The Index · A subject

Wood, willow and the cask

Wood, willow and the cooper's cask, with the baskets, boards, spoons, barrels and traps they make.

18 documents · 5 chapters · 1 dish · 55 rows

In the chapters

Chapter 1 The Rhythm of the Hearth
The Story: The wood
Chapter 4 Copper, Wood and Stone
The Story: The wood that is still alive
Chapter 5 Making Ground
At the Bench: 4. A drip line from a barrel
Chapter 10 The Water
At the Bench: 2. The willow eel trap Safety
Chapter 17 The Table
The Story: The truce at the board, The board
At the Bench: 1. A wooden plate and bowl from the green log Safety

Documents 18

On the Menu

Wood-fired wheat sourdough

In the Workshop

The willow eel trap

In the log 55

35 confirmed
8 amended
2 partly confirmed
10 unresolved
10 marked for safety

H1 amended Safety No fire is lit indoors without a chimney; wood smoke is fine particles and CO; three-stone kitchens kill through the lungs; a wood-burning house has twice the fine dust …
H2 amended Safety Creosote lays down when flue gas cools below about 120 °C; a chimney fire runs at about 1,000 °C, cracks the liner and fires the roof; cures: dry wood, hot fast fires, …
W10 amended Safety Wedge half-angle must stay under the friction angle: oiled wood 0.35 to 0.39 gives a 19° limit; practice 10 to 12°; above it the cake springs the wedge out of the trough …
B14 unresolved Safety Fat fire: tallow catches at ~200 °C and above, a wood fire under an unwatched kettle reaches it in minutes; lid or sand, never water (fireball); kettle never left, never …
B19 unresolved Safety Lye and lime: wood-ash lye burns, eyes covered; 1 kg tallow ≈ 140 g NaOH or 200 g KOH; egg-float test (coin-width cap); slaked lime 1 kg/20 l burns eyes and skin, …
B3 amended Safety Cartridge colours differ by maker, read the box; too light a charge the commonest failure; spring (non-penetrating) bolt fails on 29 % of bulls, not for cattle, adequate …
E20 unresolved Safety Fire outside a wooden smokehouse: single point of failure; barrel smoker fire management; never resinous wood (turpentine, tar)
M6 amended Safety Mould rules: brush blue and green off dry; cut away black and pink; discard a slipped bloomy rind; mites mean brushing outdoors and lye on the boards
M8 amended Safety Only tinned copper, glazed earthenware, steel or scalded wood; bare copper spoils milk within the hour
T59 unresolved Safety Horn: boil 60 to 90 min, strip 18 by 4.5 cm by 3 mm in hot tallow 15 to 20 min, pressed 10 to 15 min, edge scraped to 1 mm; beaker plugged with a wooden disc (book's …
H18 confirmed Count Johann VI of Nassau-Dillenburg, mid-16th century, ordered communal bakehouses to save wood and prevent fires; the Backhaus rhythm
H19 confirmed About 0.9 kg wood per kg flour in a direct oven, 0.55 in an insulated one; a village that bakes together burns a third of the wood
H25 confirmed Stove efficiencies: masonry 85 %, steel 50 %, cookstove 75 %, brazier 25 %; charcoal a quarter of its wood; summer kWh costs sixteen times its weight in wood
H26 confirmed 7.7 t seasoned beech a year: 4.2 t stove wood plus 3.5 t for 870 kg charcoal; 480 kg per Ster; about 16 Ster
H30 amended A coppice takes twenty years to yield; a flat insulated to post-2009 standard needs a third of the heat; straw in the roof and felt in the frames cut wood from 16 Ster …
H36 confirmed Cob oven build: bottle-and-slurry or vermiculite base, firebrick floor with a finger's gap, sand form 60 to 90 cm by 40 cm, 1:3 clay to sand 8 to 10 cm, straw layer 10 …
I34 confirmed JABOD: African and Asian ancestry three thousand years old; box 60 cm square, 18 to 23 cm deep; trench two fists, 20 cm by 10 cm by 10 to 13 cm; pipe 20 to 25 mm inside, …
I38 confirmed Blower: pressure not volume, computer and room fans fail; hand-crank blower half a turn a second; double bellows with weighted board until the 1800s; Japanese box …
I42 confirmed Coal about 1 kg/h at light work; charcoal nearly the same value by weight, a tenth as dense; a day about 100 litres or 12 to 15 kg charcoal, 50 to 60 kg wood; a village …
K49 confirmed Cooper's steels: froe 5160 at 48 to 50 HRC with a 30° edge, axe 22° at 56, hollowing knife W1 tempered 200 °C at 60, jointer 52100 at 60 to 62, croze 58, adze 54 to 56
W34 confirmed Species: apple, pear, cherry (antimicrobial, knife finish); birch the Scandinavian staple; sycamore the English treen wood (no taste); ash for handles; beech T/R 2.15 …
W37 amended Cliver and Ak, University of Wisconsin, 1993: bacteria on wood unrecoverable after 3 to 10 minutes, 99.9 % down in 12 hours; recoverable from plastic
W38 confirmed Yadav et al. 2023: a plastic chopping board sheds 7 to 50 g a year (PE), tens of millions of particles under 100 µm
W48 confirmed Open Source Ecology: Jakubowski, Missouri, 2003, fifty machines; LifeTrac about 5,000 lb (2.3 t), 27 hp PowerCube, 3,000 psi (200 bar) hydraulics, wheel motors, 4 in …
G36 confirmed Flame-curtain pit kiln: cone pit about 1 m across, top-lit, layer on at the white-ash stage, quench from the top; char yield about a fifth of the wood by weight
