It's all about the little things

I grew up without a lot of extras. We got by with very little and I guess I learned some very good lessons from that experience. I have lived my life trying to be as practical and frugal as I could be, but I never cut corners on quality, because quality always matters.

This little broadfork company prides itself in being mindful of the details in manufacturing that really matter and the people I work with have gotten into the spirit with me.

I buy my steel from a family owned steel company in Madison, Wisconsin. Wiedenbeck Steel has been run by the Wiedenbeck family since 1894 and there's a good reason why they've been around for so long. Their commitment to quality is as high as my own and I rarely use that metric. I have been a customer there since I got to Wisconsin in 2000 and I will continue working with them as long as I am able.

Josh is my usual load out guy at Wiedenbeck and since I always buy the same material for broadforks, I just tell him how many to pick on my way in and when I get back with my paperwork, he's usually at the saw, cutting the 20-24 foot lengths into sizes I can haul in my truck. Steel comes in what is known as 'random lengths.' A 20 foot piece might be 20 feet and a half inch or 20 feet and 2 1/2 inches.

Josh knows the dimensions of all the parts of my broadforks and he cares enough to measure out each bar of steel and makes a decision as to where they will be cut to make the least waste once I get them home and start sawing them to precise lengths. Remember, he just cuts the long bars in half for me.

I just finished cutting enough steel to make tines for almost 40 broadforks and the photo shows all the steel that I consider 'waste.' There are 16 nubs of steel there ranging in size from about 2 inches to less than a quarter of an inch. The rest of the waste consists of a handful of saw 'dust' from my bandsaw kerf. This time it was as good as it gets; I used every bar I cut to it's maximum.

Josh understands what I want and he's glad to take the couple of extra minutes to give me that level of service. I appreciate him more than he would ever believe.

My wife and I work very hard to provide you with a level of care and craftsmanship that is rare in the world today. When you receive your broadfork you will know the minute that the box is opened that it was made by people that are trying to make a difference in their little corner of the world. Karen hand fits and finishes every handle and my hands are the only two that ever touch your broadfork head before it gets into your hands.

Well, Josh cut the bars in half... gotta give credit where it's due.

Sometimes you feel pretty small

In my life, I have had opportunities to be in some of the most majestic places in the United States. I have stood before mountain peaks and deep within their crags. I have paddled beautiful lakes and rivers. I have witnessed musical virtuosities and have experienced great art and have stood breathless in the midst some of the most awesome displays of Nature's angry and wrathful weather.

I sought those things my whole life, not because they made me feel powerful, but because they made me feel humble and connected to them in a very deep and spiritual way.

A couple of days ago in Tucson, Arizona, there was an event that made me freeze in my tracks. The tragic shooting event there shook me to my bones and made me feel helpless and numb in a way I cannot ever remember feeling. I have always been the kind of guy that wanted to do something, anything that would make a bad situation better, but I saw clearly that there was absolutely nothing that I could do that would help to heal the heart of a wounded nation.

I felt helpless until tonight. Let me give you a little background.

Late last August, I got an order for a broadfork from The Community Food Bank. I looked them up on the internet to see what kind of organization they were. Because I am such a small business, I don't have money to give to non-profit groups regularly, but I figured that if they ordered a broadfork from me, I would do something for them.

I looked up the extension of the person whose name was on the order and called him, out of the blue. We had a great talk and he told me about all the ways they worked in the community to teach people how to raise their own food in one of the harshest places in the world, deep southern Arizona.

They have a big community outreach, a farmer's market and they organize and maintain a food bank for those in need. In addition to that, they have a Youth Farm Project where "young people are given the opportunity to develop a relationship with the food they eat... learn about food systems, contribute to the community, and of course, have some fun!"

Their mission statement is: Through education, advocacy and the acquisition, storage and distribution of food, we will anticipate and meet the food needs of the hungry in our community.

