The potential of willow

A living chair we made. 

This appeared in the Kildare Nationalist, last week. 

Every few years the owner of the land next to us clears away the brush, giving us a front-row seat to what biologists call succession. Bare ground is quickly covered with an army of sprouting weeds, the first being the fastest to grow, seed and die, and each new entry grows more slowly and lasts longer. A year or so into the succession the first trees appear, and pioneer trees in Ireland are willows.

Because they are the tree closest to a weed in behaviour, willows – also called sallies, silver-sticks or osiers -- make an amazing resource everywhere they occur, but such thirsty plants do especially well in our wet climate. They can survive an amazing range of conditions, grow so quickly that a new crop of branches up to two to three metres long can be harvested each year – and few trees have as many uses.

The bark of the white willow (Salix alba) can be boiled to form acetecylic acid, or aspirin. Their fast growth makes an excellent windbreak, and makes them particularly useful for pulling carbon from the atmosphere, repairing some of the damage of climate change. Their wood has multiple uses, and can clean up toxic waste. 

Basket-weavers preferred willow over all other plants – the word for willows, “vikker” in Old Norse, became our word “wicker." Its shoots are highly pliable when wet, lightweight and tough when dry, and grows so quickly that shoots two or three metres long can be harvested every year. Willow groves here were coppiced (cut at the base) or pollarded (cut higher up) from stumps that grew wider every year, growing new foliage and branches that kept the tree alive. The shoots --"withies" they were called in Ireland -- were harvested each spring around St. Bridget's Day, Feb 2, before the spring, from giant stumps that had never been full trees. 

Their roots spread rapidly under the surface of the soil, making them an ideal crop to halt erosion – an important issue in Ireland, where the dramatic felling of the island’s forests over two hundred years washed away much of the soil. Widespread planting of willows back then might have halted some of the erosion that so devastated areas like the Burren.

In addition, the most common willow variety in Ireland, Salix viminalis or “basket willow,” has been shown to be a hyper-accumulator of heavy metals. Many plants help “clean” the soil by soaking up disproportionate levels of normally toxic materials, either as a quirk of their metabolism or as a way of protecting themselves against predators by making themselves poisonous. Many plants soak up only a single toxin, others only a few; Viminalis, it turned out, soaked up a broad range, including lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, zinc, fossil-fuel hydrocarbons, uranium, selenium, potassium ferro-cyanide and silver.

Willow can also be used for more mundane forms of waste: researcher Alastair McCracken of the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute of Northern Ireland is conducting trials to see how willow can help clean up effluents like sewage sludge and farm manure.

Perhaps most importantly for us in Ireland, however, willow wood makes an excellent fuel, and since the trees can quickly be regrown, the fuel can be 100 per cent sustainable and zero-carbon. Basket weavers in Ireland harvested ten tonnes per acre per year here in wet Ireland, and in the dry Midwest 19th-century farmers still got nine tonnes per acre. If the wood is for fuel, though, McCracken recommends a three-year rotation, however, for the maximum yield.

Ireland stands out among European nations: no other country has more potential for biomass production, and no other uses it less. Ireland has the highest potential annual yield of wood in Europe according to the SEI. Yet Sweden, Germany, Finland, Austria, the UK and even dry Spain manufacture more than ten times the amount of biomass as we do in numbers, and while some of those countries have more area than we do, many also have more population; Britain is many times more crowded than Ireland, yet devotes more of its land to growing energy. Finland gets 18 per cent of its energy from biomass, according to a study by Sustainable Energy Ireland, in contrast with our 1.3 per cent.

In short, one of our commonest and most easily overlooked trees could be the key to solving many of our problems at once. 

Sources:

A few baskets I made.

Sustainable Energy Ireland, fact sheet: “What is Biomass?”

“Growing Willow for Energy,” by Alastair McCracken, Local Planet, 30 October 2006.

Phytoremediation. By McCutcheon & Schnoor. 2003, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, page 19.

“Enhancing Phytoextraction: The Effect of Chemical Soil Manipulation on Mobility, Plant Accumulation, and Leaching of Heavy Metals,” by Ulrich Schmidt. Journal of Environmental Quality 32:1939-1954 (2003).

“The potential for phytoremediation of iron cyanide complex by Willows,” by X.Z. Yu, P.H. Zhou and Y.M. Yang. Ecotoxicology 2006.

What science fiction ought to be

One simpler world: 2009's The Road, based on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of the same name. 

Sorry for the light posting lately -- I'll be on holiday in the USA for the next two weeks. If any readers live in the St. Louis area and want to meet, e-mail me. 