O25 confirmed Scion collection Dec–Feb, pencil-thick one-year wood, store 1–4 °C damp; graft late Mar–Apr at bud swell with dormant scion
O31 confirmed Oeschberg: Swiss, early 20th c., leader, 3–4 scaffolds at 45°, fruit wood 80–150 cm, 10 years shaping, outward bud
O45 confirmed Handstrauß § 39 Abs. 3 BNatSchG: hand's worth / modest basket; no roots; reserves and fields excluded; fines to €50,000
O50 unresolved Planting: hole 1 m × 0.5 m, stake windward, vole basket, guard, mulch, 20 l fortnightly two summers; top-working stubs 3–5 cm, sap-drawer, seal all cuts
B40 confirmed Pig: pale weeping meat after 10 min chase (PSE, no salt uptake); restraint two people, corner/board or jaw snare; head on for the hang so cheeks, ears, tongue, brain …
B58 confirmed Bone meal: spent bones burned in a wood fire to white and crumbling (needs >600 °C; 62 gives calcination stages), pounded and sieved; bone ash ~a third P2O5 (62's "up to …
B60 confirmed Bark tanning: oak bark stripped in May, dried, pounded, 2–4 × hide weight over the tan; weakest liquor first (barkometer 1.006–1.010), stronger weekly; case hardening in …
B61 confirmed Hide area: 4–5 m² per cow; apron ~0.5 m², boots ~1 m²; pig skin better eaten (hard to degrease, tans badly at home); brain tan one brain per hide, warm paste, stretched …
E36 confirmed The monk (Mönch): oak or brick box with stop-boards and pipe through the dam, surface draw-off; household size 1.5 m × 40 cm, 15 cm pipe, grille, fish pit
E45 unresolved Trap rules: odd ribs, sharp unwoven funnel tines, door plug, willow cut in winter and soaked; Californian basket 7 ft, 20 in mouth to 4 in funnel
E57 confirmed Wood: alder (Baltic/Havel), beech, fruitwood; never pine, spruce, fir; barrel smoker layout; juniper twig at the end as Spreewald signature
M20 partly confirmed De Laval 1878; 6,000 rpm; hand crank 60 rpm through 100:1; Danish cooperatives within a decade; not forgeable in a village
M25 confirmed Lombardy mascarpone set with tartaric acid from wine barrels
M28 confirmed Cave 10 to 13 °C; 80 to 85 % RH for hard, over 90 for bloomy; toad skin above about 14 °C; spruce boards; yeasts deacidify the surface in 10 to 14 days
D37 confirmed Johann Grüwel, mayor of Kremmen, Brandenburgische Bewährte Bienen-Kunst 1719, "Streusandbüchse", straw hives behind screens, willow in April, heath in August
T21 confirmed Medieval bread trencher: tranchier, four-day-old coarse bread ~4 in × ½ in, given to the poor or the dogs; wooden trenchers by early 16th c.; Newcastle 1499–1500 import …
T22 confirmed Mary Rose (1545) wooden plates, bowls and spoons recovered
T27 confirmed Wood draws bacteria into its fibres where they die within 3–10 min (Cliver/Ak 1994 cutting-board studies)
T39 confirmed Wood ash ~⅓ potash by weight (variable; often 10–30 % K2CO3); hardwood far richer than softwood; pine/spruce ash gives weak tarry lye; beech ash ~1 % of wood weight; Ch …
T40 confirmed Leaching barrel: hole 5 cm above base, stones/sticks/straw, rainwater not well water (lime kills lye), 1 bucket ash → ¼ bucket lye, run again or boil down; 2–5 % slaked …
T53 confirmed Johann Kunckel 1630 to 1703, Hakendamm glassworks near Potsdam late 1670s, Pfaueninsel 1685, Ars Vitraria Experimentalis 1679, ruby glass; Baruth glassworks founded …
J19 unresolved Household year (own): field 1,500–2,000, kitchen ~1,100 (3 h/day), milking ~300 for three goats (twice daily over two lactations), wood 30–50, tools 156, pig 32, …
J20 unresolved Three narrows: (1) mid-April to end May: potatoes in, lupin, carrots, cabbage transplant, kidding, garden; (2) June hay, late July rye at yellow ripeness, August second …
J23 confirmed 120's 156.5 h/yr split: daily wipe/oil 65 (0.18 h/day), charcoal 30, forging 15, handles 7.5, canner 1, barrels 4, field honing 15, peening 10, saw filing 9; sharpening …
J27 confirmed Lifespans: scythe 5–15 yr, axe head indefinite, barrel 10–30, cast iron until cracked; file 1–3 yr and not resharpenable; a homestead cannot cut hardened file teeth; …
J35 partly confirmed 131's village: 60 households, 300 people, ~3,450 acres, five specialist households (smith, miller/baker, cheesemaker/herdsman, wright, forester/collier); surplus ratio …
J38 confirmed Hufe in Brandenburg 30–60 Morgen (8–15 ha); a village of 40 Hufen = 400–600 ha of field plus as much wood and Luch; 131's 3,450 acres is the historical village at …
J39 unresolved Order of specialists: herdsman (paid by the head, since settlement), miller, smith, cheesemaker (40 cows, 100 l/day), potter (Ch 17), cooper, wright, tanner (Ch 9), …
J43 confirmed Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers 1500–1840, Cambridge 2002, Stavenow estate (Prignitz); villagers bargained, sued, shirked, struck
J46 unresolved Boon-day ledger: a day given is a day owed, written, read at Martinmas, settled in days, grain, wood or meat; the sick and old are carried; commons need a stint set by …