Mucking out the Stalls

Hello, Muleteers, and sorry to be AWOL there for a minute. This donkey’s life can sometimes get the better of my deadlines, but as I aspire more to the tortoise than the hare, you can be reasonably sure I’ll get there eventually.

The GreenWood Wrights’ Fest celebrates some wonderful, old-school handwork techniques in woodworking, as well as the kind of music, food and hijinks you might expect from a bunch of my kind of people in North Carolina. I can’t wait to get there one of these years, looks like it’s October 21-23 this time. Here’s more about the delightful discipline from their website:

Derived from Swedish hand crafts called Sloyd, green woodworking is a traditional way of making functional items for the farm and home with recently harvested wood. Historically taught in schools, this form of old school woodworking is captivating people from all walks of life and spreading like wildfire globally. We use primarily hand tools such as Silky saws, hatchets, Sloyd knives (Mora), and special spoon carving knives, transforming greenwood into beautifully crafted functional objects. Green wood is easy to carve but requires special considerations that may not be apparent to greenwood greenhorns. Greenwood wrights must have an intimate understanding of nature, the forest, the wood and traditional craftsmanship.

Let the chips fall where they may!

The Great Roy Underhill teaching his class on Repose. Photo Credit

One of the many ways in which I’m spoiled is that I get to dabble in farming some rotationally grazed, grass-fed Galloway beef with my friend James. With the discerning eyes at Higher House Farm, we share this absolute unit of a bull, called The Colonel, bred from our friends at Mochrum Belted Galloways. Without going into a fully granular breakdown of his bloodline, I’ll just say we met some of his family members over at Mochrum the other day, and it gave us some very warm and fuzzy feelings about breeding their attributes into the Rebanks Racy Ghyll herd.

The Colonel. Photo: James Rebanks

There will be more to come this week, as I re-acclimate myself to the California weather, so please keep your questions coming in the comments below.

Love,

Thanks for subscribing, either on the “free” level, which gets you most of the print stuff, usually published on Thursdays, or the “not-free” level, which gets you all the secret swag, which is an absolute dragon’s hoard of photos and video content, and, I mean, well that’s pretty much it.

Muleteers!