Back to the Grind

I'd like to introduce to you to the newest member of the Gulland household, with Karen taking it out for a spin. It's our grain grinder. A friend had it and wasn't using it enough to want to keep it, so she called me and asked if we'd be interested in being it's next owners. Of course we said yes.

In the past 5 years or so, we have concentrated on learning how to live our lives very differently. We live in a cold place where nothing can be grown in the winter, so we are learning how to preserve our food by traditional means as well as by freezing. We're finding out that the shelf life of certain things is many years in some cases, and we are beginning to look ahead that far with many of our pantry items.

Grinding fresh flour (from local organically grown wheat berries) for bread produces a quality of loaf that has, until now, been unattainable. We make bread once a week now most of the time. Today, Karen made 2 whole wheat loaves for the week and 2 hamburger buns, which we just enjoyed for dinner.

Karen has been making bread for years, and I have been lucky enough to sit back and enjoy it from time to time when she would whip up a loaf for a special occasion. About a year and a half ago, we quit buying bread all together and began making all our bread from scratch. She taught me how to do it, and I taught a few others along the way.

Now we produce our own pizza crusts, sandwich bread, sourdough loaves, cornbread, biscuits, and we even make flour tortillas and corn tortillas as well as specialty items like foccacia and calzones.

I think that the monster grinder will take it well. It's built to outlive us all. I cannot believe a better quality grinder exists than the Diamant. If you can't find a used one, it's worth saving for and buying it at full price. It's the Gulland Broadfork of grain mills.

It's nice to walk out in the yard and pick up a few things to throw on a pizza for dinner, and when we can't do that any longer and the ground turns to stone, we'll have a stack of jars in the basement with all our favorite ingredients in them. When we filled the freezer, we opted to not buy another one, but began to can more, dehydrate more, and designed a root cellar to share with neighbor Harald. We'll have about a thousand butternut squashes to store this winter.

The tomatoes are still producing well, as are the broccoli (Harald's favorite), celery, and bush beans. The late planted stuff is doing very well, particularly the carrots, beets and radishes.

I named this blog the 'Broadfork Blog, and Other Affairs of Daily Living'. People are beginning to do things differently everywhere these days, and I have been a student of the changes that are taking place. I like what I see a lot of the time, but I know that this is a hard time for a lot of people.

Part of my 'affairs of daily living' has been to accept that life is hard work and it takes a lot of time and energy to get things done using older techniques and machinery. Karen and I spent about 10 minutes grinding wheat by hand today, switching back and forth and turning the handle face to face, one hand each on the crank. When you're doing something like that, 10 minutes can seem like a really long time. It's always faster to open a bag and dip in a measuring cup and dump it in a bowl, but bags of flour only stay fresh for a period of months, not years in storage.

The extra effort we put into our food is time well spent, we believe. What's an extra 10 minutes a week to grind flour if you're already spending the time to make the bread in the first place?

These are the little things we do that take up the time that many people would spend in front of the television or commuting or grocery shopping. We've not been cursed with a TV in years now. We work at home for the most part, and our grocery shopping is getting less every year.

I hear from my customers from time to time and garden vicariously through them. Some of you folks have wonderful gardens! I wonder how many of you prepare and preserve a lot of what you eat during the year?

Good soil to you all,

Gulland

A Milestone Has Been Reached!

To some, it's just a number, but to me it's a moment of triumph! This is Gulland Broadfork frame #100, awaiting it's tines. It's not sold yet, but it will be soon. I make these in small batches at home in my shop, doing every step by hand with absolute quality control my number one priority. If they aren't perfect, they don't get sold.

I started this little business about a year ago and I had no idea if anyone would ever buy one of these tools. I wanted to see if a tiny manufacturing shop could support itself by offering very high quality tools at honest, fair prices. I won't get rich this way; quick math will tell you that 100 broadforks at $185 each is not enough to live on these days, but it's a great start. Pretty soon I'll have 100 happy customers that will tell their friends about this tool and it'll go from there. I didn't do this to get rich quick.

