My Simple Deep Penetrating Axe Handle Oiling System

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It took my many years to finally arrive at a very simple but effective system for oiling axe handles.  I'm pleased to say that Author Dudley Cook came to the same conclusion and recommends pretty much the same as I do in The Axe Book.  This is the first of a series I hope to continue of super accessible bullet point videos called 2:00 Minute Technique.  The idea is to deliver very useful information in two minutes or less.  Of course being rather thorough most of the time, most subjects will be covered in more depth as well, but these will be quick start guides with enough information to get to work.  I'm also linking the long version of oiling tool handles where I talk about drying v.s. non drying oils and geeky stuff like that.

This system penetrates the handle deeply.  How deeply I don't know as I haven't sliced open a handle to find out yet, but it has to be pretty deep considering all the oil some handles are capable of sopping up.  It probably builds up especially a lot in the outer rind of the handle wood.  I think of it as replacing water that was once in the living tree.  As long as you use a good drying oil, like linseed, it will cure to a tough plastic like substance, the same stuff oil paints are made of.  I use raw oil because it has a slower curing time allowing for deeper penetration before the oil on the surface seals off the pores.  The other reason I use raw is because the product known as boiled linseed oil is not boiled linseed oil at all, but rather a compound containing solvents and toxic metals to the end of decreasing curing time.  I've actually gone now to using food grade flax oil only (same as linseed oil,  but food grade is usually called flax oil).  The last can of "pure raw linseed oil" I got smells of solvents, so I just found the cheapest flax oil I could on amazon and ordered that.

There is concern among some that raw linseed will never cure enough and will remain sticky.  I've been using it on my handles for a long time and it cures out plenty well.  Whether it will cure as hard and tough by comparison to boiled I'm not sure, but it's definitely more than adequate.  I can assure you of that.

I see "oil finish" recommended a lot, like Watco or Danish Oil Finish.  As far as I know, they are all cut with solvents and dry quickly.  If part of the liquid that soaks into your handle is solvent, then when that solvent evaporates it would seem that using these preparations would leave less total oil in your handle with each coat, penetrating or not.  Personally I avoid working with solvents because they give me heartburn every damn time.  Using food grade oil is great for me since I'm applying it over and over again all day, I can keep it in the house near the woodstove for faster curing and don't have to put on gloves or even wash my hands if I don't want to.  I usually just wipe off the excess oil and get on with my business.

Once the handle is thoroughly penetrated the oil will not soak in anymore.  If you get tired of putting oil on, or don't want to use so much oil, I think you could stop for a while and let the oil cure a bit before continuing.  Eventually, you can start to build up coats as a surface finish one thin layer at a time. Just apply the layers very thinnly and allow to cure to the touch before adding another.  Building up a surface finish is not a necessary step, but it looks nice and insures the handle is completely sealed.  I tend to just add a thin coat once or twice a year when I have an oily rag.  Polish comes with use.  There is probably a way to fake it by buffing etc.  I wouldn't know.  I'd feel like a dumbass sitting around trying to make my tools look like I use them when I could just be using a tool instead.

This system takes a lot of oil and a lot of time and may be overkill for some of your handles, but give it a try on something and I think you'll like it.  The knife handle below is deeply saturated and turned out awesome.  Repeated oilings took that porous, soft birch handle and made it into something altogether different.

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And here is the long version.

Homescale Apple Breeding: Labeling the Seedlings and Amazing Red Fall Colors

Below is todays video, the latest installment in the now year and a half long homescale apple breeding project.  We started at pollinating some blossoms in Spring of 2015, and now the trees are waiting another couple of months to be grafted out.  Labeling is important because it is what allows me to keep track of each tree and to take notes on the apples as they begin to grow and fruit.  The identifier code also tells me what the parents are and what year the pollination was made.

The fall colors on some of these seedlings is remarkable.  All of the extremely red leaved seedlings have maypole as one parent.  It is the most red fleshed apple I've used, but it also has very red leaves, flowers, bark and even some red in the wood.  The downside is that, it is a very primitive apple with a lot of puckery tannins.  The flavor is excellent, but it is pretty rough around the edges, and low in sugar on top of it.

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imagine these all grafted onto one tree for fall color effect.

One neat thing about Maypole is that it is a columnar style tree.  That means it grows very upright and narrow.  Not a single stem, but it has a very small footprint.  It is also dwarfed, so it will never grow very tall.  If I recall correctly, I think the columnar trait is dominant.  So that will be interesting to watch for as these guys grow out.