Science fiction has become the dominant genre of the last four decades – the biggest film of the year has been sci-fi almost every year in my lifetime. Of those, some are simply swashbuckler fantasies set in space, like Star Wars, while others are the very entertaining superhero fantasies that have become as ubiquitous as Westerns or musicals once were. Each year, however, brings a new wave of dystopian post-apocalyptic films – in the last year we’ve had Blade Runner 2049, Ready Player One, War for the Planet of the Apes, Geostorm, and later this year we can expect Alita and Mortal Engines.

Another simpler world: All Creatures Great and Small

I say “dystopian,” because science fiction used to be creating utopian futures in which mankind had solved most of its problems – Star Trek being one of the only survivors of that age. In the time that science fiction has dominated our culture, though, it has been about something else: telling us how hopeless our future is, and how we’re all doomed.

They have a point; we have created a society that runs on coal and oil, which won’t last forever. Even the amount we’ve burned so far has changed the air so much that it is literally changing the weather around the world, creating more intense storms, harsher droughts, and greater extremes of heat and cold. Anyone who walks along the Irish shoreline can see the other main product of our civilisation, the plastic and other rubbish that now clutters the world’s seas, or piles up in landfills that have become the largest man-made structures on Earth.

Yet apocalyptic stories assume that our modern car-driving, computer-using culture will collapse overnight in some catastrophe, whether a robot Armageddon, climate disaster or Rapture – and the fact that we make entertainment about such horrors means that they are not really our fears, but our fantasies. And they offer the worst possible model for how to handle the realistic difficulties we might face in the future. Paranoid survivalists do not help build a delicate web of trust among neighbours, and millenarians will not help build lasting infrastructure for the next stage of history. The more people are convinced that we face a violent and despairing future, the more likely such a future becomes.

In the decades to come, as we have to cope with more difficult economic times, energy crunches and unexpected weather, more of us will have to grow more food ourselves, learn to use less energy from different sources, and buy more products made to be fixed and re-used rather than thrown away. It might be a reduction of our energy wealth by 10 percent, or 50 percent, or 90 percent – depending on your time and place -- but it’s literally not the end of the world, and we shouldn’t confuse the two.

And it will require more of us to form carpools, shopping co-ops, allotment clubs, medical co-ops, home-schooling networks and other such ad hoc organisations, and to cheerfully work with our neighbours to create new relationships – something people can and often do in a crisis, and exactly the opposite of what most science fiction depicts. 

Movies and television programmes could easily help people imagine a more realistic future, and there are many models they could use. 1950s America, Irish village life, post-war Britain, modern-day Mexico or India – since people in every time and place used and wasted less than we do today, almost any such model would probably look more like our future than the latest Zombie Apocalypse movie.

For example, picture a gentle television comedy series set in a modern suburban housing estate, but with the lawns turned into gardens, and bean vines crawling up the sides of every house. Most homes hold extended families of mothers, grandparents and children, some of whom had to move in with cousins and in-laws from what used to be the coast. Picture each home having masonry stoves for the cold and Arab ventilation shafts for the heat, coops and hutches outside for animals, and neighbours pooling their money to help each other out.    

I can picture storylines involving elderly people, who grew up during the boom years, having arguments with their more practical children and grandchildren, or feuding with other elders over culture-war issues that have long been rendered moot. Other storylines might involve the young men of the community taking turns patrolling the homes against local gangs, making life difficult for secret cigarette addicts and covert teenage lovers and leading to all manner of comic misunderstandings and hijinks.

Some episodes might involve the same sort of bucolic charm one might find in All Creatures Great and Small, Last of the Sumer Wine or other British series, or in Irish films like War of the Buttons. Perhaps residents gear up for the annual vegetable awards, and get a little carried away with the competition, spying on each other with binoculars and sending children to spy on their neighbours for pocket change.

Perhaps other stories involve the neighbours learning old-fashioned ways – when the water turns out to have heavy metals, they learn how to create a slow sand filter and charcoal filter. Or the creek is flooding the neighbourhood, and everyone has to pitch in to dig a channel or an overflow field full of willow trees. I could see it being like one of my favourite films, 1934’s Our Daily Bread, in which a group of down-and-out people during the Depression have to learn to run a farm together.

Other storylines might be more dramatic; perhaps one of the residents gets an eviction notice, and the neighbourhood bands together to stand against the police. The matter is resolved without violence when the police fall in love with Granny Madison’s blueberry pies, and agree not to evict in exchange for a pie once a week.

I could see a story involving an elderly resident keeps to himself, and is the subject of much gossip among the neighbourhood children, who peek in his windows and frighten each other with stories about him. When one boy sneaks into the house on a dare, however, he finds the old man has a fascinating history, and the two become friends. The episode ends with the boy leading the old man out to meet his neighbours for the first time.