It just so happened that the guy whose name was on the order was the the CEO of the Community Food Bank, Bill Carnegie. We had a wonderful conversation and at the end, I asked him if he would have a use for a second broadfork; I wanted to make a donation to his program out there. He said he would be delighted to have a second broadfork and was very thankful for my gift.

The following is an excerpt of the note I got from them a week later:

"We do a lot of hand digging in our 1/3 of an acre youth garden, and are working to build our desert soils and to create the rich organic matter and diverse soil communities we lack here naturally. Your broadforks are key to helping facilitate this process."

It felt great to know that I had done something that really mattered and that extra broadfork was stationed in their youth garden, working in the hands of the people that can really make changes in our world.

Well, that's the background and this is the rest of the story.

As I was reading the news tonight, I came across an article on Huffington Post; a statement from the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, Mark Kelly. In his closing line he says, " Many of you have offered help. There is little that we can do but pray for those who are struggling. If you are inspired to make a positive gesture, consider two organizations that Gabby has long valued and supported: Tucson's Community Food Bank and the American Red Cross."

I know The Community Food Bank of Tucson would be as appreciative of your contributions as they were of mine. It's a group that is doing really good work in southern Arizona and here is how you can get in touch with them:

Community Food Bank

3003 S Country Club Rd #221

Tucson, AZ 85713-4084

(520)622-0525

communityfoodbank.com

Sometimes when I feel small, helpless and insignificant, I reach out and touch something bigger than I am. Try it for yourself.

Good soil to you,

Gulland

By the way, that incredible photo above will enlarge if you click on it and you should. It's Leigh Lake in Grand Teton National Park, with Mt. Moran in the background. The water was that perfect ALL DAY!

Photo by Karen Stack

We're Making Tracks

It's time to leave all this Wisconsin fun to head down South again.

Our first stop will be the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Work Group Conference in Chattanooga, TN. You can meet the folks that make the Gulland Broadfork at the Earth Tools BCS booth at the trade show there on January 21st and 22nd. The Southern SAWG Conference is always a wonderful place to get great information and the Earth Tools booth is always a hot spot to get your hands on the finest hand tools available, brought to you by the people that know them the best.

If you're going to be at the conference, please stop by and say hello. I met several of our customers last year and it's always good to see you again.

Next on the conference schedule this year is the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture 20th Annual Conference February 2nd-5th. We'll be there at the trade show with Earth Tools as well. It'll be our first PASA Conference, and we can't wait to get there.

Our last show of the season will be Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service Conference in LaCrosse, Wisconsin on February 24th-26th. MOSES is a biggie, and it's also our first time to attend. We'll be at the Earth Tools BCS booth there, as well.

Being an internet based business, my wife and I seldom get to meet our customers face to face, but we love to when we can. Please come by and introduce yourselves if you are attending one of these events.

It's been a brutal winter so far in southern Wisconsin, and Nature has shared the Love with the rest of the country, it appears. Now is the time to gather with those like yourselves at one of the conferences I have mentioned so that you can learn as much as can while you can't break into the soil.

We hope to see you there!

Good soil to you,

Gulland

Things I Like

This is Marco the ox in the blacksmith shop at Tillers International in Scotts, Michigan.

There's just something right about anvils and oxen being in the same room. They are both symbols of things that have ultimate utility, yet there are very few people that understand them and their place in the modern world. After spending 25 years around anvils, I feel I understand blacksmithing pretty well. I only began studying draft animal power 4-5 years ago when I started to consider options for working larger and larger gardens for more food production.

I wondered how much land would need to be cultivated to feed a family or a small group of neighbors. An acre is essentially the size of an American football field, and I thought I would choose that as an approximation of my needs. Working by hand is slow and brutally labor intensive. Often there is a week of soil work to do, and just 2 days of good weather, so something has to be added to the equation to make it work.

Of course, the first thought goes to tractors. Common 21st century thinking offers that nothing can make things go more smoothly than the addition of petro-energy to a project. The energy density in tractor fuel provides more work per pound than anything this side of a nuclear reactor, and it's no wonder that the ox has pretty much been swept into the dustbin of farming artifacts.