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One of the apples I crossed Maypole with is Wickson, which can get up to 25% sugar, the most I've ever heard of for an apple, so hopefully one of those 14 crosses might yield something sweeter.  If nothing really eminently edible comes of those, they might still make good puckery cider apples if the sugar is raised, or something to use in further breeding.  Because, remember, each new seedling is a product of both of it's parents, and carries a large compliment of Genes hiding within.  If the high sugar trait does not express in the first generation, it may in a second generation, especially if it is back crossed to Wickson, or another Wickson seedling.  Stay tuned for 5 or 6 years to find out!

and here is the entire series on this project...

Axe Strops #6 Tanning the Deer Skin in Oak Bark

In this segment we finally begin tanning the skin.  Vegetable tanning is one of the neatest things I've ever learned.  This is the most exciting part where the hide fiber is transformed into leather.  Leather is not skin or tannic acid, it's a unique material made of the marriage of those two.  It can be left in the weather for years, and though it may become moldy and damaged it will not rot away for a very long time.  There are pieces in my compost piles that I pull out and throw back in every year just to see how long they will last.  The first piece of leather I tanned was a rotten piece of skin that I should have buried, but I had some oak bark sitting around so I made a solution and tossed it in.  The tan almost seemed to heal up rotten parts of the skin and knit them together.  I still have that piece of leather.  I left it hanging in a tree outside for a year or two once, but it appears pretty much unfazed.

Bucking Without Sucking, Toward Efficient Notching With an Axe

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I have a great video coming out on tanning the deer skin for the axe strops I'm making for the cordwood challenge.  But the file is huge and my internet was acting up so I made this short video out of something I had sitting around from another project so I could keep my every Saturday posting schedule.

In the video clip, I'm just messing about and demonstrating on this log.  I wasn't actually processing this fallen Black Oak tree, it was just a good size and condition for the project which will be a more in depth video and blog post on common mistakes in bucking, as well as the psychology that leads us into those mistakes and keeps us there.  Bucking well is a hard won skill and can be very clumsy, especially under varied field conditions when working at ground level.  There are several important take home messages in this video that can help people get passed common pitfalls. 

If you see something like the video I'm adding below by Ben at Ben's backwoods on throwing big chips, it looks exceptional in the backdrop of the average axe bucking video (excluding competition choppers), but it shouldn't seem so exceptional.  This is the kind of accuracy, strategy and adherence to a proven system that can make chopping, fun and much more efficient than most people imagine it could be.  I'm also linkng a Basque axe race that viewer Jon Ugalde posted in the comments on todays video that is truly epic!  Those are beech logs they're cutting.  Seriously awesome.

Axe Strops #5, Rinsing, Drenching and Bark Preparation

In this segment we repeatedly rinse and scrape the skin to remove lime and unwanted gunk, then soak the skin in an acid drench made from fermented bran and water.  Oak bark is prepared by chopping and cooked to make the tanning solution.

Permanent Soil Improvement Experiments w/ Biochar Continue, Catch Pit for Artichokes

This is the fourth such experiment in long term deep soil modification using a simple system of trenches or pits.  For now I'm using the term catch pit.  The basic concept is a hole where you toss in stuff that builds soil and feeds plants, backfilling with charcoal and dirt as you go.  It's cool.  Everyone should do it so we can find out how well it works.  I think default thinking these days is to let someone else prove things first, but I think that is backwards and everyone's context is different anyway.  I'm not just interested in how the finished soil performs, but how it ends up fitting into people's lives.  To me that part is just as interesting.  A society that feels an obligation not to waste soil nutrients and to build soil for the future is the one I'd like to live in, so that's what I'm doing.  I don't really know about the state of the rest of the world, but I think America would benefit from picking up a shovel more often and investing in an uncertain future.

Axe Strops Project #4, Unhairing the Deer Skin, (Cordwood Challenge)

Moving along with Part 4 of making axe strops from scratch for the cordwood challenge.  As some will remember, two of the hides for the project were stolen by a bear or bears.  The remaining hide is now ready to flesh and begin the deliming process.  In this video I finish scraping over the skin to remove as much hair as possible and then re-flesh it.  Next it is rinsed and scraped alternately to remove all of the lime and return the skin to it's normal flaccid state before tanning.  Also below is my original video on unhairing skins for tanning.