Another episode, perhaps, could revolve around a group of unemployed men struggling with family stress and poverty, who decide to pool their money and skills and build a small wind farm together out of boards and car alternators. They hope to generate enough electricity to get the Internet coming to their homes again, enabling them to keep in touch look for jobs, download self-sufficiency courses and – closest to their hearts – play video games with old buddies on the other side of the world.

Make up your own examples of what your neighbourhood or family might look like if weather and the economy became more difficult, and yet life went on. Write a short story, a comic book, or a

fairy tale for your children. The point is that few people read scientific papers or specialist web sites, but we all watch or read stories. If you think there is hope for a decent future -- and I do -- then make that future come alive for your family and friends. I ask only two things: it show a realistic future, and that it be fun.

Wild food in spring

Originally published in the Kildare Nationalist newspaper. 

All food was wild once, and all the vegetables in rows at the grocers were bred over centuries from what we now call weeds. In many cases, they were bred to have more flesh, like the giant carrots over their smaller root of the Queen Anne’s Lace, or for their orange colours over the white originals.

Yet colour and tastes go in and out of fashion with each generation; look at the white eggs that were fashionable a few decades ago, and how completely they were all replaced by otherwise identical brown ones, simply because brown eggs carried an image of being more “natural.” Since carrots have been bred there have been white, orange, yellow and even purple varieties, breeds suited for different tastes, climates, times of year or for fashion –to match what consumers imagine to be nice-looking. 

Most importantly, the varieties we get at the store were selected for bland flavours, giant sizes and their ability to sit in a box or on a shelf for weeks while being transported across an ocean to your neighbourhood store. Fresh vegetables, typically, are nothing of the kind.

The wild food still exists all around us, though, all over our fields, and our hedgerows create a vertical salad bar filled with food for the taking. Some of these are wilder versions of familiar vegetables, like wild parsnip or sea beet, while others have no domesticated equivalent, like fat hen or jack-by-the-hedge.

Hawthorn trees still have a few shoots in the shaded areas, and the shoots – leaves just coming out -- make an excellent addition to salad. Later this year their berries – haws – will cover the hedgerows, and a single tree can yield thousands of berries. They make a colourful wine and jam, and are easy pickings, and while they are not the most strongly-flavoured berry, they can be mixed with other ingredients – try hawthorn-and-ginger jam, or hawthorn-and-crab-apple wine.

Every spring we use the youngest leaves of the linden tree as a salad (also called the lime – no relation to the fruit) and it gives us two weeks of free and edible greens. Dandelions are still flowering now, and their younger and less bitter leaves can be put into salad, while their flowers can be battered and fried, or made into an excellent wine. Come autumn the roots will be at their fullest; try pulling them out, dry-roasting them, grinding them into powder, and using them to make coffee.

I’ve mentioned the amazing properties of nettles many times – sautéed they make a great vegetable, added to soup they flavour the stock, dried they make a great tea or can flavour beer, they can be made into wine, and their fibres can be made into cloth.

Bistort’s long columns of lavender flower clusters appear all over our bogs and wastelands, and people in centuries past often ate its leaves on Easter. It makes a good dish sautéed with leeks. Fat Hen was apparently much more widely eaten in ancient times than today, and its pale green leaves are quite nutritious. 

The garlic –flavoured leaves of Jack-by-the-hedge first emerge in spring, but often a new crop appears this month, so this is a good time to go looking for it. Its large, deeply green, heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers make a great ingredient in salads, and can be sauteed like spinach and used as a vegetable, doubling as both the vegetable and the sprinkling of garlic in one.

The flowers of chamomile, seen above, make an excellent evening tea, and can be added to salads. Cowslips, oxlips and primroses, all in the same family, can also be eaten raw or made into some of the richest and sweetest wine I've ever had. 

Finally, the shamrock-like leaves of wild sorrel carpet forest floors beginning in spring, and can still be seen this time of year. Its lemony leaves make a perfect addition to salads, taking the place of some of the vinegar in dressing. They can also be cooked, but be warned that they wilt almost instantly, and in an herbal mix should be added lastly.

If you are not sure what these plants look like, of course you can look them up online or get a book on foraging -- I recommend Food for Free, although it is written mainly for the British Isles. Do remember not to remove plants from the roadside, where they could have been bathing in toxic fumes, or from anywhere you think might have been sprayed with pesticides. When you do find one of these plants, try not to strip them of all their edible parts – leave some leaves for them to continue to grow, seeds for them to continue, and so on.