I took out an ad in Countryside Magazine that hit the stands on October 15th 2008. That day, my phone rang with the first customer that had not bought one from me face to face. He was in New Mexico, and thus began this very rewarding little business.

There is a Chinese saying, "The ox is slow, but the Earth is patient."
I'll continue to patiently make each and every broadfork with painstaking care using my own hands to do all the work. Even the apparent drudgery of handle fitting is joyous on a beautiful Wisconsin afternoon in the dappled sunlight beneath the birch tree by my back porch.
Each handle is fitted this way to insure a good tight fit when you get it. Nothing is worse than a handle that rattles around in the socket, and the only way to achieve the proper fit at this scale is the way I am doing it. Depending on the humidity when you get your fork, it may be a little tight or a little loose, but the 3/8" stainless steel lag screw that comes with the broadfork WILL hold it together tightly. Sometimes the handles might need a little help slipping into the sockets. You can tap the handle into place with the aid of a wooden or rubber mallet or just a piece of 2x4.

Make sure you don't leave this nice tool out in the weather, and a couple of times a year, rub the wood down with a 50/50 mixture of linseed oil and turpentine and some steel wool. It's a way of preserving wood that has been used for centuries, and it still works fine.

A note to the person that gets Gulland Broadfork #100:

You have made me believe that there is a great deal of hope for our future. You are the kind of person that takes care of your own responsibility to feed yourself and take care of your soil, because you know how important it is to have some control over your most elemental needs. The purchase of this human powered tool shows your commitment to the environment, to your physical health, and consequently, your mental well being. Producing your own food IS good for your head.

By purchasing your Broadfork from me, you are saying that you believe in the small business man, and you have 'put your money where your mouth is.'

A note to the 99 before you and to #101 and beyond:

We're all in this together. We're a small tribe of self reliant persons doing what we can in these crazy times to take care of business for ourselves and our loved ones. We're teaching ourselves how to raise food, preserve it for the months ahead when we can no longer pluck it from the Earth, and share our excess with our friends and neighbors. We're teaching what we know along the way and we are all doing a very good thing.

Thank you to all my previous customers. Your gardens are in the farthest reaches of this country and beyond. Gulland Broadforks are in Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico. They are in the good soil of Nebraska and New Mexico, of Florida, Maryland, Washington, Maine, Texas, the Carolinas, Idaho, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, and my home state of Alabama. California has many, Idaho, a few. I won't list them all, but most states now have a Gulland Broadfork serving in a resident's garden.

It's getting close to the end of the season, and it's time to start to consider what to do with the garden over winter. I'll be reporting back as we start to close down sections that are out of production and I'll show you how I prep my garden beds for their winter rest.

Good soil to you all,

Gulland

Fast Food Local, Local Food Fast

We live about 10 miles from the nearest fast food blight, and refuse to eat that way anyhow. Within 2-3 miles we have a few locally owned taverns that I would feel better about supporting, but there's an issue with my arteries and a threatened early shut-down if I eat in such a way. That leaves me with a do it yourself attitude about food.

I went to the garden a little bit ago and picked a couple of squashes, a pepper, and onion and a hand full of beans for lunch. Prep time was minimal because I never even wash anything unless it has soil on it. In a couple of minutes the skillet was hot, and the saute was over in 5. I added some bread we made yesterday from a sourdough starter from Neighbor Harald, (with a touch of real butter) an old fork from my wife's grandmother's collection and a handmade napkin, and the feast was on.
Since the world headquarters of Gulland Forge Broadforks is located here at home, we eat in a lot. In fact, we rarely eat anywhere but here, and especially this time of year. It's so easy to go and pick up our meals in the yard.

I have been working on the garden in the last few days getting things ready to receive the fall plantings. Yep, it's the middle of August, and time to plant again in south central Wisconsin where fall comes very early.

There are a lot of great things left to plant this season that are willing to put on a jacket and cap, so to speak, and come out of the ground in cooler weather. Now is the time to plant more lettuce, spinach, turnips, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, mache, chard, carrots, parsnips, mustard greens, and peas.

So get up off the couch and get something planted in the garden. I am working on some new video this week for the Gulland youtube site, so make sure you take a look over there and watch me make it look easy.

