Hallow's Eve

It was 19 years ago that I first arrived in Ireland a few days before Samhain -- Hallowe'en -- when The Girl was still a baby. I didn't realise then that this was the day for setting off fireworks here, like Independence Day in the USA, New Year's Eve in Germany or Guy Fawkes night in the UK. Local boys, it turned out, shot bottle rockets all night into the dark fields. Where our house was. 

Let me tell you, there's nothing a jet-lagged baby loves more than artillery outside the window. 

Sorry for not posting more, but I'm working on a big project to be announced soon. 

Drying

Say “dehydrated food” and people think of army rations or those little pills people eat in science fiction, but you probably have many dehydrated foods at home already. All grains are dehydrated, for example – rice, oats, popcorn – along with powdered grains like flour or cornmeal, and grain products like pasta. Most beans and lentils come dried, as do staples like salt and sugar. Most people also are familiar with raisins, sultanas, sun-dried tomatoes, dried herbs and, of course, tea. You can dry all kinds of food outside of these, however, and it remains one of the most effective and efficient ways of preserving food through the winter.

Vegetables can be dried, even those parts we don’t ordinarily eat fresh. Broccoli, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, kale – all these can be dehydrated and saved indefinitely as ready-to-go soup ingredients. The dried vegetables can also be ground into powder and mixed into soup or bread, adding to its nutrition. Meat is difficult to dry in this climate without a dehydrator, but if you have one you can make jerky, a source of protein that can last for months at room temperature without spoiling.

Dehydrating food saves money, allowing you to spend cents on what would ordinarily cost several euros. A can of soup, for example, has more salt than you need in your entire day, is exorbitantly expensive for the amount of nutrition you receive, and costs a few euros. On the other hand, you could keep enough dried vegetables in your pantry for months of soup, all for no money and a little effort, with no salt, no chemicals and plenty of nutrition.

Herbs can be dried, of course – basil, oregano, thyme and dozens of others. Other plants can be dried for teas – nettles, dandelions, mint, and chamomile. To dry them be sure to pick them when they are fresh and already somewhat dry – that is, not after it’s been raining. Then shake off any moisture, pat them off with a towel, tie a string around the stalks and hang them in a cool dry place like your pantry. Don’t hang too many at once or the herbs will just go yellow without drying properly, as parsley did with me this year. If you can get your hand around the thickest part of it, you should be fine.

Teas can be made from almost any dried edible leaf, flower or fruit, but a few are particularly well-suited: clover, dandelion, bramble shoots, nettles and sage all make good teas. Mint, fennel, dill and anise are good for stomach problems, while chamomile flowers are good for relaxing before bedtime. You don’t need to make just one kind of tea – take a variety of herbs and mix them together, perhaps with a bit of honey or fruit juice. Remember that you generally need a lot of leaves to give boiling water taste and colour, compared to black tea.

Every autumn most people will have a glut of excess fruits and berries around them, most of which will go to waste. Dehydrated, however, and they can last the rest of the year – apple rings, blueberry raisins or whatever you like. If you have a dehydrator, you can also dry mashed fruit into fruit roll-ups. All these make nutritious sources of vitamins through the winter, and a dessert-like snack for children.

If you need a dehydrator, there are some available online for around 50 euros and up, and if you use it regularly it should pay for itself in short order. To use a food dehydrator to dry fruit and vegetables you want to select produce of good quality, as overripe produce might not work well. Cut them into similarly-sized pieces, as this will ensure that everything dries evenly. Some people find it better to blanch vegetables in boiling water for a few minutes first – check what your dehydrator recommends, and then experiment.

People have been preserving food as long as they have been eating – drying, fermenting, pickling, smoking – but in the last few decades people have abandoned all these in favour of one device: the refrigerator. Fridges and freezers remain handy, of course, but they have limited space, require constant electricity and cost money, so we might find it worth our while to remember how to preserve food in other ways if necessary.

 

 

 

Twisting wood into a house

These days, you spend your life paying off a house, and even building a shed or animal shelter can be expensive, as timber, brick or any other modern building material requires a heavy investment of money, time and skilled labour. For thousands of years, though, people used a simpler technique that used nothing but natural, local materials.

“Wattle and daub,” as it’s called, takes its name from its two components; a “wattle” was a wicker fence or wall made of a pliable wood like willow or hazel, woven around upright posts like a horizontal basket. Farmers sometimes surrounded their fields with wattle fences, which could be made in modular, lightweight pieces a metre or two high and a metre or two across – hurdles -- and then uprooted, carried to a new location, and stamped into the ground where needed.

The farmer usually created a wattle by putting the upright posts (sometimes called zales or sails on these islands) into a wooden frame (sometimes called a gallows) to hold them in place. Then withies – slim cuttings of willow or hazel – were wound back and forth around the uprights. At the end of the hurdle the withy would be twisted for greater flexibility, wound around the last zale, and woven back in the other direction. Usually a gap would be left in the middle of the hurdle, called a twilly hole, which allowed a shepherd or farmer to carry a few hurdles as a time on his back.