Spring

This is the time when the chilly rain and gray landscape of the Irish winter gives way to the cool beauty of summer, when the fields erupt in oxlips and daffodils, the hedgerows swell with delicious hawthorn shoots, and the riverbanks ripple with nutritious nettles. In these months the usually solitary herons flying in pairs over the canals, and while jogging along the banks I spot the occasional bullfinch and kingfisher. Yesterday I spotted something extraordinary -- a goshawk flew out of our hedgerow and into our woodlot, followed by an explosion of panicked swallows and other birds flying in all directions. 

This year, though, everything is late; after six months of Irish winter and a month of Scandanavian winter, the hawthorn shoots are only now timidly peeking out of the tips of branches, and the usually brilliant blackthorn trees have not yet even hinted at blooming. Bluebells would ordinarily be spreading across the forest floor, flooding the woods with a brilliant violet light. 

Ordinarily our linden tree would be sagging with bushels of tender leaves that make an excellent salad, but this year we will have to wait until May. Only now are the primroses peeking out of the slowly drying mud, and the fields slowly turning green with new shoots -- the newborn lambs wobbling across the fields are scrounging for good meals this year. 

I visited my neighbour Seamus today -- I feel the need to check on him, although he's spent a lifetime working the Irish countryside here, and at 86 he seems healthier than most 30-year-olds I know. Ordinarily he's over the moon this time of year, t's his time to plough and plant the fields, to pat the chitted potato shoots into his patch of dry soil in the Bog of Allen. 

"We've lost a month," he said. "The fields are still too wet from the winter snows to plant, and no one can take tractors into them -- they would get bogged down, or rip up the fields until you couldn't plant. We've never had a winter like this, and now I don't know if we'll have a hot summer, or a late one, or no summer at all -- you can't tell anymore." 

When the blackthorns do bloom, I will set out with The Girl to mark them again, either with ribbons around the trunks or simply by counting steps and remembering where they are. Their small plain leaves are not obtrusive most of the year, and their small black fruits hide easily in shadow, so we must mark them now to gather sloes in November. At the same time we'll gather comfrey from the canal banks, an excellent addition to our compost. 

Thankfully, we have seeds already saved for this year, we have raised beds and a greenhouse, and we have seedlings planted inside and ready to go. This year I'll be quite busy with work and studying, and trying to write more, and The Girl is now a teenager working on her own projects, so it was to be a light year for the garden anyway -- good timing for us. 

We cut our grass for the first time this past weekend, and will probably do so about once every month or two for the next six months. Many people cut their grass far too often, keeping it from developing healthy plants. When I could, I replaced grass with edible and attractive plants like cowslip, primrose, Good King Henry, fat hen and chamomile.

I'm hoping that the warm weather will give me the chance to see more people, in the same way that the snow did. The unseasonable weather, like any emergency, brought people together, reminded us how we’ve lost touch with each other – and gave us a chance to turn that trend around.

Top photo: The forest floor around now. Bottom photo: See those bluebells? We don't. 

Splitting wood rightly

When we first moved into a house with a wood-burning fire, I needed to get and prepare the wood, but knew only what I had seen in movies. Through reading and consulting neighbours, I learned the basics of felling trees – either invasive species on our property, or wood that could be coppiced or pollarded and would grow back – and then to dry the logs and saw them into blocks. Finally, I tried chopping the wood the way I’d seen people do it on television, taking an axe and swinging it down full force, but it took a lot of work, and the thin blade often got stuck. Pulling it out seemed like getting Excalibur out of the anvil, and most of my attempts yielded slapstick results that I’m glad were not being filmed.

Eventually, though, an elderly neighbour stopped by and gave me a bit of advice: you don’t chop wood with an axe, as you see in movies. You split wood, with a maul.

The thin, sharp blade of an axe, I discovered, is designed to chop across the wood fibres, as when you’re chopping down a tree. Hitting a tree trunk over and over in the same place cuts the lignin fibres above and below, knocking out chips and creating the familiar V-shaped incision. Axes are also lighter, about two kilograms, as you have to put all your muscle into the swing and don’t have gravity to help you.  

A maul looks similar to an axe, but has a longer handle and a wider, heavier metal blade – wider so it doesn’t get stuck, and heavier so it comes down with more force. A maul’s wide, blunt blade is made to cut in the same direction as wood fibres, as when splitting logs for firewood; trying to cut down a tree with a maul is about as effective as doing so with a sledgehammer. Mauls usually weigh about four kilograms to carry more momentum in the swing; you’re swinging in the direction of gravity, so the weight becomes an advantage and not a liability.

Once you realise their purposes, their handles also make sense. An axe’s handle is great for swinging sideways, but swing it down and you risk hitting your legs. A maul’s longer handle hits the log with more force than an axe can, and if you miss, you just hit the ground.