Good soil to you,

Gulland

Harald was mistaken

Harald is my next door neighbor, just across the driveway. He helped to build this house in 1948 for his Uncle Clarence. My next next door neighbor is about a half mile from here, and we're about two miles outside the tiny village of Black Earth, Wisconsin.

Harald is directly descended from the Norwegians that were among the earliest settlers here in Vermont Valley. He knows all the history of the area and even remembers the years the various trees were planted around the property and loves to share his stories almost as much as I enjoy hearing them.

He loves the deep rich soil here in Black Earth and told me when we moved in here that, "Whatever you plant in this beautiful soil will grow."

He's articulate, broadly wise, but very humble, and wow, does he love to grow food! He has gardens scattered here and there over several acres around the house. Look behind a copse of trees above his house and you'll discover his experimental squash patch. His 'kitchen garden' is swelled beyond capacity, and he says, "I'd rather mow it than not plant enough!" We've benefitted by Harald's propensity to plant more than he can pick.

Yesterday we were both out in the gardens picking and Harald finished and walked by with a huge bag of beans he had just picked. I piled him high with crookneck squash as he walked past my garden, even stuck a couple in his shirt pocket. You can't leave his house without a hand full of cookies, garlic, or something edible.

I was visiting him a few days ago and he saw a packet of carrot seeds on the windowsill and asked me if I'd like to plant them. I told him I thought that it was too late to plant carrots, that in 60-75 days it would be October and I thought it might be too cold.

Harald said, "Well, they'll never grow in this bag!"

Harald was mistaken, as you can see. I guess a seed was still in there. I'm going to love this batch of carrots.

Our garden is great this year, thanks largely to Harald, but mostly thanks to some of the best topsoil on the planet, abundant sunshine and plenty of rain. My wife and I are very fortunate to have landed here.

All good things,

Gulland

Gulland is on youtube!!

That's right, everybody. I finally got around to making a broadfork demo video.

There are a couple of really bad ones on youtube that feature a 'gardening expert' using a broadfork like a harpoon and one that has some body builder guy in a meat suit, shirtlessly pounding a goalpost sized broadfork into apparently rock hard soil with his considerable hulking frame, 'wrasslin' style.

Now you can see skinny-armed Gulland showing a much more reasonable technique that will allow you to use a broadfork for hours on end if need be.

I'll apologize in advance for the less than Hollywood level of video, but movie making is about my 9th language. There will be more eventually, but I finally got the ball rolling with this one.

Here it is, the Gulland Broadfork in action!

Funny thing happened... not 'ha-ha' funny.

I was in the shop yesterday, forging broadfork tines, and I had a little slip of the hammer which resulted in a brief touch of knuckle and 1600 degree steel. It would have hurt if the steel wasn't hot; the impact alone was what made me scream.

When I do such things to myself, I have an autonomic response to the situation and blurt out a string of vile obscenities in obscure languages. It seems to help for just a moment. The words mean nothing to 99% of the planet's population, but would make grandparents blush in several small, distant countries. I trained myself to respond like this over the past couple of decades of burning, cutting, abrading, bludgeoning, and otherwise causing pain to myself with power tools and hot, heavy objects.

Being a one person business, I have to be very careful, and I am. I always wear boots, an apron, safety glasses and ear protection. Gloves are not safe when doing certain operations, because they make you clumsy, particularly when holding hot tines with tongs. I tell people that you really have to wear gloves either all the time or never so that you don't have to think about whether they are on or not. 

Rule #1: Assume everything in the blacksmith shop is hot until proven otherwise.

Rule#2: Everything in the blacksmith shop is out to get you.

I haven't had a 'real' burn since the Great Burn of '88 when I seared the entire palm of my right hand and had my first prescription narcotics soon after. These little burns happen pretty regularly just due to the nature of the job and are forgotten about quickly.  