Part of the attraction I found in oxen was the fact that they were around long before the use of petro-energy came onto the scene. There was a lot of work done with draft animals prior to the availability of tractors, and they still can work today. Oxen were everywhere 150 years ago, and now there are only a relative handful of people that have ever seen a working team; far fewer have actually worked with draft cattle.

The ox is not a separate breed or species of cattle; it is simply a castrated bull that has been trained to work. Training begins as soon as possible, but the young team must develop their bodies before any real work can be done with them. This young team below is only a couple of months old, and with a week of training by a beginning class at Tillers International, they were already responding well enough with commands that they were able to complete the obstacle course pulling a light wheeled wagon at the Midwest Ox Drovers Association (MODA) meeting last weekend at Tillers in Michigan. Each year, a pair of calves is trained by the Tillers Oxen Basics class the week prior to the MODA meeting, and the trained calves are raffled into the oxen community as a fundraiser for MODA. This year's team are named Thomas and Jefferson, or Tom and Jeff. They were the nicest team of calves I have seen in my 3 year association with the event, and they will find their new home in North Carolina.

A solo ox can be used for lighter tasks, or for more delicate jobs like pulling a weeding cultivator through corn rows. A single yoke is attached to the implement by way of chains on either side of the ox. This is Will, a Dutch Belted ox about 10 years old weighing in at about a ton. Will's partner, Abe, couldn't make it to the event due to a leg injury, but Will seemed to enjoy himself pulling the weeding cultivator through the corn and sorghum fields.
This team is being led by a Tillers intern from Mozambique. Zacharias is learning the draft oxen techniques from Tillers so he can go home and teach new ways of making agriculture more efficient. He is driving Herschel and Walker and pulling a disc cultivator through a freshly plowed field. A pair of oxen can pull a tremendous load and do a lot of field work in a day. The heavy double yoke is attached to a chain that pulls the implement as Zacharias leads the team with verbal commands and taps from the goad. This team has been working the fields at Tillers for a long time, and seem to know what is expected of them. Watching them cooperate through the universal language of the ox drover is magic. 'Gee' and 'haw' are 'right' and 'left' around the world, and the oxen know their names, regardless of the accent the drover might have. I hope Herschel and Walker enjoyed working with Zacharias as much as I did. His enthusiasm was contagious, and his love and understanding of the animals was strong.
My wife and I had a great time at Tillers last week, and hope to be adding a couple of young calves to the yard next month. If you're interested in finding out more about oxen, here are the links to Tillers and MODA.

As we reach a place in time when we must all begin to be more mindful of the delicacy of our balance in the availability and consumption of petro-energy, we should consider options to the sources of power and energy we have taken advantage of for so long now. The broadfork business has introduced me to so many people that see the writing on the wall that the days of cheap and easy petro-energy are in their twilight times. If you believe in the broadfork, you believe in a very old concept that still works as well today as it ever did before. Oxen fall into the same category, and I believe it was my attraction to them at first.

This is a link to some more photos from our time at Tillers last week. Click here. All photos by Karen Stack.

"The ox is slow, but the Earth is patient."

Good soil to you,

Gulland

The sun is setting on an old friend

In October 2008, I had the need for a website to let the world know that I had broadforks for sale. Knowing nothing about the 'World of Websites,' I called in a pro.

Tashai Lovington got that call and designed the website that I have used since then. My instructions were simple; I wanted a single page website linked to paypal, and I wanted it to be as simple as a kid's lemonade stand. We sat down at a table at Sjolinds in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, had coffee and chocolate, and hashed out the details.

Tashai is an independent filmmaker, partnered with Robert Lughai, and their company is called Tarazod Films. We met several year ago when they were filming Mad City Chickens. Our chicken story was featured in their film, and in that process, I got to know an amazingly talented and artistic couple.