To split wood, wear safety goggles if you can, although I’ve worn just my glasses in a pinch. Do wear something, though, as splinters can fly everywhere. Wear gloves that fit and can grip the handle.

Take a log of about 20-to-50 centimetres long – any longer than that and you want to cut it again with a saw before you try to split it. Check for knots – you can have some, but position the log so your blows avoid them as much as possible. If it already has small cracks, try to cut in the direction of those.

Put the wood you want to split onto a stump, or onto the ground – but not onto stone or pavement, lest you miss and get shards of stone and metal flying everywhere. Stand with your legs apart slightly, with one farther back than the other, like you’re taking a step forward.  If the maul won’t split a stubborn piece of wood, you can get a few wedges, inserting them into the log in the cuts your maul made, and then hitting them with a sledgehammer. 

I wait until my logs are dried before splitting them, but ours are lilandia trees in the pine family – other types of wood, I’m told, are easier to split green. Most woods need to be dried at least six months before they can be burned in the fireplace, and preferably nine. By the way, we only cut our lilandia trees, which were numerous and overgrown on our property and are an invasive species, or woods that we can coppice or pollard and that grow back quickly, like willow. I find that wood seems to split more easily in cold weather, although it might just be in winter that I’m especially motivated to get it cut fast.

In any case, splitting wood this way on cold days keeps you warm twice; once from the exercise you get, and then in the evenings when you curl up by the fireplace with a good book.

 

Still snowbound

Seeking a change of atmosphere, I walked a few kilometres to the village this afternoon – not a difficult walk ordinarily, but more so in deep snow. Along the way I met my neighbour Caoihme (pronounced Queeva), walking down the bog roads to call on her neighbour, while her daughters were laughing and throwing snowballs with other neighbourhood teenagers a respectful distance behind.

“How’re you fixed for supplies?” I asked. We were well stocked for dried and tinned goods, and had enough vegetables to see us through these days when everyone was snowed in and the store shelves empty.

“We’re grand,” she said. “We have all kinds of supplies in the shed, chickens for eggs and neighbours to trade with – but not a drop of milk to be had for tea.”

“That’s what I’m going to see about in town,” I said. “Perhaps they’ve cleared the roads a bit.”

“Ah, I doubt it,” she laughed. “I sent Seamus (her husband) to the shop the other day to find anything that hadn’t been picked clean. He came back with a piece of cake and a potato.”

“Well, if they don’t have milk,” I ventured, “I wonder about Tommy’s cows? Do you think he milks them?” We have enough neighbours who raise cows, I thought, it seems a shame to let such a resource go to waste.

“Ah, I think he raises them for meat,” she said. “And none would have calves that had been weaned recently. You can try, but I wouldn’t go rooting around down there myself.”

We walked on a bit, saying hello to neighbours along the way and admiring their giant snowmen or other sculptures, and she checked on the horses along the way to make sure they looked healthy and fed. We talked about getting our families outdoors, and that drew us into talk of footing turf this year in the bog.

Turf, also called peat, is the remains of centuries of moss and other vegetation that built up in the bogs, which built up over the millennia when the submerged lower strata did not fully decompose. Draining the bog and pulling back the top layer of vegetation reveals black and spongy bio-mass that turns reddish-brown and hard when it dries, and creates a slow-burning, smoky fire when lit. For hundreds – probably thousands – of years it has been the main way people in this cold country kept warm. The smell of burning turf is one of the most distinctive things about this land, and in country homes and pubs alike here neighbours gather around turf fires in the winter evenings.

Most farmers who lived anywhere near a bog had a ready source of fuel for the winter, once they pulled away the top layer of vegetation and exposed the peat underneath. Farmers here – everyone was a farmer of course, whatever else they did – carried special shovels shaped like one corner of a square, made for sinking into sides of a ditch and scooping out long rectangles of peat.

These days, the cutting is done by tractor, leaving long ropes of black and moist turf like liquorice, partly cut at intervals of a foot or two. While machines can cut the turf, though, humans still need to dry it by hand, “footing” it by cracking apart the liquorice into bricks and stacking them like cross-hatching, four or five bricks high.

“Will you all be footing soon?” I asked. “We’ve skipped the last few years, as we’ve relied on firewood, but I’d really like to get a new load for next winter, and it’s already March.” I knew the man who owned that part of the bog, who sold the turf from it, saw a death in his family last year when his son drowned in the canal, and was in no state to do business.

“We surely will,” she said. “I’ll tell Tommy you’re interested, and you can come out with us. We’ll be putting our daughters to hard labour for the day, with their young muscles.”