Now, here's where it gets funny... Since I always wear ear protection, I don't know how loud I talk (or scream) in the shop. I must have let out a particularly blood chilling scream, because my wife heard me, and came running to see what happened... and she brought her CAMERA! She arrived with the scent of seared flesh still heavy in the air and recorded these photos. Here's a close up where you can see a piece of mill scale stuck to the burn and see the singed hair on my finger.
I'm glad she came to check on me, but grabbing the camera was a bit strange, even for her.

A burn doesn't necessarily hurt. Sometimes the nerves are fried and you can continue for a while before the pain comes on. In a couple of minutes I finished the last tines, and went to the house for the cure. I typically apply ice directly for a half hour, then aloe vera, which is amazing on burns. Top it all off with a shot of tequila, and get back at it in the morning.

These broadforks really are hand made.

Be careful out there,

Gulland

Questions, questions.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a call from a man in north central Pennsylvania who was interested in purchasing a broadfork. He said that he and his girlfriend had recently moved to some rural land and that they wanted to garden and would go into a small production situation. We talked for a while about the broadfork and he told me that the broadfork would be the largest expense so far for the garden, and that he would have to consider it. I had a feeling I'd hear from him again. 

Last weekend his order showed up in my email along with a note reminding me of our previous phone conversation. He ended his note with this: 

"This is our single biggest cost investment thus far, but we decided to go for it because it seems like it'll last a lifetime at least. We look forward to using your fork this season and passing it on to future generations."

Wow. 

Given the state of things in the world these days, sometimes I feel like asking someone to send their money to me is like taking food out of their hands... No, wait a minute... its like putting food into their hands! 

Something occurred to me after I got that note. Each time the broadfork is used, it's cost per use goes down. There are no yearly tune ups, no broken springs or cables, no flat tires, and no gas tank. 

You buy it once, you pay for it once. Your pocketbook wins, your soil wins. 

After I had that realization, I wanted to know a little more about this customer that had only been a voice on the phone and an email correspondent. I had this short list of simple questions I sent to my him after I got his note:

What inspired you to want to produce food?
How much experience have you had with gardening before you went 'pro'?
What will you be planting?
Will you be selling roadside, at a local market, or to friends, etc?
If you have time and would like to share that info, I'd love to share it with people out there that need inspiration.

I got his answers and his permission to post them. I hope these words mean as much to you as they did to me:

What inspired you to want to produce food?

A:  My girlfriend and I were living and working in New York City for a few years after college, and doing 'well.' It took a while for it to dawn on us that, despite our successes, we were actually becoming increasingly disempowered. We had less time to ourselves and we were reliant on a vast series of bureaucracies for our most basic needs, including, but not limited to, our housing and food. Meanwhile, we'd been spending summers out on a piece of land in North Central PA owned by my family -- a farm that burned down in the 60s and has since been owned by weekenders. We were living outside, fixing things up, and building a little house. When summer was over, we'd go back to 'real' life. It occurred to us that we could switch the whole thing around and make our time here our real life.

 

Food production, especially, is meaningful to us. It's the most basic human activity, and we know nothing about it. In our ignorance, we've let huge corporations set the terms for the quality and price of what goes in our bodies, and the way our food is grown. For us to grow and preserve our own food is the single most important part of taking control of, and responsibility for, our own sustenance.

 

How much experience have you had with gardening before you went 'pro'?

 

A:  We have almost no experience. I've worked at a plant nursery, and grew up with a very small garden in the backyard. We spend a couple months working on two farms in Argentina. We've got very helpful and supportive neighbors.

 

What will you be planting?

A:  We're doing a little of a lot, in terms of vegetables and herbs, about half an acre altogether, although a bit more counting experiments with various grains. Everything that we like to eat, and extra of things we think other people will want. It will take a few years before we have fruits.

 

Will you be selling roadside, at a local market, or to friends, etc?

 

A:  We'll be selling at a stand in a nearby town, and possibly at a couple farmers' markets. We also bring our stuff into New York, where our chef friend makes incredible, gourmet meals and we explain where the food was from and how it was grown. 

Hope this helps. Looking forward to the fork!

I hope I don't wear my readers out by repeating this over and over, but you folks are wonderful and an inspiration to me. Thanks to you all.

Gulland