Strawberry Pear Locavore Mead

We came home the other day to find a bushel basket filled with pears, good honest lumpy little things with all the blemishes that come from growing naturally. Dad planted those trees going on twenty years ago, and now there are more pears than he can find uses for, so he thought we might find a use for them. Well, even more of a use than all of us snacking on them like crazy as long as they last.

Pears from Dad's trees next door at Mellow Hill!

We immediately thought of mead, since it has been five years or so since I made a batch of pear mead. Rather than add oranges like last time, we decided to provide the citrus fruit content with a pound of gorgeous strawberries from the local farmer's market. Rather than add tea from across the world, we used shaved red oak bark, which has become my standard tannic acid additive. Straight from our own firewood stock is as local as it gets! 

We haven't gotten our usual bulk honey from Swan's Apiaries in Unity, but did happen to have some even more local honey (from Sidney!) found at The Green Spot, a wonderful organic market in Oakland. So except for some spices, this a wonderfully locavore batch of mead. Here's how easy it was...

Pears being prepped for mead...

We peeled and diced about three pounds of pears and started them simmering in a large skillet. To this we added the pound of strawberries and just a bit of lemon juice to help bring out the flavor. While that was all softening, we started mixing up the honey with water. This part is easy too. All we do is pour out the containers of honey, ten pounds this time, which will make a bit over two gallons, into a large kettle. Then measure two and a quarter times that much of hot water, and add that, stirring to dissolve the honey. Our tap water is beautiful well-water, so just hot from the tap works fine. If you don't have that luxury, you may want to heat up some good water from a spring or well. The hot water makes sure that you get all the honey from inside the containers.  Water measured at 2 1/4 times the honey by volume gives you a good estimate of the right balance of sweetness for a good semi-sweet mead. (If you use a hydrometer, you could fine-tune it to between 16 and 17 percent potential alcohol.) 

Pears and strawberries make great mead...

By this time a potato masher squished the fruit up beautifully, and we added that to the must. Finally we grated in a couple of teaspoons off of a chunk of red oak bark using a fine grater. If you don't have this, instead add two teabags of a standard black tea. Then some spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger), and it all went into a brewing bucket with a bubbler set up. We made sure it was well below a hundred degrees fahrenheit, and added a packet of Cote des Blancs wine yeast from Red Star. That's it. Now we simply wait for the yeast to make so much alcohol from all that honey that it dies off, let the sediment settle, and in two to four months we'll bottle and cork it, getting close to a case of mead if all goes well. This is our fourth batch so far this year. After decades of mead-making, I feel like I know what works best, what I like the most, and definitely have some varieties that I know I will always make. Still, there's always room for growth, and our recent shift to very local ingredients is a very nice trend. It will be better for us, and supports our local beekeepers and farmers!

Men and Wood

If you have been reading right along, you already know that I have an affinity for wood. Trees are metaphor-rich, and I love metaphors. Some of my best childhood memories are about wood, from watching Dad build first a gunning float, and then a sailing dory, in our suburban basement when I was little, to building my teenage muscle by carrying anything I could of the trees he cut down for firewood, to earning minimum wage splitting enormous elm trunks by hand during one long and memorable summer. The memories are many, and powerful. 

Half your wood, and half your hay...

This winter, having a newly-enlarged family in the house, We've been going through more firewood, and that means cutting more firewood. That work has been lightened by having boys to help, and I am so very conscious that this work is my chance to help them gain similar memories, metaphors, and strengths of their own. Just as I remember my father teaching me how to spot cherry in a woodpile by the orange color of the heartwood as it seasons, how to measure out four feet quickly by waving the chainsaw over the log a certain way, how to bring down a snagged tree safely, I hope they remember decades from now these days of learning some of the same "guy-stuff" knowledge.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all on board with women doing heavy lifting and using power tools. It's just that working with wood is one of those few remaining arenas where men can almost always find common ground and a sense of shared humanity. In the last week three different men have stalled at the store, clearly not wanting to get back to their work or errands, because we got to talking about wood. Just today I spent a full hour talking about thermal mass, drafts, recirculating masonry-stove heat, and the relative merits of pellet stoves, with a man who obviously was thrilled to talk shop with another guy. Last Friday I spent a similar hour with a man who shares an interest in music with me, but who had never stayed so long to talk about guitars even though he is in the store nearly every week.

An ironwood sprig on the woodshed when it was new.

Last summer I spent one day with friends helping them cut and carry cedar logs for their planned cordwood masonry building project. It was gasping, back-wrenching, sweat-soaking work, and I felt like a dishrag afterward. But those few hours of grinning at each other through the flying wood-chips and mixed-gas smoke, joking while carrying logs too big to be exactly good for our backs, conferring about which way to drop a particularly tricky tree, all brought Ben and me much closer than we had been before. I eagerly await a next time, even as hard a day as that was. 