“I might conscript my girl,” I said. “As of about six months ago she suddenly became a grumpy teenager and less enthusiastic about helping, but the air will be good for her.”

When I got to town there was no milk or any other staples, just as Caoimhe said – but it seemed like everyone in town had gone to the shop as well, not just to pick clean the few remaining items on the shelves but to chat and break the cabin fever. Some people had managed to get there by car, others by driving ATVs, tractors or even their horses – or just walked, as I had. At the shop I met my neighbour Jack, and talked about the strange weather.

“We’ve had cold snaps a few times before in the last century,” he said, “but in the last few years we’ve had the floods of 2009, the freeze of 2010, the floods of 2015 and now this,” he said. “It’s not anything we’re prepared for.” Nonetheless, he said, they were all well-stocked and used to living on very little, so they were able to take such crises in stride – richer or more modern people would be harder hit.

On the way I stopped at the pub, and many of the neighbours were crowding in there as well; one came in with his father-in-law, who insisted on buying me a pint, and I returned the favour. Many of us stop at the pub every so often, but are not regulars, so a gathering like this reunites people who see each other in passing but don’t get a chance to talk anymore.

Buried

Ordinarily Ireland gets no more than a light dusting of snow once a winter, as the Atlantic currents keep us temperate. This past week, though, was the weirdest weather my neighbours have ever seen. We've gotten up to a metre of snow in places, according to news reports, with winds of up to 100 kilometres an hour. Our car can't get out of our driveway, most buses and businesses have shut down, and the local stations have given over to weather reports.

The west of Ireland hasn't been hit as badly as this, but the east of the country got the worst of it; local news stations showed a map of the most-affected areas, and we're right in the middle of it. I'm told the temperature got lower a few times in the last century, but my elderly neighbours say they've never seen this much snow where we are.

I walked a few kilometres to the store yesterday, to pick up a few essentials, and found that about a hundred people had the same idea; no milk, eggs or many other staples. No matter; we're well stocked for food and wood for the fire, and we still have electricity.

I checked on the neighbours to make sure they had enough - many of them are quite elderly -- and not only are they doing well, the snow brings everyone out to play.

Actually, it's quite pleasant; I have a few days off work, and after a dark Irish winter we have bright sunshine -- and since it's snowed, the light is from above and below. The Girl made a snowman, and we had a snowball fight -- she's a teenager now, and usually too cool for such things, so I treasure these moments when I can.

The fact that our gas keeps freezing gives me a chance to experiment with cooking over the fire, where temperature is no longer a matter of a button or dial but the amount of wood and the curve and sound of the flames. I made egg drop soup today, and might try my hand at popcorn tonight.

I've been curling up by the fireplace with a couple of books by the amazing Anthony Esolen, and I'm taking calculus courses online. In the evenings we've been watching movies. A few nights ago I showed my daughter Charade, with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, one of my perennial favourites -- a delightful mix of comedy, romance and intrigue. Last night we watched Captain Blood -- a film under-remembered now, but every bit as good as the famous Adventures of Robin Hood, and with many of the same actors -- Errol Flynn, Olivia deHavilland, and my daughter's favourite, Basil Rathbone.

With a fireplace roaring next to us, we agreed: if you're stocked up on the basics and mentally prepared for disruption, an emergency can be a chance to remember how lucky you are.

A man who knows his business

The road to our house runs along a 300-year-old canal, originally dug to transport turf -- dried peat moss, our main fuel here -- on horse-drawn barges to the damp and chilly homes of Dublin. The road is only a single lane wide, so even a short trip to the village and back involves a lot of pulling into driveways and letting other cars go past. 

On the other hand, it makes a lovely path to jog back and forth on weekend mornings, past rusted boat-hulls on the shore and neighbours with their dogs and children. It harbours many distractions for the aspiring jogger, like hedgerows filled with fruits and berries in season, the sweeping grandeur of our local herons in flight, or the darting brilliance of kingfishers and bullfinches.

As I jogged along the canal this weekend, my neighbour Liam waved to me, and I stopped to say hello.

How you keeping, I asked.

“Not a bother, Brian,” he said in his amiable rasp. “A little unsteady this morning -- I was up calving all last night.”

One of your cows gave birth? I asked. As long as I’ve lived here next to neighbours and friends who raise cattle and sheep, and even helped out a bit, I’ve never been with them during birth. Yet this is central to a farmer’s life -- one of my favourite television programmes on these islands is an annual event called Lambing -- Live!, where talk show hosts interview farmers in spring and talk about how the lambing is going.

“Sure, usually they’re just fine by themselves, but sometimes they need a hand, and it can keep you up until dawn,” he said.

Do they tend to all give birth around the same time, in spring? I asked -- it seemed a little early for that.