The first call I made when I figured out I needed a website was to Tashai. I told her that I trusted her implicitly, and that she could do anything artistically that she wanted to with the website. If you have seen the original website, you know I did the right thing. Her artwork was wonderful, and that little website impressed a lot of you enough to purchase a broadfork from me.

Thank you, Tashai. It worked.

There's a new site coming, Broadforkers! It'll be up and running in a day or so, and like our gardens, it'll be continually growing and changing, and providing us with more than we would have ever dreamed. I'll miss the old one and it's simplicity, but I am finding that I have a lot more to say, and I need more room to say it.

From very humble beginnings, this little company has begun to take root in the rocky soil of the stormy US economy. It's working out because I have chosen to give you your money's worth, and you have chosen to shop for the best. It's the way business ought to be done, and it's the way it will always happen here.

I am deeply grateful for each of you. Without you none of this would have been possible. The business has grown to the point that I needed a second pair of hands to help me with production. I chose the most capable hands I knew, and they happened to be attached to my wife, Karen. She has built the new website, and is the 'soil scientist' on staff. She now does all the handle work, fitting and finishing each and every select ash handle that goes out the door.

Now I have to say that four hands touch your broadfork before yours touch it. Four very grateful hands.

Good soil to you all.

Gulland

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

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

Hot Stuff!

My favorite part of making the broadfork is the hot work. I started blacksmithing in 1985 and have been around a lot of hot metal over the years. The same intrigue and passion for forge work that hooked me in all those years ago still keeps me wanting to do it day after day, year after year. 

Making the tines is a lot of fun. Initially, I used a mechanical hammer for forging the tips, but in the move last fall, I left the 2000 pound beast behind in Wisconsin. Doing them by hand is possible, but very slow and a lot of work that can (and should at my age) be avoided.

So I asked my wife to help me. She swings a 3 kilogram German style sledge (it's her very own hammer!) as I swing my little 1 kg hammer. We strike in rhythm, back and forth as I rotate the hot bar on the anvil to forge the tip square. It's fast work, and we usually do 20-25 tines without a break, but have done 40 before. Ow!

I'm really proud of her ability to hit. A lot of women wouldn't touch that job with a stick, but she really took to it, developing the strength, speed, stamina, and most importantly, the accuracy needed for the job. We've been doing it for years now and she's really good with her hammer. We have fun doing the hammer work together and have done enough now to where it's almost play, as it should be.

Once the tips are done, the tines are placed in the forge and each one is heated and bent to that perfect curve. 

With the hot work done, the assembly begins. All the parts are gathered, rolled in a tumbler to clean the mill scale off them, then brought together at the welding table.
I try to intersperse the steps as much as possible to keep from doing one thing all day. It keeps it interesting for me, and I think it's better for the body to break up the chores like that.

All the other details come along; the drilling, the handle fitting, the trips to the handleman, the welding, the sawing, the trips to the steel supplier, etc. It's all part of the job.
I love seeing a cart full of parts in the morning. Thank you for helping me to keep that cart full. It's spring now in 2/3rds of the country, and it's getting pretty busy in the shop so I haven't been able to write much lately. I'm working on a little demo video that should be out soon so you can all see how the broadfork was designed to work. Keep an eye on the blog for that.

Thank you all for your support. I recorded my first daughter/mother broadfork sales referral this week. The daughter works on an organic farm and bought a broadfork several weeks ago. Her Mom ordered one yesterday. What a wonderful thing to share.

I hope the ground is warm where you are and that you are planting soon. Keep those broadforks busy!

Gulland

Scythe In The City

Few lawn chores are pleasurable to me.  I hate a lawn for all the right reasons. Mostly, they are a waste of space, and a pain to maintain. In town, however, there are some things that MUST be done. 