I wonder if there's something to the idea of a wood-centered workshop for men and boys, where those who know, share what they know, and those who are new to tools, trees, even to varieties of wood, can learn, and build their connection to nature and to their own manliness, which is really just one of the kinds of humanity if you think about it. Cut down a few trees, learn what it is to carry a tree-length log through the woods, get the smell of bar-and-chain oil in your hair, split a bit of firewood by hand, learn to identify the most common trees in your area, and then bask in the afterglow of all that work, leaning on the result of your work, still talking wood, trees, and stoves with the guys.

Perseverance

Years ago, I went on a motorcycle trip with my very good friend Johnny Bongo. We were both fairly new to the biking world, maybe a couple of years of local riding under our belts. Part of my own preparation involved trading in my classic beemer for a newer one (still not a NEW one, just not as ancient) because I knew that my wrenching skills had some clear limitations. Both of us planned like crazy. We each packed emergency supplies, plenty of clothes, tire-repair kits, the whole deal. 

Barrier, schmarrier...

Johnny had a new GPS system, and had worked out every turn of the road to get us where we were going. Believe me, we went to some beautiful parts of the country. A couple of days in, and here's where the photo makes sense, we were scheduled to find our campsite, tucked away in the flat landscape of Ohio. The roads there are laid out like graph paper lines across a virtually flat landscape, very strange to JB and I, who live in a wooded, hilly part of Maine, where no road goes more than half a mile without a needed turn. 

So every few miles was a cross-road, and there were no side-roads, no back ways, no diagonals. Not long before dark, we came to a closed road barrier, just five miles from where we were trying to go. We knew that if we let it stop us it would mean going back, and all the way around one of those giant blocks of waving corn, several miles for each side of a square. We looked at the barriers, looked at the big backhoe parked right across both lanes, bucket to the tar, at the deep swales on each side of the road, looked at the sun going down. We were tired. We had sore asses and stiff backs. We wanted to be setting up our tents and warming up some soup. This unforeseen obstacle really sucked at that moment. Then we looked at each other, shrugged, and wordlessly agreed to just try it. 

Around the barriers we went, creeping in first gear, then very carefully, leaning the bikes to squeeze under the arm of the backhoe, over to the other side. Each bike took all of the strength of both of us to maneuver under that arm. One of us bent a rearview mount a little bit, I don't remember who. It might have been that the road was closed because it was totally impassible further along, but that wasn't the case. We felt like such rebels. The point is, though, that we didn't shrug and turn back. The road wasn't impassible. We didn't hurt anybody. And we got to where we were going, almost on time. 

Looking through old photos, I found this and realized that I had not thought of the obstacle, or of our perseverance, for years. In the moment, it felt like a big potential setback. I recall resorting to some choice Anglo-Saxon vocabulary for a minute or so. Now though, it is a distant memory. Much clearer in my mind is the gathering of new friends when we finally got to our destination, the evening around the campfire swapping riding stories.

Here's another, briefer example. My Dad has taken me, my sister, all of his grandchildren, and many others, on a hike of Katahdin, Maine's most spectacular mountain, many times. It's not an easy hike. It's frankly exhausting, much more of an endeavor than most people expect when they first get up that morning and confidently strap on a backpack.

Climbing Katahdin

See how rugged the climb is in the photo? That's Dad on the left. My point is that if you look at the mountain ahead, it looks insurmountable. If you put one hand over another, watch your step, place your feet carefully, and keep your mind on the goal, you get there. Every single person who has attempted that climb among the many excursions that I've been on has finished it. They've seen Maine from its highest point. They've walked the famed Knife Edge Trail. They've seen Chimney Pond from on high, where it looks like a tiny jewel among toy trees. That's what they remember, not the tiredness, the sore knees, the scraped knuckles. They remember succeeding.

That's my message today. Know where you want to go, and don't turn aside. Take the next step. Reach for the next handhold. Pause for a breath, but don't look back. Oh, and one more thing. This one is important. Take the right people with you on your journey.

Update from Ironwood Hollow

It has been a good week here at Ironwood Hollow. The Vanilla Tupelo Honey Mead started a week ago has been bubbling away quietly in the pantry. We've talked with a couple of mead-students who are now accomplished meaders in their own right about some batches in progress and how to handle unforeseen issues (when in doubt, wait for it to get better). We've moved some things around so as to get to the mead in the cellar a little more easily, with an eye to finding just the right bottles for what promises to be an epic Thanksgiving. 

We've had the first snow of any consequence since Honey and the kids have moved in, and we all watched a young buck browsing our blackberry bushes amidst the new white this morning before school. Everyone pitched in with the project of building a rack above our firewood in the woodshed, for all the reclaimed lumber that has been accumulating for future projects. 