“Left to their own devices, they’d all give birth around spring, but I encourage them to spread it out a bit,” he said. “Makes it easier on me.”

Do you, um, bring the bull around at certain times, or what? I asked. Sorry, I’ve lived here long enough that I feel like I should know this.  

“Frederick,” Liam said -- “you’ve seen him in that field down along the canal banks - you know the one? He’s a good lad, and he’s been with me a while now.”

I’ve seen you with the bull, I said -- I’m impressed at how calm he is.

“Everyone’s terrified of bulls, but I’ve never been hurt by one -- I raised him, and he trusts me,” Liam said. “Occasionally he’s lifted me in the air with his head -- gently, just playing -- and set me down again. I’ve tried to pull him in the tractor, and he can just pull the other way and turn the tractor around -- so if he wanted to get me, I’d be gone. But he’s never wanted to do anything other than play a bit. It’s cows you have to be afraid of.”

Really? I said. You think of bulls as much more dangerous.

“Ah, bulls warn you when you’re getting on their bad side -- they stamp, they snort. They give you fair notice, and only fools ignore them. But cows can come at you out suddenly, just because the spirit took them.”

Liam has been handling cows since he was a boy -- in some cases, the great-great-grandparents of these cows -- so I trust his judgement on these things.

Garden in winter

·        

Today I had a chance to step out in the garden and get a few things out of the way. We are tearing down the garden beds in our greenhouse, as the wooden beds are almost rotted through and we have used the soil for tomatoes over and over, so we need to get new beds and new soil.

If you don’t have a greenhouse yourself, think about making cloches, clear containers to protect your plants from frost and give them a head start. To make a cloche you can take a scissors and cut across the middle of a plastic fizzy-drink bottle, leaving a bell-shaped dome for your seedling. The resulting plastic will be quite floppy, so you might want to support it with a criss-cross of sticks poked through the plastic and taped together where they cross.  You can place the bottle over seedlings in the garden – preferably with the bottle-top screwed on at night to keep out frost, and left open during the day to allow the plant to breathe.

I also drained water through our fireplace ashes, in the hopes of creating enough lye -- the alkaline water that drained out the bottom -- to make soap later this year. I spread the soaked ash over the margins of our property, piling cardboard and mulch over it, in the hopes of keeping brambles from invading and taking root in the margins. I checked the beehive, to make sure the bees are snuggled up cosy and have plenty to eat, and will be preparing some more sugar-water to get them through the next few weeks before the first flowers.

Finally, this is the right time of year to prune most fruit trees, so that they will put more energy into growing buds, flowers and fruit this summer. It’s also the time to coppice or pollard trees like willow and hazel, so that you can have firewood for next winter and the tree will send up new growth this summer. It’s not much fun to work outside when it’s this dreary, but the work has to be done now if the land is to be lovely and productive when it’s warmer.

This is the right time to cut willow, either to build a hedge, weave a basket or just spread the willow around. If you want to take a row of willows and make them into a hedge, cut the willow partway through the stem at whatever height you need. Cut only partway so that you leave some of the xylum, the inner bark that transports water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves, and energy from the leaves to the roots. Then fold the stem above the cut, and weave it around the trees and branches around it so it stays in place. If this is done properly, the tree will remain alive and continue to grow above the cut, and will create a living fence.

To spread willow over your property, cut stems off the tree and plant them in a bucket of water. Wait a few weeks until they grow a shock of white roots in the water, and then dig a hole where you want them to grow. Cut off the roots around the stem, plant them in the hole and refill it.

The days are getting longer again, so it’s a good time to think about what to put in the garden next year. When you plan your garden, try to think in three dimensions, using not just fields or garden beds, but hedgerows and woods. Our hazel trees produce nuts, and under them we planted blueberries and other shade-loving plants, and we will have sorrel and other ground crops lower still – multiple levels of crops going upwards.

This is not an easy month to get out in the garden – the days remain short and chilly. Everything remains wet, meaning that a shovelful of earth is much heavier than it should be. The more you are on top of things now, however, the less you have to wait later, and gardeners do enough waiting as is.

Most of the crops left in the garden at this time of year are root vegetables or cabbages -- for us, that means beetroot, parsnips, celeriac and kale. I’ve written before about how to make them into soup or other vegetarian dishes, but they are especially nice as crisps, and while not extremely healthy, they are probably a bit healthier than the store-bought potato crisps.

Take several parsnips, beetroot and a bulb of celeriac, and some kale leaves. Wash everything well and peel the vegetables -- with the celeriac you might have to peel a lot.

Slice the roots with a mandolin, thinly enough that, when held to the light, they are a bit translucent.