Saffron, Growing the Most Expensive Spice at Home

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Todays video is on saffron.  Saffron is expensive!  a quick look on Amazon shows the lowest price around $5.25 a gram, which is approaching $2400.00 a pound.  Um, yeah, right?  Fortunately it packs quite a punch flavor wise and not only does a thread of saffron contain a lot of flavor, but it is essential that you don't use too much of it or it's rather odd and dusty flavor can unbalance a dish.  So we can be thankful for that serendipity.  Anyway, $2400.00 a pound and up, what's up with that?  I'll tell you what's up with that from personal experience.  Saffron is expensive for two reasons.  Not a lot is produced per acre and more importantly, there are no saffron processing machines.  Each flower produces only three threads of saffron, which are the red female flower parts that receive pollen (or at least they used to, now the plant is sterile).  Every flower has to be plucked out of the ground, which is slower than you might think because they are buried in a brush of tough leaves,  Then someone has to pick that flower up and nimbly extract the three delicate red threads without pulling out too much of it's lower white part which has no flavor, and without any other unwanted stuff like bits of petal or the male pollen bearing parts.  If the worker is to neither starve nor be fired post haste, this must be done rapidly and preferably by plucking all three threads at once, not breaking them off short or pulling off one or two at a time.

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Every year thousands of mostly young and lazy people flood the region I call home to engage in the harvest of cannabis.  One of the more time consuming jobs employing thousands is trimming the buds to remove the larger leafy parts. Of course there are no statistics for a black market industry, but thousands flock here for this relatively high paying job.  It is tedious work, just like saffron plucking, but the pay is vastly better.  If saffron were illegal, people would flock to saffron growing regions to pluck saffron and leave with enough to live on for 6 months or more.  Alas, saffron production is an entirely legitimate business and if you go to follow the saffron harvest, I think you'd better save up for a while first and bring extra money with you for your saffron processing vacation!  I had some illusions of possibly growing the stuff for side income.  Well, let me tell you, those notions came to a screeching halt when I weighed an hours yield of saffron plucking not even including growing and harvest.  I'm going to try again someday when I'm better at it, but at this point is looks like it's the kind of work that the first world always shuffles off onto some place where people have fewer choices for employment.  I can tell you, if you pay 2400.00 a pound for saffron, someone is getting royally screwed in that transaction and it ain't you!  You're certainly getting a bargain.

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But hey, money isn't everything and I'm about the biggest fan around of divorcing ourselves from the everything-has-a-price-tag, time-is-money, market value mindset.  I've spent a lifetime unlearning that way of thinking in order to pursue the kind of knowledge that I'm after.  If I stopped to value the stuff I do all the time, I would do very little of it.  That means I am poorly adapted to the modern paradigm and really have low survivability in the current default society, but that's okay with me.  There are things more important than money or survival.  Look buddy, when the local economy collapses because of the legalization of marijuana I'll at least have saffron aplenty for my mixed rodents with gourmet mushrooms and acorn sauce as I slowly starve to death up here in the hills defending the last of my carrot crop from wandering bands of starving out of work pot growers.  Nope, the saffron industry will never replace the pot industry in the emerald triangle but, thanks to it's inherent potency, growing enough saffron for your own yearly supply is very easy and not even that time consuming!  I enjoy plucking those precious little red threads out, at least to a point, and processing the flowers from a bed 4x6 even at the peak of the season is basically the amount of time it takes to watch a tv show or part of a movie.  I would present for your consideration the idea that kind of busy work is good for the soul.

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Saffron is easy to grow here.  I just plant the bulbs and maybe weed them and that's it.  I did get two different batches of bulbs and so far one batch is far out performing the other, so that is something to think about.  There are different strains, no doubt due to epigenetics or to random mutations over time since the plants do not produce seed but are grown solely by dividing the underground parts and planting them.  While the bulbs are rather pricey, it might be worthwhile to pay extra for a proven producing strain if you can find a seller you have that kind of confidence in, like a producer that sells bulbs on the side to subsidize saffron thread production.

The worst problem I've had is that rodents seem to love them.  I had to plant them in a wire lined bed to keep gophers out, which has worked well for a few years now.  I've also made a lot of naturalized plantings, but they have done poorly so far.  I had hoped I could just scatter the bulbs all over the hills and wander around plucking them with the theme song to The Sound of Music playing through my head, but it is looking like they are not well enough adapted to this climate or soil.  I haven't given up yet, but it's not looking good.  I'm not sure where all you can get away with growing the stuff, but you can look into that on your own.  It seems to grow well in my mild Mediterranean climate.