The Mellow Hill Dome

The kids have taken to country life in a beautiful way, and we're just getting started. The boys have done nearly all the work of sifting gravel for the driveway repairs and a greywater drainage area for wash-water. All of them help with the firewood. This morning we watched that buck nibbling in the yard before the kids made their own tracks right across his on their way to the school-bus pickup.

We have started to arrange our thanksgiving, first one together. I realized this morning that I will just be a puddle of emotion for that entire day, as Honey's family meets mine, we fill the 'Hollow with more love and kin than ever before, and these cordwood walls (and our arms) embrace the newly grown family that we are bringing together. Tears of joy make the best seasoning, and since I know what a big old heap of sentimentality I am, I think I'll let Honey do the talking while I carve the turkeys. 

We just got our first delivery from Currier and Chives, a new local bakery CSA, and had home-made raisin bread toast for breakfast today! If there is a local farmer who sells any kind of shares in his product, that is such a great way to support the real local green economy. Ask at health-food stores and farmer's markets if there is anything like that around you; we have seafood, meat, vegetable, and bakery CSA's in our area, and support them as we can.

We're looking forward to a big building project next year, and have started pulling ideas together for that. Winter in Maine is long, and cozy evenings by the fire with graph paper and alternative building books will get us through. Watch for updates!

Filling Dad's woodshed.

About the kids and wood...my Dad, right next door in the Mellow Hill Dome, needed help this year with his firewood for the first time ever. He had it all cut ahead and seasoned in the old shed down by the barn, but needed to have three cords of wood moved up to the shed next to the house and workshop. In two easy afternoons the kids pitched in, and we scurried back and forth like an ant colony with wheelbarrows, until he had everything just the way he needs it for the winter. I was so proud of them...I haven't smiled that much through hard work in my whole life. 

So that's life at Ironwood Hollow this week. Family, wildlife, projects, hopes, dreams, blessings, trials, love, life, beauty, and yet more blessings. May your life be as full, and may you be as aware of that fullness as we are!

Coppice Thoughts

I have been mulling over a particular aspect of tree lore for the last few days, trying to find the best way to express it, to find its real place in my world-view. In the middle of this process, we've had a family health crisis that brought my thoughts into focus very quickly. I've always thought of trees and forests as a fine source of meaningful symbolism and metaphor, and today I can't think of a better way to say what I feel.

The roots of a coppiced tree feed the new shoots.

Coppicing is the practice of cutting a tree once, then waiting for numerous shoots to grow from the stump as new trees for various purposes. Trees that are harvested in this way include hazel, oak, willow, and one of my favorites, ironwood. What happens is the root system, unharmed by the cutting, feeds the living tissue in the outer rings and bark of the stump, and new trees grow in a ring from the already-established roots. Eventually the stump disappears under the new growth and becomes just a memory, but the old roots, and the new shoots, live on. 

Some of the shoots thrive, and some don't, but they all get a good start from that parental tree, nourished because of all the years it put in, reaching deep into the soil, finding nutrients, water, strength. I can still remember the day, probably twenty-five years ago, when my father, on one of our many fire-wood cutting days, explained this to me, pointing out a ring of maples, growing closely together, all the same size. He taught me that you can tell the size of the original tree by imagining a circle drawn by the centers of all of the new trees.

Men teach boys a lot by saying little, in my experience, and I'm not claiming that's all for the good. But it's true, and this is a good example. I have no doubt that Dad felt the symbolic weight of coppicing, that image of an adult tree passing on its strength to the new generation, of the shape of the parent tree echoing through the years in the pattern of new growth. He didn't say any of that, though. He just pointed out the plain facts, looking me in the eye, while I, a boy learning to be a man, listened carefully for levels of meaning. 

Coppiced trees show the size of the parent stump.

The depth of the understanding clicks into place later, as life provides more events, more experience, more joys, trials, beauties, loves. Seeing the way that my life, my sister's life, our children's lives, all echo his presence in many ways, no matter how far we may travel, and despite many other influences, I am rocked by the depth of meaning in so much of what he has given us. The tree lore is one thing, the unabashed love for the world around us is another, the wish to appreciate nature in quiet reflection. The humor and affection that he has always spread freely is still more of it. 


When you see a close ring of trees, take a moment to think about the gifts that carry through generations like the shape of that coppice. When you look at your parents, your siblings, your children, imagine them as a coppice, and appreciate the ways that we have been gifted by our elders. Think how we can gift our young with the strength of our roots too.

Last Child in the Woods? Not Yet.

When I was about ten years old, my family moved from a small suburban home to a couple of dozen acres of freshly harvested pine forest. The land was littered with branches and huge stumps, with smaller trees leaning in to fill the empty spaces overhead left by the fallen pine giants.Even so,  I found those woods to be magical, and we were surrounded by plenty of undeveloped woods. Until then, my idea of "forest" had been an acre or so of woods tucked between our neighborhood and the nearest main road. The reality of a couple of square miles of trees, trails and streams was amazing.