Heat a pan of oil to 180 degrees Centigrade. Fry them in batches -- about two minutes for each batch, or until they look crisp but not burnt -- making sure they are covered with oil and turning them frequently. Be prepared to withdraw them quickly, as they keep cooking and turning colour even after you remove them from the oil -- don’t let them get close to burning.

Let them cool and let the oil drain, dash some lemon juice over the lot, and sprinkle some salt and pepper. Some people like to fry up garlic cloves, or herbs like rosemary or sage, for some extra flavour; if you do this, best to cook them first and let the oil impart their flavour to the other vegetables.

You can also turn the kale into crisps. To do so pre-heat an oven to 150 degrees C. Put the kale in a dry bowl, drizzle a bit of olive oil over it and toss the kale until a thin layer of oil is coating everything. Line a baking tray with tinfoil and spread the kale over it, no more than one leaf thick. Cook for seven to ten minutes until crisp – they burn quickly too, so keep checking on them.

Introduce snacks like this to your kids or your junk-food-eating friends. It won’t turn them into home-farming health nuts overnight, but it does introduce them to the idea that, instead of simply buying fatty, expensive food from a company, they could make it themselves to their own taste, learn a bit of cooking skill, and have fun. It could be a first step to more adventurous experiments down the road.

Scenes from the village

We had a great Christmas; The Girl got a new bow and arrows, to keep up with the passion that occupies most of her free time. She’s been going to archery events across Ireland -- and soon, in other countries -- and coming home with trophies, so I’m satisfied to shell out the money to keep her going. She got me a book that she knew I’d love, and we also got some Hitchcock DVDs -- we watched Rope the other night, and as jaded a 21^st century teenager as she is these days, afterwards she said, “That was intense!”

This is always a difficult time of year; the heating never works as well as it should, so we’re relying on the fireplace to keep the house warm. Of course it got colder in parts of the USA where I lived, but somehow it feels colder here; perhaps it’s the fact that it’s damp, or that we live in the giant heat sink of the bog.

Also, as I’ve mentioned, we’re at the same latitude as Alaska, so the winter nights are long and dark. I don’t leave the house unless I have to, and have spent most of the time curled by the fire writing what I hope will be a book.

Still, my elderly neighbours are hardier than I, and grew up in this area before it had electricity, much less under-floor heating. After Mass today I saw my neighbour Liam, haler at 75 than I am now, and he exclaimed, “’Tis a fine frosty morning, isn’t it Brian?”

“’Tis lovely,” I said, “But I’m not suited to it - I’ve spent a lot of time by the fire.”

“I just lit my first fire this morning,” he said.

We talked some more, and I promised I’d stop by for tea, thinking to myself, Remember to bundle up before you go.

***

I went back to my usual schedule this week, returning to my day job in Dublin. Every morning I wait in the darkness for the double-decker bus to come barrelling down the country roads, and stop and pick us up. Also returning to work were my neighbours; Cahil, who works at the hardware store down the road; Sean, a local handyman and construction worker; Betty and her grand-daughters.

Me: How was your Christmas dinner?

Betty: Sure it was lovely, Brian; now that I have daughters to do my cooking, so suddenly I enjoy Christmas dinner a lot more than I used to.

Me: Seeing your children to adulthood should have some rewards. Speaking of, I see your grandchildren around, Lauren and Shannon. I can't tell them apart, but then they're usually well bundled this time of year.

Betty:  Ah, go on - they could be in beach clothes and still look the same, sure they could.

Me: Does everyone in your family look alike?

Betty: Not too different -- I have four daughters and six grand-daughters, and none of the apples fell far from the tree.

Me: In appearance or where they live?

Betty: Aw sure, two live in our village, and two in the next village down. Not a one that can't bicycle to the others' house.

Me: That's great -- and they all get along?

Betty: Completely -- my youngest granddaughter is still in the school here, Rosin.

Me: I know Rosin! If you don't mind my asking, is Martina -- the woman who works at the shop in the village -- her other grandmother?

Betty: (laughs) yes, her son married one of my daughters. We're co-grandmothers.

I suppose it was not too unusual here, but would be most places -- every morning Betty and I wait by the bus stop, while across the road in the village shop she sees her grandchild's other grandmother in the window.

Me: Is Rosin in secondary school yet?

Betty: No, she's a year behind yours, but will be going to the same school later this year. How's your little one finding secondary school?

Me: She's not so little anymore -- we used to do things together all the time, but now she wants to do her own thing. She spends a lot of time doing archery and choir, and I don't mind -- kids can get into a lot worse these days.

Betty: Sure, we all do that for a while. In the end, though, we come back home to our family.

Me: I’ll be counting the days.