The flowers bloom in the fall and are harvested daily or up to every other day as they emerge and processed immediately.  Dry the threads quickly, but out of the sun and store in a dark jar.  It is an oddly flavored but delicious spice and I'm finding more and more uses for it.  Yesterday morning I made browned chanterelle mushrooms in a butter and caramelized maple syrup sauce with saffron, vanilla and candy cap mushrooms.  Was it good?  Do you have to ask?  Omg, it was so good.

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Well, that's it.  Watch my short and very pretty video, because it's cool and I worked hard on it.  And share it with someone you love so I can get more views and buy axes!  I don't actually really want any more axes, (though I probably want different axes).  I just want to test them all.  I'm only interested in having a pile of axes to the extent that it serves the purpose of learning me all about them.  Once I determine an axe or other tool is dead weight, just like an apple variety or saffron strain that doesn't perform, It's getting the axe so to speak.  Skills and knowledge over gear.  I have too many possessions already due to my not-so-simple living.  I also don't need more saffron than I can process, or tons of saffron that I have to care for, but can only process for 3.00 an hour.  Okay, maybe with the right marketing, selling local organic saffron to fancy by area restaurants maybe I could hit the point where saffron production is at least equivalent to very low paying job like working at walmart.  Or, maybe I'm wrong and I'll get super fast and crack the saffron code to make it a potentially viable business.  I think saffron will remain a labor of love though.   Anyway, I was saying that I don't need tons of saffron plants, so I can sell the extra corms to other would be saffron growers, which is honestly probably much more lucrative than saffron production.  Once I dispose of the poor producing strain and expand the good producing strain, I'll probably have bulbs for sale in my little SkillCult e-store or on ebay.  Until then, I think you'll see saffron cropping up in a recipe here and there.

Note that there is no advertising on this site, nor am I constantly pushing you to buy products, but only occasionally link products that I can pretty much get behind with little or no qualification.  That is no accident.  I feel that having advertising everywhere is contrary to my goal of convincing people to learn and do more for themselves and consume less.  The medium is the message as they say.  However, when you do need to buy stuff, you can help me succeed at my endeavors by bookmarking this link ( http://amzn.to/1Ne861e )in your browser bar and using it whenever you shop on Amazon.com.  It costs you nothing, but it has the potential to help me a lot if enough people do it.  If you don't know how it works yet, that link contains an ID that credits me a small commission around 4% to 6% on anything you buy through it.  That's why most sites are covered in links and ads pushing you toward Amazon or other affiliate programs.  I really don't want to do that, and I don't think you want me to either.  And a huge thanks to those of you who already use that link, it does make a difference!

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Tasting a Couple of New Seedling Apples with Mark Albert

While at Mark's Albert's house shooting the pineapple guava video, we sat down and tasted a couple of my new seedling apples, one of which has red flesh.  I'm a little more positive about the red fleshed apple now than I was at the time.  It developed a bit more sugar after spending a little more time in the fridge.  It's not going to be an outstanding desert apple, but I would think now there's a chance it will outperform Grenadine.  It looks better I think.  It's a very attractive apple.  The flavor is quite nice.  After that we tasted some varietal grapes and Glenora grape juice and chatted about grapes a bit.

Pineapple Guava Tour with Collector, Breeder Mark Albert

I visited with my good friend Mark Albert a long time collector and unintentional breeder of Feijoa, also known as Pineapple Guava.  Mark is a dyed in the wool fruit explorer and has dedicated his life to the pursuit of knowledge in the realms of home gardening and orcharding. More importantly he's driven to share that information (as well as genetic material) forward through the local group, Mendocino Permaculture which puts on the local scion exchange , writing, teaching and personal correspondence all of which no doubt cost him a great deal let alone not resulting in any personal gain.  We had a discussion while I was there about that drive to share information which we both share.  The idea that someone would earn that kind of hard won knowledge and not share it would probably leave us slack jawed and shaking our heads in bewilderment.  If that kind of thing isn't used to help us all progress then what's the point?   I hope to do some more video visits with him in the future and get some of his wisdom and opinions out to you guys.