I let the grass go too far before mowing this spring, and it got out of scale with what my beloved 60 year old reel mower could handle. So I let it go a little bit more and broke out the scythe for the first time this year.
The scythe is an amazing tool, really. Depending how tall you are, you can cut a swath about 8 feet wide if you're in good grass. You start far behind yourself on the right, swing wide and around...
... and end up on the other side with a nice, neat windrow of mown grass as you proceed. With each swing of the blade, a small step is taken forward and a semi-circle of fresh grass is mown and pushed to the side. The effort in using the scythe is comparable to that used in paddling a canoe. It's just not that big a deal. I calculated that about 600 square inches of grass is cut with every swing of the blade.
When it's all mowed, you take a wooden rake and collect the windrows together. Then a pitchfork is used to load it onto whatever conveyance device you are using. A garden cart is ideal for fresh cut grass. These traditional style rakes have about a 28" width and a 6 foot long handle. The tines are 4" long and you can move a LOT of cut grass with one pull of the rake. 
The grass piles up quickly. You can rake 2 windrows together, then start rolling up grass into big piles until it gets hard to move with the rake. A pitchfork is then used to load the cart with the piles of cut grass. In the case of this batch of grass, I used it to smother some overgrown and undesirable privet. 

I have a friend in the scythe business that you should look up to get a lot more information on the tool.

My friend, Botan Anderson in Wisconsin, sells the finest scythes and accessories available. Take a look at his website at Mystic Prairie. Make sure you tour his site and see his amazing farm. Oh, and his ducks are wonderful, so don't miss the slideshow! Botan is doing the right thing and is an inspiration to me.

Another great article I'd like to direct you to is this one written by my friend Harvey Ussery. Here he lists the most important tools for the homestead, the scythe, the cart, and the broadfork.  "Completing the Tool Kit" takes care of the rest of the stuff you really need. 

Spring is about to happen to you wherever you are in the northern hemisphere, so get busy and get ready to grow something. Find a new way to love an old tool.

Gulland

Details, details

I went to Mike's HandleWorld today to pick up my order and saw this stack of tool handles. These are square ended post hole digger handles. Most broadforks on the market use these, but I don't. 

When I set out to make broadforks, I didn't want to be another broadfork maker, I wanted to be the best broadfork maker. I had to find the details that the others manufacturers were missing and fine tune the Gulland Broadfork to make it better. I came into this job after blacksmithing for the last 23 years and I learned a lot about wooden handled tools in that time. I always carefully installed handles in my hammers, knew how to choose the right ones out of a pile of handles. 

A striking tool handle should be used with the grain of the wood running in line with the direction of the strike to make the handle stronger. The broadfork is not a striking tool, but it's very important for the grain to line up with the direction of the pull so that the handles will be able to utilize the ultimate strength of the wood. Take a look at the photo below.

It's easy to see on the square ends which ones have diagonal grain running through them, and you can see it on a lot of the round ends as well. These diagonal grain ash handles are very strong, but ultimately not as strong as those with a grain that can run in line with the pull of the tool. With a square handle socket, the handles can't be spun around to line up properly.

That's why I use a round handle socket. It's a little more difficult to assemble because welding a round tube to a square tube makes for a more 'interesting' weld joint, but it allows me to align the wood grain of the handle to be exactly where I want it. 

Each handle is pre-drilled with the proper grain orientation so that all you have to do is tighten 2 bolts and the handles will be as good as they can be. 

When designing this broadfork, there were lots of places I could have ignored such details but too many people do that these days. I wanted the Gulland Broadfork to be a generational, heirloom tool.

It's all in the details.

Gulland

Sawdust

This is a picture of the parts of the broadfork handle that will never make it to your hands. This pile of sawdust won't go to waste; it will be sent to a factory from here to be used as fuel to fire a boiler. 

I get to see my handle man tomorrow. I first met him by phone last summer and saw him for the first time just a few weeks ago when I went to his 'factory' to say hello and order some more handles. Mike's just a little over 45 minutes away, which is dangerous because I could spend a lot of time visiting if I'm not careful. I consider him to be a partner in my business because without his handles, the Gulland Broadfork would just be a doorstop.