According to author Una McGovern, hurdle fences were vital to medieval agriculture; by keeping sheep confined without the need for permanent infrastructure, they allowed tenant farmers to graze sheep on a patch of land, letting them manure the fields one by one and deposit the fertilisers necessary for cereal crops.

The same technique could form the walls of a building, once a log or timber frame was built and the wattle filled in with a “daub” plaster for insulation and privacy. The daub often contained clay, human or animal hair and cow dung, and hardened around the wattle like concrete around rebar. The technique proved popular throughout the ancient world, among Sumerians, Chinese and Mayans alike. If kept dry the walls would last for centuries, and even now restoring or demolishing old buildings in Europe sometimes reveals wattle inside the walls.

Not all ancient builders loved it; the Roman architect Vetruvius, in the first century BC, moaned about its hazards in his Ten Books on Architecture:

“As for ‘wattle and daub’ I could wish that it had never been invented,” Vetruvius wrote testily. “…But since some are obliged to use it either to save time or money, or for partitions on an unsupported span, the proper method of construction is as follows. Give it a high foundation so that it may nowhere come in contact with the broken stone-work composing the floor; for if it is sunk in this, it rots in course of time, then settles and sags forward, and so breaks through the surface of the stucco covering.”

Vetruvius’ disdain notwithstanding, however, clearly many of his contemporaries loved it, and it’s easy to see why; it allowed people to build a structure cheaply and easily. The main disadvantage, as the Roman mentioned, is that it cannot get damp; like cob, straw bales or other natural building methods, it works best when you build the foundation and walls of rock for the first metre or so.

The technique is similar to building in cob, that mixture of sand, straw and clay, mixed with water and squeezed together – usually by humans walking on it.  Handfuls of the mixture – the word “cob” comes from an Old English word for “lump” – are stacked them on top of each other in a row, stomped solid by people’s feet, and then another layer of cob added, until people have a wall.

The straw binds the clay and sand together; instead of a wall’s mass hanging on a few large structures like girders or beams, it hangs on the many tiny structures of the straw. Once the cob dries it can be almost as durable as stone. Daub needs to be thinner than cob, like stucco or plaster – to be spread across the wattle rather than creating a self-supporting wall – but is can be made from quite similar materials. 

Of course, wattle and daub is probably not suitable for modern homeowners unaccustomed to mud walls. That doesn’t mean, however, that it has no relevance to today’s homesteader; animals don’t tend to mind such all-natural surroundings, as long as the interior remains warm and dry, and neither do garden tools.

Building techniques like cob or wattle-and-daub fell out of favour in the modern era because they are more labour-intensive than our modern building techniques that rely on fossil fuels. We should not let such skills disappear entirely, however, for these methods still have advantages. They are completely ecological, requiring no machines, and generating no pollution. They can last for centuries, as evidenced by homes built this way in Europe – and might still stand when our reinforced concrete has collapsed to ruin. And when a wattle-and-daub home is finally torn down, it merely adds fertiliser to the soil, rather than toxic waste – and another one can be built, literally dirt cheap.

 

References:

Una McGovern, Lost Crafts, published by Chambers, 2009. 

Vetruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Chapter 8, Section 20. 

Top Photo: Cottage in Heimbach, Germany. 

Bottom photo: Listed building in the UK with original wattle showing. 

Both photos courtesy of Wikicommons. 

 

What Once Held Communities Together

I wrote a few weeks back about how much of our community life has disintegrated over the years; elderly Irish tell me that people used to go to each other’s houses on winter nights and tell stories, used to bring musical instruments that they knew how to play, and used to sing old songs together, since everyone knew those songs and everyone could sing well and without embarrassment.

I mentioned that this was true in my native USA as well, as seen in the “funny pages” or cartoons of American newspapers, which have changed little over the years and thus provide a window into the America that was. You can see the same rich communities in old black-and-white movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, and if you are tempted to think that those were mere fictional conceits, like the way people burst into song in old musicals.

Yet in his excellent book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam used dozens of polls, surveys, diaries and other statistics to back up their depiction of what American life used to be, a culture rich with neighbourhood gatherings, card games, fraternal lodges, dinner parties, bowling leagues, PTA meetings, political caucuses, town bands, Boy Scouts and many other groups.

In Ireland over the last few centuries, neighbours used to assemble “mutual-improvement societies,” training their members not only to read at a time when where was little public education, but to understand and debate scientific and political issues of the day. They organised adult schools, subscription libraries, reading circles, dramatic societies, and musical groups. Other volunteer associations organised to pay each other’s medical bills, unemployment benefits, and burials, to offer savings banks and job referral services – and by 1880 as much as 80 percent of all male workers belonged to such groups. It was only through their loyal support and intense political organisation, for example, that someone like Ramsey MacDonald, illegitimate son of a farmhand, could rise to become Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Similarly, movies and television have given us hundreds of portrayals of American life through the decades, but rarely has any media showed the fraternal lodges that were part of so many Americans’ lives. Most people have heard of the Freemasons as the inexplicable target of conspiracy theorists, or parodied as the Stonecutters on The Simpsons, but there were literally thousands of similar organisations, with chapters in almost every town and neighbourhood.