After about 40 years of growing and testing Feijoa, he has some new seedling varieties which have risen to the top.  I've confirmed that at his tasting where I unknowingly picked the same favorite he did.  They are smaller fruits, but quality over quantity if it comes down to that.  Down the page you'll find his recommendations for a early, mid and late feijoa.  After this visit I'm planning to put in three to cover the season.  I have a smattering of them already placed here and there, but I think it's time to put in a row of better placed, and better cared for, bushes.  The plant is very tough and drought resistant once established and it looks good.  All around a good one for establishing on the homestead or home landscape if you have the climate for it.

VARIETY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM MARK ALBERT

At the 40 year mark of testing, the list has gotten pretty simple for the north. 

The north means our Mendoterranean climate zone, or anywhere north of the bay, where the cooler climate zone will likely not allow the latest-season southern cultivars to ripen to perfection before our cold temperatures stop the ripening or freeze the hanging fruit. This list has a definite bias toward the home grower, with no commercial goal in mind, and quality of fruit comes before size. 

The proven cultivars at this point are: 

Early season (October): Albert’s Pride or Albert’s Joy
Middle season (November) : Moore
Late Season (December): Albert’s Supreme

Because these cultivars have been selected in the north, they will also work in the southern California when they are not ruined by the Santa Ana winds, the hot, dry wind from the east that can cook the ripening fruit in the fall. It does not work the other way: good southern cultivars may not ripen in the north. 

This is an ongoing experiment, and we are now testing the latest New Zealand cultivars which have recently made their way to the U.S. These are likely to be very good, because they newest cultivars were selected by New Zealand feijoa lovers with a more educated pallet, not by paid academicians, as in the past. 

Also the biological time factor is that feijoa is a very new fruit, only selected out of the wild in the last 130 years or so from South America. When we look back at the old cultivar names, that’s only 5-6 generations of development. So it makes sense that each generation is higher quality because they are crosses of the best of the previous generation of cultivars. This is how all fruit is improved. The previous 2 waves of New Zealand cultivars were commercial selections and were a bust in California. 

So these recommendations may change in the next 5-10 years. 

In Abundance, 

Mark

Foraging for Gourmet Wild Mushrooms, coccora, porcini, oysters, puffballs

I've been putting up large quantities of dried and frozen wild mushrooms for a few days.  These are some of the mushrooms I grow and a few other things I ran into running around in the woods having a good ol' time.  Right now the good stuff that's out are lions mane, coccora, porcini and a few oysters.  Also some puffballs, which I'm very fond of, especially browned in a skillet.  Be careful out there if you decide to take up mushrooming.  I highly recommend it, but it takes a while to get comfortable with identifying and eating stuff when there are always the possibility of eating something that will make you sick or kill you.  What I do is mostly eat what I already know.  This is a staple subsistence activity for me.  I ignore lots of mushrooms I don't know and get on with finding what I do know and have already proven safe.  If you live on the west coast I can pretty much recommend David Arora's books without hesitation.  I use his small book All The Rain Promises a lot, but also own the large one, Mushrooms Demystified and use it quite a bit.  I don't think I even own any others anymore.  Once I got those two, I got rid of the rest.   http://amzn.to/2fTRxzP

Tasting 17 Apples in November and Looking at New Seedling Apples

I went out and picked what apples were available to taste this past week.  There were a few good'ns in there.  More exciting is a couple of my seedlings that are looking rather nice.  You can tell some things about an apple by just feeling it and looking at it.  A couple just look like they are going to be hard dry fleshed and bitter.  The one I taste in this video obviously looks more like something you'd expect to be eating.  The most exciting though is a very red and beautiful apple which colored up amazingly even in nearly complete shade covered with stocking material to protect it from birds.  Typically fruit colors up better with light.  It is a cross between Grenadine and Lady Williams.  Both are late apples and this may be a very late apple, though I'm inclined to think it is approaching ripeness fairly soon.  

You can't judge an apple by it's cover.  We certainly learned that from the red delicious era when strains of it were selected for better and better looking apples with worse and worse flavor and texture.  But I'm hopeful for something tasty out of this with red flesh.  The odds are against it of course.  Most of my apple seedlings will be between mediocre, such as the one I taste in this video, and just plain bad.  But even with the primitive, unrefined apples carrying undesirable characteristics that I'm using in many of my crosses, more will be edible than not and I'm expecting at least a smattering of apples worthy of further propagation by someone.  This apple bears so much resemblance to Grenadine, that I'm hoping it has inherited it's beautiful and flavorful red flesh.  Check it out.