I like to support small businesses like his. On the day I was there, 3 people were working, including Mike, and when his business peaks in the summer, there may be 4 or 5 at most. He spent a lot of time with me showing me around the log yard and the sawmill, and explained how everything worked. His building burned down several years ago and he rebuilt from the ground up, salvaging and rebuilding a few irreplaceable specialty machines, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, and trying it again. I don't know if I'd have the courage to do what he did, but Mike's a man of strong Faith and he's really good at what he does. I hope all his customers appreciate him as much as I do.

After the logs are cut into slabs, two men set up at the saw (above) and feed the heavy pieces through the beast, over and over cutting square pieces from the slab until there's nothing left on the in feed side. Ash is a heavy, dense wood, and although the slabs get smaller every time they pass through the saw, there is a nearly endless supply of slabs in a day's work. 
On the off feed side, the square pieces are stacked and stickered to insure that air can circulate freely around them so that they can be kiln dried more efficiently. Mike's drying room is run off of wood scraps that fire a boiler that provides the heat. The drying room runs constantly and this pallet of handle material will spend a couple of weeks stacked wall to wall and floor to ceiling with other handle stock before the real work of shaping and finishing them begins.
There are about 38 dozen handles on this stack. One in ten handles will meet the quality standard that I specify for my customers. To put a visual on that, essentially, the top 3 rows on this stack will be good enough to go to my customers. 

I'll have about a dozen dozen handles to work on after tomorrow and I really enjoy the woodworking portion of broadfork making. I look forward to the peaceful, quiet work of sizing the handles with my block plane and soaking them in the linseed oil and turpentine mix. This has been a fantastic project so far and I'd like to thank all of you that have become my customers and my friends along the way. 

I saw a t-shirt this week that said something like, "If you find a job you love to do, you will never work a day in your life." Thanks to you, it's going that way for me.

Gulland

"A Chicken in Every Pot"

We've all heard it, but exactly where did that phrase come from? A little research and I found that in 17th century France, King Henry IV wished that each of his peasants should enjoy, "A chicken in his pot every Sunday." Later on, in 1928, though President Hoover never actually said the phrase, the Republican Party used the phrase in a 1928 ad campaign touting a period of "Republican prosperity" that provided a "chicken in every pot."

Yeah, and we know what happened shortly after that.

The metaphor of the chicken in the pot brings up all kinds of warm thoughts of visiting Grandma on Sundays and the closeness and joy of a family meal together, scents of home made foods wafting, and the crisp autumn air just right for a friendly game of football in the yard.

Go to the grocery store today and try to set that lovely Norman Rockwell scene with a factory farmed bird and you have to add some not so pleasant images and words. Let's see, "Arsenic in 70% of pots," "Salmonella in every pot,"  "Campylobacter in every pot," "Antibiotics in every pot," you get the idea. 

For several years now, my wife and I have been watching the quality of food we purchase. We raised chickens at home and grew a lot of our own food, supplementing it with high quality local food when at all possible, and in general, being very careful what we bought and how we cooked it.

We recently spent 105 days camping, and in that time we ate a dozen meals out. You read that right. Sometimes we needed to stop in and use a wi-fi, and occasionally, we just wanted some fried chicken or a burger. Otherwise we did as Lewis and Clark would have done, as they were a great inspiration as we traveled through South Dakota and Nebraska, and a hard act to follow. We cooked our own, we also packed our own, and we bought high quality food as we traveled.

Raising one's own food supply is not easy or convenient or stylish, but it's high time a lot more of us did it, and none other than the main stream media has inspired me to post this today.

MSNBC.com posted an article today that everyone needs to read, then decide who you want to provide food security for you and your family. Clearly the USDA isn't doing a good job for us. Just take a look at the e. coli and salmonella contamination issues we have been faced with in recent years. As funding is cut to monitor food quality (and it WILL be) and food factories cut more corners in production (and they WILL), we will face a point in time where we're playing Russian roulette on our dinner plates.