They included the Elk, the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Knights of Columbus, and such sadly extinct and magnificent-sounding organisations like the Prudent Patricians of Pompeii, the Modern Aztecs, and the League of Friendship of the Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun. They took many forms -- quasi-religious orders, paramilitary groups, social clubs, health funds, college funds, unions, co-operatives, and grass-roots political organisations, many of these at the same time.

Each lodge member contributed a small amount of money each week to a fund, and when any member took sick, the lodge typically gave them sick pay to cover the loss of employment. Lodges often hired a doctor or nurse to check up on all its members; called “lodge trade,” it offered work for thousands of medical professionals, and unlike our modern medical system, it was affordable and gave patients a say in their own care. When a member died, the organisation often paid for the funeral and perhaps a pension for the widow(er) and children. Many did more than that. A lodge called the Knights of Labour evolved into the first labour union, and every union created since has followed its template.

As recently as the mid-20^th-century a majority of Americans were members of these organisations – again, of both genders and all races. Of the 3,500 fraternal organisations that existed at the beginning of the 1900s, about 1,500 were African-American. And while they are called “fraternal,” many existed solely for women and were run by women, some independent of any men’s organisation.

This doesn’t even include the PTA, Lyceums, Chataquas, Temperence Societies, Agricultural Societies, Philosophical societies, educational institutes, book circles and church clubs. These organisations were deeply woven into community life for centuries, and their sudden and astonishing decline after the 1960s has been rarely commented on or even noticed.

These kinds of close communities lasted longer here than in the USA, but are fading here now as well --- but this trend is not inevitable. These organisations did not appear in the landscape, after all – they were organised, and could be again. 

 

Photo: Knights of Columbus gathering. Public domain. 

 

The Neverending Forest

A prehistoric squirrel, it is said, could have scampered from Norway to Singapore without touching the ground, so dense was the carpet of trees that stretched across the world. Similar forests stretched across North America and many other parts of the world – all of them providing a home to thousands of living things, all of them vacuuming the carbon dioxide from the air and keeping the climate stable.

Most of that landscape was felled for timber and paper long ago, the land given over to crops and suburbia – or to wasteland. Of course, humans need food and houses, but we also need timber and wildlife, and our ancestors would have been wiser to preserve some of those forests for future generations. And sometimes, they did – for at least six thousand years, some humans have used an old technique to continually harvest timber from a forest while keeping it alive indefinitely.

When the evergreen trees around here are cut at the base, their roots die. But many broad-leaved, deciduous trees continue to soak up water and nutrients through their roots. The roots put their energy into creating shoots, which grow into new saplings – and soon you will have several smaller trees where you had one before. In a matter of years or decades – how long depends on the type of tree – you can harvest those smaller trees, called “underwood,” and the process begins again. You can keep doing this as long as the original base continues to live, which can be more than a hundred years.

Commonly coppiced species included ash, chestnut, oak, hazel, sycamore and alder, and most of these created shoots from the cut stump, called a stool. The new trunks usually curved outward from the original stool, and so their naturally bowed wood was often prized for ship-building. Other species, like cherry, would send suckers upward from the roots surrounding the stump. Either way, the new shoots grow quickly, fed by a root system made to support an entire tree.

Willow stands in a class by itself in coppicing, as it does not need to mature before being cut, nor does it require a decade or two of waiting. Its flexible shoots – withies – are perfect for weaving into shapes, which provided early humans with homes, boats, chariots, armour, fences, barns, sheds, coops, weirs, animal traps, and baskets.

Woodsmen coppiced areas where they could keep out cattle and horses, as animals might eat the shoots. In places where animals might roam the woodland they would pollard – or cut branches higher up on the tree out of their reach. Waterford farmer and self-sufficiency expert John Seymour called coppicing and pollarding “the most fundamental of woodland crafts.”  

In medieval Europe vast stretches of woodland were coppiced or pollarded regularly for charcoal, firewood, timber and other uses. Here in Ireland, willows – sometimes called sallies or silver-sticks – were pollarded each winter from century-old trunks that had never been mature trees, often looking like fields of spiky sea urchins. Weavers here were said to harvest the willow on St. Bridget’s Day – Feb. 1 – and with large machete-like tools called bill-hooks, collected ten tonnes to the acre.

In a copse – a forest of regularly coppiced trees – each tree is marked with the year it was last felled, and only a fraction of them are felled again each year. Coppiced trees – harvested every several years or so – are interspersed with trees allowed to grow to maturity and felled for large pieces of timber. The latter group – called “standards” – are harvested at a rotation time of about 10 times the coppice; for a coppice cut once a decade, for example, the standards will be cut once a century.

If more forward-looking souls were to turn their fields into copses, they could have a regular harvest of wood for many generations to come. Enough copses around the world could supply the world with paper and timber, warmth and wildlife without the need to ever fell another forest.