There is more than a passing resemblance between this seedling and it's seed parent grenadine.

The thing is that the red skin of grenadine is actually from the color of the flesh showing through the translucent skin.  My hope beyond hope is that this is the case with the seedling.  It seems unlikely though.  We'll find out soon enough.

In the video I taste wickson, amberoso, crabby lady, king wickson, muscat de venus, something that may be katherine, something that may be ashmead's kernel, bedford pippin,high cross pippin, claygate pearmain, one of my seedlings, pink parfait, gold rush and others.

Of Sharp Tools and Dummy Rules, A Safety Framework and 1/2 Hour Video Just Talking About an Axe Handle

Here is something I recorded regarding safety when using sharp tools.  I hope it conveys my basic approach and philosophy regarding the subject.  I'm much more about a general approach and philosophy adopted as a framework in which to approach work than I am about sets of rules.  Most rules that are stated as absolutes need all kinds of qualification that they don't always get.  Not only is that ineffective when engaging in real world work, it can be dangerous.  What I like to call dummy or boy scout rules are generally stated in absolutes like never and always.  That discourages intelligent engagement with the work at hand and defers your safety to an authoritative statement or entity.  The idea seems to be that if you just do this one thing, you will be safe.  If you're doing real work in the real world, you'll find that most of those rules will be broken, and some frequently, in order to carry out work at all or to do work more practically or more efficiently.  It would be more constructive to state these as guidelines and be realistic about the risks involved and strategies one can employ to ameliorate risk when doing things that are dangerous, or when using sharp tools in the grey area that exist between the very safest ways to do things and the most effective.  The usual black and white approach can lead, I believe, to unsafe work approaches when trying to bend your self and your work to static and overstated rules which experienced craftsmen and workers may not actually follow.  In the future I'll get more specific on knife and axe safety, but this is actually some of the more important part to me.  

Also, I forgot to post this video on the husqvarna axe handle.  It covers various points regarding the handle and planned modifications and as a matter of course addresses some stuff about axe handles in general.

Starting the Husqvarna Forest Axe Project, Intro and Testing the Stock Axe

This is the beginning of a look at the Husqvarna 26” Multipurpose Forest Axe.  After seeing my unflattering review of their hatchet you might expect me to be frothing at the mouth about this one, but I actually think it has potential or I wouldn't have bought it.  The video is a short intro with a lot of chopping.  I kept falling asleep while trying to edit it because the repetitive chopping is somehow very soothing.  This is a class of axe that is light enough to pack, but as the name implies is good for a lot of different stuff.  I like this class of axe for running around the woods here or doing a little limbing.  The Gransfors Bruks Forest Axe is the most famous example, which I own.  Having put that axe through a lot of firewood last year just to see what can really reasonably be done with it, I can say that these light short axes can do some real work!  They are probably not the best at anything.  It’s compromises all around.  I would not really recommend this as a firewood axe to most people.  it is too light and it would be better if it were longer..  However, if someone interested in a packable axe and improving their skill at using one, I think it would be an excellent exercise to get one of these and cut a quantity of firewood with it.  It is also probably an easy axe to learn to chop on.  Although a somewhat longer handle could be safer, the shorter handle should be more accurate.

I’ve had the gransfors for a very long time and thanks to the outstanding quality of the handle wood and my hard won skill at not breaking axe handles all the time, it has survived the years and seen a lot of use.  I like the design, but it’s a tad short at 25 inches, which is my short limit for a truly effective and comfortable axe at my height (5’ 10”).  The workmanship on the head is terrible though.  The bit is extremely crooked.  So if the Husqvarna works out, which I think it will, the Gransfors will go on the auction block.  I’m not interested in these things hanging about gathering dust.

Coming up in this project, we’ll talk about the axe, buying it and what I do and don’t like and then start modifying it.  Some stuff I know what I want and other stuff will be experimental.  during and after, we’ll test it at various uses to see how it performs.

One Year Shelf Stable Apple Butter Update, Still Going Strong

It's been nearly a year since I made my first batch of old fashioned shelf stable apple butter.  Today's video is an update on that project.  It spent the year in my trailer here with wildly fluctuating temperatures.  Many days were over 100 this summer and many more than that in the 90's.  There is no sign of spoilage and it still tastes delicious.  All the links to previous posts and videos concerning apple butter are listed below.  Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of apples on my trees this year and have not been able to get any to make a larer batch.  It's an excellent product and not particularly difficult.  I hope you give it a try if you have access to apples.