Take your fate into your own hands and grow your own. It is the only way to insure that you will get good quality food. Grow your own vegetables and grow your own chickens. Find a way and make it happen. Start small, and learn your way as you go. Visit Harvey Ussery's site and get all the information you need to have to make it work for you. Do it today. This is really important stuff. If you can't grow it yourself, try to buy your food from a source you trust. 

Here's that link to the msnbc.com article again

Gulland

Creating Broadforkers

I had a great Saturday. We visited with Alex, who had recently bought his first house. It's on 5 acres with a barn and some fenced pasture in the rural outback of north central Alabama, and is a perfect a place for a young man in his 20s to begin. Alex has spent his whole life up there, surrounded by farmland and home gardens, but had never had one of his own. After my wife and I had a tour of his new place, he asked where he thought his garden should go. 

We took a look around and decided on a spot, which was, coincidentally the same one his Dad had chosen. I told him we could lay it out and start working it with the broadfork and he could get some spinach started if he had some seeds and an old storm window to cover it on cold days.

Alex thought it would be a lot more complicated than that. He said, " So that's it?"  I told him we could lay out a line with a garden hose to get a look at exactly where it should go. We looked at the shadow of his (very nice) barn and of the surrounding trees, considered the approximate angle of the sun in a few more months, stretched the hose out and started working. I always travel with a broadfork lately, and I showed him how to handle it, then he tried it out. The soil was a sandy clay soil and was very easy to work. 

As we worked, Karen and I talked with him about the foods he liked to eat, and how to get them started. He'd never had fingerling potatoes before, and from the look in his eyes as we talked about them, I think he'll enjoy them a lot, particularly when he digs up his first basket with his broadfork. He's going to have some really good potatoes there.

He seemed a little surprised that he didn't have to 'till' the whole garden, but just the rows that would be the beds, and it would look kind of like earthen corduroy. I told him I'd be back with my scythe when the grass got up to show him how that works to make great mulch.

I left my demo broadfork with him to work on the garden this week, and I plan on going back next weekend to see how it went. I felt like something very important happened there in the warm sun and chilly breeze of the last day of January. Alex really wants to produce some of his own food, and now I believe he is going to do it. He's off to a good start.

I think demystifying gardening is part of the challenge in getting someone started. From the outside, it seems like so much work, so much equipment, such a miracle to get food to grow in the Earth. I told Alex that when we open the ground and put in a seed and water it, we are simply letting Nature happen. 

Try to help someone start their first garden if you get a chance. You'll feel good about it, I promise. 

Gulland

Making the Gulland Broadfork

When I started this blog, I really wanted it to be about the broadfork. So far it's been about pears, intermodal logistics, chickens, and Chernobyl. Today, I'm going to talk a little bit about the broadfork.

I want you to know that I make each one by hand, one at a time in my shop. I pay attention to details during this process to make sure that each tool is as good as it can be. I go to great lengths to insure that things are done the right way, ultimately for you, but also for me and for all of us. By that I mean that I am very careful in the manufacturing process to think about the details that will make this tool useful, durable, repairable, environmentally reasonable to produce, and actually profitable, so that I can make a living by doing this. With proper care, the Gulland Broadfork should never get to the point to where it should end up in a landfill.

First, I want to introduce the process of fitting the handles to my broadfork. The select ash handles are really half the tool and deserve to be treated as such.  My handles come from a small producer located about 30 miles from me in Tennessee who gives me the best he has to offer. He uses ash that is native to the Tennessee Valley, and the wood travels very minimally from where it is harvested to my shop. Mike runs a 4 person operation, and most of his employees are family members. I consider him a partner in my business, and I have the utmost respect for what he does. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with him.

I start by matching each pair of handles by grain density so both will have about the same amount of 'spring' which is what gives my broadfork such a great feel when in use. Some handled tools feel like pry bars, but these contoured ash handles have a dynamic feel when in use. All the handles are straight grained, and the grain runs the full length of the handle with no run-outs.  I drill each one with the hole in line with the strongest orientation of the grain. 

