be a classroom and living space that will attach to the end of our currently existing tool shed on the farm.  Here's one of the plan drawings:

In our initial workshop, Josh handed us a glossary of terms, some of which I will now share with you, gentle reader:

Post and beam: A structural system whereby floor and roof loads are carried on principal timbers that may be merely stacked and fastened with hardware or may utilize timber joinery.

Joinery: The shaping of timbers where they mate to fasten or lock them.

Sills: Timbers that tie the bottom of the frame and distribute its weight along the foundation.

Tenon: The reduced end of a timber that fits into a mortise.

Mortise: The cavity that accepts the tenon. 

Square rule: A system of layout in which a smaller, perfect timber is envisioned within a rough outer timber; all joints are cut to this inner timber.  Many timbers in a Square Rule frame are interchangeable.

Rafters: The timbers spanning from eave to ridge to which the roof sheathing is attached.

Joist: The spanning timber that the floor is attached to.

Brace: A diagonal timber or a temporary piece of lumber that prevents distortion in a frame.

The wood is white pine from trees felled on the farm and milled down to size on the sawmill.  The sills, posts and beams are very heavy eight by eight by sixteen inch pieces.  With time, we'll also be milling the remaining pieces: floor and ceiling joists, rafters, braces, etc:

And into the greenhouse we go to set up our work area:

We will use no hardware.  The joinery will all fit together like puzzle pieces.  Here are the tools of the trade:

And finally, action!

I'm finding this work to be incredibly meditative.  The tunes are going, it's warm in the greenhouse, and everyone is working in companionable silence.  I feel a little bit like Michelangelo, holding my mallet and chisel and helping to create something that will eventually be a work of art.  Okay, that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea.  On the second day of work, the sun began to set and we were having a hard time seeing what we were doing. But nobody wanted to leave.

Tomorrow's another day.

Thanksgiving

In honor of Thanksgiving, I'm going to write about our recent turkey and chicken slaughters.  These have been pretty intense experiences for one who has never killed an animal before.  Although I'm not a big meat eater, I do eat poultry, and I was determined to participate.  After all, if I'm going to continue to eat meat, I want to be connected to the path that the animal follows to get to my dinner table.

If you get queasy about this stuff, now is the time to stop reading. Sorry.

The turkey slaughter happened several weeks ago, on the day of the huge October snowstorm.  The birds were enormous and numbered about twenty.  People were set up at a series of stations to perform the tasks that needed to be accomplished. First, the turkey is taken out of the pen by the feet and placed upside down in a metal cone with its head sticking out the bottom.  With a very sharp knife, the head is severed with one swipe and the blood drained into a bucket. Although now officially dead, the bird convulses for about thirty seconds. It is then placed in scalding water to loosen the feathers and transferred to a mechanical feather remover, which essentially looks like a giant salad spinner. Then the bird is placed on a table for butchering, which includes removal of the feet, neck, intestines, and internal organs.  Last stop is the kitchen, where it's submerged in ice water, cleaned more thoroughly, and frozen.

I was amazed at how quickly it happened.  Before I knew it, the birds looked like something you'd get in the grocery store.  I spent time performing each task that I described, with the exception of the actual killing.  I didn't think I was quite prepared to do it swiftly and competently, and I was content to watch and learn from others.

Fast-forward two weeks to the culling of the laying hens.  I should note that I really like the chickens. Their clucking, scratching, funny behaviors, and ceaseless laying of delicious eggs has endeared me to them.  Nonetheless, I knew that I needed to fully take part in processing this time around.  Very few of us in the group had ever done this before and there was a lot of nervous energy.

I did what I never thought I would do: slaughter a chicken.  I focused on ensuring that my cuts were clean and swift, making it as humane as possible.  As a group, we were all business, doing what needed to be done even though it was difficult.  That day we made twenty gallons of organic chicken stock.

I did this together with thoughtful, respectful people, faculty and student farmers alike.  And, unlike with the pigs and cows, which have to be sent to the slaughterhouse, we were able to see these animals through to the end right on the farm.  I found a lot of comfort in the notion that we had control over the manner and humaneness of their deaths.  Will I do it again?  I don't know, but if I plan to keep chickens for eggs, I need to know how to "dispatch" an old or sick animal.  Now I do.

Autumn on the Farm

Garlic planting

The farmhouse

Cow chores!

Horsing Around

Ah, Vermont in the late autumn. Unseasonably warm, sunny weather. Two days on Fair Winds Farm working with gorgeous, majestic Suffolk Punch draft horses.

