I had a very busy October and only now it seems like I will be able to do some work in my workshoppe again. I was able to do some, but not much. Mostly I was working around the garden, harvesting nuts and fruit etceeraaaa. In the end, there was probably over 50 kg of walnuts and I had to spend a few days working with the nutkraken because my father was tired. Long lever or not, it was just too much.

I put 16 kg of shelled nuts aside for oil making and I will probably need to build a better solution for cracking the buggers in future years. We already have two more walnut trees in the garden, so there will only be more work. Although they are probably still quite a few years from fruiting. One is a seedling, now circa 10 years old, and another is a grafted red walnut, two years old.

Over three weeks I have spent two to three days a week taking my mother to and from rehabilitation. It seems to have been worth it. This Wednesday she was finally able to straighten her right leg at the knee to over 75%, which was a huge step up since it was barely 50% two weeks ago. That was indeed a happy moment.

So let’s take a break now and show you the last of my wood collection.

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Sweet and Sour Cherry (Prunus avium & Prunus cerassus)

You may remember how I was forced to fell a huge cherry tree in my garden. That tree has warmed us in the winter for over a month and of course, I have also put a lot of wood aside for crafting. This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is highly improbable that more than 10% of this will ever be made into some kind of product. Maybe if I manage to get together some viable process for making cutting boards. And of course, to sell what I already have made, I am getting a bit cluttered.

Unfortunately, I did not put aside very many long pieces of this wood. There were not many opportunities. But when I was processing all the wood that I have set aside over the years, I have found several long logs of sour cherry and almost miraculously they did not develop very many cracks and neither got they invested with wood borers. So I have also several nice and long-ish prisms of sour cherry wood, two or three bundles like this one. I think those would make very pretty knife blocs and if used as veneer, I could make quite a lot of big ones at that.

And surprisingly, some of the logs shed the bark quite easily and it too was uninfested and undamaged by bugs in many cases. Thus I have put aside the bark too. I could make it into layered handles (I do not know anyone who has done that with cherry bark). If I do not use it in the end, my inheritors can always burn it for heat.

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Willow (Salix sp.)

One of the pollarded willows in my garden looked kinda sickly so I have decided to fell it. And because the pollarded head was full of knots and twists, almost like burlwood, I put it aside and cut it into prisms. I have also “obtained” probably a willow rootball from the garden of a nearby abandoned former sanatorium, where several trees were cut/uprooted during conservation works and most of the wood was left there to rot. I hit a stone in the rootball blunting my table saw a bit but the wood is at least pretty. The upper and left wood in the picture is the pollarded willow head, and the lower right wood is from the rootball.

That is all as far as wood goes. I do have some other crafting materials that are intended for use in knives, I will possibly make posts about those later.