The drilled hole is carefully whittled out before the final handle sizing is done.

The steel handle sockets are seamless DOM tubing, and are sized just a bit smaller than the handles I get from Mike. The wood comes to me at 1.5" diameter, and the tube is 1.482" inside diameter. That leaves me with a little fitting to do as you can see from the scratches on the end of the wood handle shown here. I choose to do it this way to insure that the handle and socket are fitted very closely to each other. The wood changes size ever so slightly with changes in moisture, so it can never be perfect, but I like it to be as close as possible when it leaves my shop. The first step in sizing the handle is to see approximately how much wood needs to be removed. The handle is pressed by hand into the socket, and the resulting line gives me the exact depth of cut I need.

The sizing process is one I have decided to do the hard way. In the first few broadforks I made, I used a sander to size the handles to fit the sockets. For production, I wanted to minimize the amount of 'consumables' I had to purchase and throw away. Sanding discs wear out quickly on the rock-hard ash wood, and all that sandpaper would just go to the landfill, so I decided to buy a hand tool to do the job. I went straight to the top, and bought a bronze Lie-Neilsen low angle block plane. I'd like to thank my brother for turning me on to this exceptional tool. After I borrowed his, I went out and got one for myself. It is a joy to use, and though it may be a bit slower to use than a power sander, it works beautifully, and at a human pace. It's silent, doesn't create that fine dust that gets everywhere, and has no throw away 'consumables'. By doing it this way, I don't have to use electricity for a sander or for a vacuum system. Clean up is simple with a broom and a dustpan and I use the shavings to make fire starters and garden mulch. 

I set up a simple jig to rotate the handle as I size it to fit, from time to time checking the handle socket as I slide the razor sharp blade through the wood pulling off paper thin curls. Doing this for an hour or two is quite relaxing, really, and I am always amazed at how much time passes while I am doing this very pleasant task. Yesterday I enjoyed Holst's 'Hammersmith' while I fitted a couple dozen handles. You can get much worse work.

The last step in fitting is to actually line up the holes in the wood with the holes in the metal. This is a nice, tight fit and everything lines up perfectly. The square punched hole in the handle socket is another detail I add. The handle is attached to the broadfork with a single stainless steel carriage bolt with a thin locking jam nut. The square hot punched hole holds the square shank of the carriage bolt making the fit-up as neat and clean as possible. 

We're not through with the handles yet. Next time we'll take a look at the last step in making the handles as good as they can be. If you couldn't tell, I just love these tool handles. Having been a blacksmith for all these years, I feel like I am learning something new with this exposure to woodworking, and I'm looking forward to doing more of it.

Thanks for reading along, and check back soon for more broadfork information.

Gulland

First Post

Stay tuned for the action packed adventures of a broadfork maker! If you don't know what that is, take a look at the tool on my website   http://gullandforge.com

Through this blog, I hope to introduce you to the tool itself and the way of life I have created around self sufficiency based on lower tech tools and low fossil fuel input gardening at a small, scalable level that almost anyone can achieve. 

Along the way, you'll meet the broadfork, the scythe, traditional hay rakes and pitchforks. You'll learn about the true value of chicken poop in the home garden. You'll come to know that there was a pretty successful life on Earth prior to the invention of the internal combustion engine and our addiction to it as a tool to do all our 'hard' work for us.

I'll try to share what I know about a simpler lifestyle to those of you that are interested in becoming more free from the dependence of purchasing more stuff.

There will be a rant or two along the way and a lot of references to "What were they thinking?" as I observe the things that we are blatantly doing wrong in the world.

I'll document some of the projects I take on and how I solve the challenges that confront me. 

There are some serious changes coming at us right now, and I am modifying my lifestyle to accommodate those changes  before they are imposed on me. I feel like there are a lot of people out there that don't know how to get started in a direction that takes them out of the path of the fear of the unknown, and on to a path of empowerment and knowledge.

It's all about small steps in the right direction.

Follow me.