Jay (pictured above) and Janet Bailey run draft horse workshops on their mostly animal-powered, organic farm in Brattleboro.  They have a small farm store on site and sell at the local farmers market, producing organic eggs and goat milk products. They keep chickens, sheep, goats, and pigs. They also offer sleigh rides in the wintertime on trails that wind through the woods on their forty acres. They've been working with draft horses for over 30 years, and currently have six of them.  We worked with four: Charlie, Robin, Nora, and Martin.  We spent the first hour guiding each other around using twine as reigns...definitely a throwback to childhood, but incredibly instructive and very helpful when we actually started driving the horses. Then, they familiarized us with the horses by having us lead them through an obstacle course of buckets.  Here's Keith as he leads Charlie around. Don't get stepped on!

Next step: properly harness the horses.  A metal brush is used to groom them first...this removes any dirt which might chafe under the leather and injure them, and it's a nice way to bond with the animal and get ready for the work day ahead.  They really like it.  Then the harness, hames, collar, and bridle get attached.  These horses have been so well-trained that they made it easy for us.  Below, Anna prepares to put on the harness and hames.

Over the next day and a half we learned how to give voice commands - Come Up (go), Whoa (stop), Back (back up) Haw (left), Gee (right) -  and steer with the lines, attach the farm equipment, and understand the work it takes to operate a farm with these horses. We spent a blissful amount of time on the wagons and carts riding through the pastures and woods while each one of us got practice time with the horses.  And each day, Janet made an awesome lunch with food grown on the farm along with freshly-baked bread.

The farm is also part-museum.  There are rusty old pieces of equipment scattered around the out-buildings and the fields. But don't let the rust fool you...many of these pieces are fully operational.

http://www.fairwindsfarm.org/

Chainsaw Bill

If one is to run one's own farm, one must learn the safe operation of one's chainsaw.

Let me tell you that I had no idea that learning to use a chainsaw was part of the curriculum, so I was a little nervous.  Rumors floated around about a high school driver's ed-style blood and guts video detailing the horrors of clueless, untrained chainsaw operators.  People also referred to the course instructor as 'Chainsaw Bill', which brought to mind visions of Freddy Krueger and Jason from Friday the 13th. 

'Chainsaw Bill' turned out to be veteran logger Bill Girard from The Game of Logging, which, according to the organization's website, is "widely acknowledged as the premier timber harvesting training program in the country, offering hands-on training in a competitive environment. Top instructors across the country combine demonstration with participation to teach safety, productivity, conservation and cutting techniques."  The course most definitely lived up to that description.

Bill with the students

Bill (in Kevlar gear), instructing Todd and Phil

Over the next three days, he led us through a series of lessons on everything you ever wanted to know about chainsawing: personal protective equipment, safety checks, maintenance, sharpening, the five-point tree felling plan, spring pole release, limbing, and bucking firewood.  I appreciated how hard core he was about safety.  In the end there was no scary video, but he had about a million stories of people who have been impaled, eviscerated, decapitated, maimed, lacerated, who have bled out from internal injuries, suffered permanent head injury, received dozens of stitches, and have become alcoholics because they couldn't work any more. He peppered these stories throughout the three days of the workshop, just to keep things extra entertaining.

In the end, he inspired confidence and was a patient, kind teacher...I became fairly comfortable running the saw.  I gotta say it helped that he was standing right next to me to make sure I didn't wind up in the ER.  Thanks, Bill!


Watch as I fell a tree:

October Snowstorm

The day dawned cold and gray.  You could sense snow in the air, especially if you had just watched The Weather Channel.  Twelve inches?  Really?  "That's crazy...those weather guys always blow things out of proportion," thought the student farmers.  But, because it's always good to be prepared, their fearless leaders, Stephen and Tyson, scheduled an emergency vegetable harvest. After all, it was the last week of the season for the farmers' market and CSA distribution; it just wouldn't do to have the rutabagas buried under a foot of snow, snug and comfortable, yet inaccessible.

Things did not start well for student farmer Liz.  The flakes had just begun to fly when Stephen instructed her to start picking and bundling radishes.  Under normal circumstances, she thought that radishes were beautiful red orbs that would look as good on a Christmas tree as they would on a salad.  But today, picking them meant cold, wet, numb fingers and knees.  Manual dexterity was reduced to zero as the temperature plummeted and heavy snow began to pile up.

Next up: rutabagas. Now the snow was accumulating quickly. The task was to pull up every plant in the field, box it, and get it to the barn before the produce was buried alive.  What a site to see! A blur of white (snow), green (veggies), and brown (dirt) moving through the fields at record speed.  By the time the sun set, over 400 pounds of rutabagas had been harvested by the group of six.

Liz arrived home anticipating a hot shower and a warm meal.  Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans.  The weight and volume of fifteen inches of early season snow overwhelmed trees and power lines and the electricity went out. Little did she know that power wouldn't be restored until 72 hours later.

She experienced a small crisis of confidence and wondered to herself, "Am I hearty enough to be a farmer?  Has a student farmer ever died from hypothermia?" And most importantly, "What does a rutabaga taste like?"