I just love trees!

I learned to go deep into the woods, far enough to hear nothing but birds and rustling critters. When I wrapped my arms around the larger trees, I could feel the earth and wind through them. The rough bark on my cheek, the constant whispering of the leaves, the ankle-deep moss, soaked into me, made me a country boy in no time. Inspired by Robert Frost's poem "Birches," I climbed leggy trees until they bent to let me down. I felt that call to climb into the heights of the branches, and beyond, but also the pull of the earth below, so eloquently described by Mr. Frost nearly a hundred years ago. As he wrote, earth's the right place for love, but also, one could do worse than be a swinger of birches. 

Beeches in winter

Inspired by the Tarzan novels, I made pathways among the trees, lashing cedar logs between the upper trunks with nylon baling twine. I would run along these balance-beams, hanging onto branches, from one tree to the next, and the next, and never fell. I know that my father, who grew up with a forest too, not far away, knew the importance of giving his children such an opportunity. Those seasons among the trees impressed me deeply. Years later, when I was at last able to build my own home on that same acreage, using some of the trees that I had known as a boy, it felt like I had never left.

Among the hemlocks that I cut, peeled, and dragged out for floor framing was one that had grown around some knotted nylon baling twine about twenty feet off the ground. When I discovered it, I realized it was the only remaining trace of those treetop trails I had built. Those days of playing Tarzan came back to me in a rush, and I gave that particular log a place of honor in the house. I know exactly where it is under the floor-boards now. I think of how I've come back to a new beginning, and how a new generation is now held up by that log as they follow their own youthful, dreaming paths into the world by way of these acres of woods.

Think how those logs beneath our floor, cut from trees that I grew up climbing, are the foundation for the same kind of magic happening all over again. We're giving our kids the great gift of learning the smell of spring leaves, the feel of a tree beneath you swaying in the wind, the music of crisp leaves underfoot, and the crack of freezing bark in the middle of the coldest winter's nights. If I can borrow a phrase from a really important book, "The Last Child in the Woods" is still out there, and I would say that there are many of them, since I know of so many who are raising nature-aware kids. Not everyone can leave the cities and suburbs, but I am so glad that our kids have this chance, and encourage anyone to find ways to get their children out under some trees as often as they can.

Bean Hole Beans

"...there's always some level of uncertainty."

Decades ago, the hole was dug, and lined with stones painstaking pulled from the soil nearby. An enamel cookpot was committed to rough use, the first of several, as they don't last forever under this treatment. The old metal flyer-sled that my sister and I had almost outgrown was pressed into service as a bean-hole rain-cover. Since then, many times, Dad has gone out and lit a hot fire in the hole late at night, letting it burn through the night, so that the stones and surrounding soil could hold that heat.

Each time, next morning, he'd pull out the coals, replace them with a pot full of beans, water, fatback, and assorted secret ingredients. Then, against everything we learn in modern life about dirt and food, he'd shovel the soil back into the hole, burying the pot, sealing it underground with all of those hot rocks, for at least eight hours. He'd go about his day, often preparing for company, setting out the tables, cutting and jointing some meat, pulling up from the cellar something he or I had brewed, all the while enjoying the sight of smoke and steam rising from the bean-hole site like a rare Downeast fumarole.

Unearthing Bean Hole Beans

Fast-forward to last weekend, the most recent time the tradition was observed, and we have family, friends, friends of family, gathered for a belated birthday, music by yours truly, food by potluck and bean-hole. People share news, admire recent changes to the property and family home. Dad likes to make an event of the bean unearthing, and this time is no exception. 

Wielding a spade, and grinning for the fun of the occasion, for the pleasure of having such fine company, he stands beside the smoking patch of ground and clears his throat, eventually catching most of our attention. Striking a pose with the space, he announces, "I have done it in this same hole many times...but there's allllways some level of uncertainty..."

Smirking, and noting uncle Billy's chuckle, and some smart remarks ("Have you used the same tool every time?"), he begins to carefully excavate the pot, releasing clouds of smoke, while kids look on wide-eyed, not believing that FOOD is going to come from this. Soon there is a respectable pile of dirt, and the pot is revealed, safe under some aluminum foil. Carefully brushing it off and lifting it out, he carries it to the plank tables, and unveils the contents. 

Bean Hole Beans

Something very special infuses traditional bean-hole beans, and I'm not sure if it's the scent of the soil and smoke, the special care given to long-held tradition, an extra flavor imparted by the assembled family and their enjoyment of the ritual, or all of these things. All I know is that I always look forward to a plate of it, to watching how much Dad enjoys presenting it, and to the amazement of the uninitiated, when they see fine, hot, savory dinner being dug up from our bony New England soil.