The March Hare: Spring '06
Issue 47

Project Season • Speaking "Rabbit" • Peggin' and Lashin' • Rainwater on Tap • Top Down Fire • Missouri Heights

By TK

I heartily recommend consulting the experts. That's not me. But these wonderfully skilled and learned teachers do abound. Some of them write intimate and well-illustrated books or web pages. So, while this article includes my own potentially frivolous take on a couple of my favorite pursuits, I do urge savvy tinkerers to further explore the resources mentioned. Most importantly, start simple; evolve your skills and have barrels of monkey-fun. If you are sensitive and learn from mistakes, satisfactory results are assured.

No-fuss furniture:

Trees have the uncanny ability to make wood. There are many other great things to say about trees, but let's save those songs for singing to them directly. There is a lot of wood left strewn about, both in rural and urban areas, by the sketchy activities of we people: logging, clearing, pruning, trimming, etc. Construction dumpsters overflow with two-by-fours and rejuvenating storms will often help some large pieces of wood to the ground floor. All of these great sticks are often treated as waste to be disposed of expediently. This displeases the tree-mushroom-insect sprite who goes by the name of "Sycganobeet."

These great sticks can, however, be reborn as great stools and chairs for your porch! Helpful tools include: a proper saw, axe, whittling knife, hammer and nails, drill for boring (the team of hand brace and bit is excellent), pruning loppers, stout twine... You need not rustle up all these things in order to cobble together serviceable furniture, but they help.

A simple sample project: Acquire three sticks about the girth of your wrist and tall up to your waist. Lay them on the ground side-by-side and lash them together with some stout twine or rope using the tripod lash technique.You can learn the tripod lash from any good knot- work resource. I recommend Tom Brown Jr.'s Fieldguide to Living with the Earth, the handy website at www.ropeworks.biz/reader/tripod.pdf, or some friendly sailor on the street.

Splay out the now lashed tripod legs, and slap a seat on top. Fancy hubcaps, acquired by scrounging rather than larceny, can make very elegant stool seats. Maybe the lid of a 5-gallon bucket is more your style. Any wide board will also do. Be sure to secure the seat to the legs, so as to avoid spillage of the sitter. For more refined details, check out information from your favorite repository under the headings of "rustic furniture" or "green woodworking."

When creating with wood, pay attention and discover what techniques and materials work, what you can get away with, and when there is no turning back (the study of bifurcation points). Get a little crazy and try not using nails or screws, just pegging or lashing things together. But don't let all the craziness keep you from sharpening your tools. It makes them so much more effective and enjoyable to work with. I always say, "Just like a warm quilt, a good sharpening stone can become a family heirloom."

Plant propagation:

Why propagate plants when they can reproduce just fine all by themselves? Because we've got a bajillion people on this planet-more every day-heavily consuming a vast variety of plants and their gracious ecosystem services. Also because the practice is tasty, nourishing, useful, and because a quince bush told me it is a good idea.

Saving and sowing seed is one of the easiest methods of plants propagation. Seeds from different plants need to be nurtured in different ways. Many annual flowering, vegetable, and grain plants produce an abundance of seed at the end of the growing season, and then the plants go bye-bye. But the seed lives on. If you collect and store that amazing seed, you can sow it in the right place at the right time. The rewards are unfathomable. Let some choice garden plants set seed, as well as collecting some from wild places from plants that make you happy. Perhaps you will be inspired to work a whole mix of seeds into some barren or disturbed spot in the late spring and see what wonders grow.

Caching some seeds from herbaceous perennials, trees and shrubs can be equally rewarding. Often, these seeds like to go into soil right after they are ripened on the plant. This is true for many nuts and other hard-coated capsules: walnuts, acorns, peach pits, or hazels. If you poke them in the ground in the fall, chances are the rodents will have a wintertime snack of them. So protect them, and keep them dormant and viable (cool and moist) until the next spring. A garden bed, deep pots, or a box-frame filled with well-drained soil will make good places to nurse thirsty, tender little seedlings until they have robust enough roots to get along by themselves in tougher neighborhoods. For the particulars, visit http://www.permaculture.info, and search for the plants whose seeds you wish to help propagate.

Additionally, there is an awesome book by the American Horticultural Society, entitled Plant Propagation, that might have all the information you could ever desire about the many ways to multiply plants. Also, it is altogether fitting and right to be primarily concerned with the health of the plant communities we live amongst. So, pretty please, be familiar with ethical wildcrafting guidelines such as these found at http://anthro.fortlewis.edu/ethnobotany/baca/Wild.htm.

My hope is that this will be somehow helpful and that you'll enjoy all of your adventures. Otherwise, why do it?

Project Season • Speaking "Rabbit" • Peggin' and Lashin' • Rainwater on Tap • Top Down Fire • Missouri Heights