Original blog post with recipe

All of the historical research I compiled

Axe Strops From Scratch Part 3, Preparing Wood and Seasoning

Part 3 in which I prepare some green wood to season as slabs and billets for making the paddles.

Axe Strops From Scratch #2, Fleshing the Hides and Some Tasty Poison

The Axe strop project is moving along.  Here is installment two wherein I flesh the hides out of the lime, refresh the lime solution and put them back.  Also making almond extract from wild bitter almonds growing in the local creek.  I use these same almonds to grow my own almond rootstock.

BITE ME! revisited, Checking in With My First Seedling Apple and a Few Others

I only had a few specimens of my seedling apple this year.  The first couple were unripe, but the last one seemed better than any I had last year.  That is not surprising since fruits either grafted or from seed can take a few years to start bearing exemplary fruit.  BITE ME! is from an open pollinated Wickson seed, which means that I don't know whos spread powdery pollen was spread over Wickson's sticky stigma.  This year BITE ME! seems to have more of the Wickson flavor that motivated me to use wickson as a parent in breeding.  That flavor and the high sugar content (up to 25%) have encouraged me to make a lot of intentional Wickson crosses with other apples.  It's encouraging that the flavor came through in the this case, although the sugar content of BITE ME! seems average.  I will definitely be sending out scions of bite me to whomever wants to try it.  It has potential and I'd like to see what others think of it in the long run and how it does in other regions.  I will probably start selling scions in the webstore here about FEB 1st.  That is the plan at this point.

Also in this video we taste a few other apples, one that is probably Northern Spy, Zabergau Reinette, Vanilla Pippin and Suntan.

Dealing With Meat Under Varied Conditions, Heat, Aging, Spoilage Prevention

I filled my second deer tag recently and had a carcass to deal with just on the very evening that we entered into a heat wave in late September, with warm nights on top of it.  Fortunatley, I have dealt with this sort of thing enough to know not to panic.  My deer is all in the freezer now and I've been chowing down on delectable venison for days and will be for months to come.  Last night I was chowing down on raw venison that had hung through a warm night with no chilling right after being killed and then through most of a day that reached 103 in the shade, delicious!

For anyone of a homesteady mentality that will be planning to raise and slaughter animals, or who hunts much could probably be helped by this information.  It takes time to build confidence doing this sort of thing and to begin understanding boundaries, but it's great knowledge to have. Everyone used to know this exact type of stuff, because that is what everyone needed to know.  people used to get fresh meat from the butcher and needed to keep it without refrigeration or know how long they had to use it all up before it went bad.  I was looking through a cookbook recently from way back and it had a section on judging meat at the butchers to suss out how fresh it was.  Important skill to have at the time and also now if you choose to put yourself in positions where you need to make due under varied conditions.  I have more to say about this whole subject and things I'd like to expand on or that got missed in the video, but I have to go get ready for rain this weekend.  This video will have to do for now.  It's not a how to kind of thing as much as an expansion of what are probably most people's perceived boundaries regarding this subject.  It is certainly micro-niche information, but very important when you need it.

I also tagged in some neat footage at the end of a couple of yearling bucks play fighting near my house.  Very lucky to have the chance to capture that!

Pocket Axe Strop Production Part 1, Introduction, Liming Hides and Selecting Wood

This is part 1 of my project to build up Pocket axe strops from scratch as incentive/rewards for the Axe Cordwood Challenge.  I may also sell some on the website depending on numerous factors.  For those who don't know, a strop is a device for polishing or refining a sharpened edge.  it is the last step in many sharpening sequences and can also be used to touch up edges, especially if polishing compound is used.  It usually involves leather, which my design of course does, but the act of stropping can also be done on wood or even cloth.  In this project, I'm building strops from the ground up, which involves, tanning, glue making and working up some wood from it's raw log-like state.  There should be no materials used in these strops that were not processed by me here on the homestead, down to the lime and fat used in preparing the leather.  The project will span an undetermined number of videos, as well as a short version of making an easy high quality hide glue from scraps that most hunters or butchers of animals typically throw away.  Almost anyone who is not me should learn a lot from this series and I hope to learn some stuff too! ;)  Feel free to vote on names for the pocket strop or think of new ones... Stropet, Pocket Strop-It, Pixie Paddle (the woods are a dangerous place full of mischievious pixies!).