Joe’s Late Season Mushroom Report

black chanterelle

Black chanterelle (Craterellus cornucopioides)

The Late Season (text and photo by Josef Szuecs)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, mushrooms generally fruit in species dependent windows of time.  The exact timing of these windows vary from year to year, affected by a number of factors.  In the SF Bay area, we can start looking for a few wonderful late season mushrooms in December and January.  Namely, Black chanterelles (Craterellus cornucopioides), Hedgehogs (Hydnum repandum  and H. umbilicatum), and the Yellow-foot chanterelle (Cantharellus tubaeformis or Craterellus infundibuliformis).

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Balancing the Brain

egyptian juggler

At a certain scale, production woodwork requires a lot of time spent physically sorting and grading material, then processing it through a sequence of noisy machinery. It can be dull, monotonous work, but I still get a thrill watching grain patterns emerge and generally enjoy the physical labor as a kind of meditation. I find it helps to begin a day of milling wood with an exercise I call balancing the brain. In the past, this has taken the form of a commute by bicycle to my shop, or practicing Tai Chi. Lately, I’ve been spending a few minutes each morning juggling and relearning to ride a unicycle, both familiar activities from my youth. The activity reminds me to be present and aware of my stance, which protects me from injuries associated with repetitive motion, and helps keep me safe and sound when working with dangerous tools.

unicycleI love my salvaged, battered unicycle and antique wooden juggling pins


Flotsam of the Day

beachcombing4someone left a rose in a driftwood log

I can’t think of a better way to recalibrate after an intense week of studio woodworking than a morning of beachcombing after a string of storms. I appreciate more and more living and working so close to the shore, and find daily release and inspiration being able to take a walk, a run, or an occasional dip in the surf when the waves are rideable. ivexterm tabletas dosis niños I always return to the studio refreshed, having put things in perspective simply by tuning in to the flotsam of the day.

beachcombing3beach erosion has uncovered an old engine block

beachcombingI found a great piece of wood for my first driftwood skate deck

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Labor Me Vocat

labor me vocat

Translated from the Latin, Labor Me Vocat is roughly, ‘duty calls’, an apt motto describing my current state of affairs. As is occasionally inevitable in a life of craftwork, my head and hands are now fully focused on realizing a string of challenging projects, and my posts on this site will be less frequent. ???? ???? ??? ?????

I began this experimental weblog two years ago as a way to organize my thinking about craft during the course of daily life and work, as a contemporary take on the ‘jointer’s journals’ of 18th century carpenters. To that end, I’ve come full circle, and am confident the site now functions pretty well as an elaborate articulation of my philosophy of craft, hopefully useful as an idiosyncratic ‘pattern book’ of an approach to sustainable design applicable across disciplines and diverse media. I’ve tried to consistently distill my thoughts in an ongoing manifesto, which codifies an ethos of making and invites elaboration by others.

In closing out this phase of Deep Craft, and in preparing to lay the groundwork for a new body of work informed by my research, I hope to draw some conclusions. ??? ????? ????? I’ve learned to see craft as a bridge between art and design, a way of making aesthetic inquiry empirical. Ultimately, the practice of craft is a strategy or method for matching one’s inner state to outside conditions, which to me defines an ideal state of comfort.

I thank all of my devoted readers across the globe for their support, and hope to hear from folks about their favorite posts as I consider developing Deep Craft as a book proposal. ????? ????? ?? ??????? In the interim, please feel free to ‘friend’ me on Facebook. – Sincerely, Scott Constable

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Ene’s Arbor Day

olive treesrows of mature olive trees at the Urban Tree Farm (photo: Ene Osteraas-Constable)

I’ve asked Ene to write an occasional post for Deep Craft, and am proud to share her first story (all text and images by Ene Osteraas-Constable):

I greet the deluge of the season’s first heavy rains with relief and contentment, knowing that all the bare root trees I planted are securely in the ground, benefiting from the deluge. Cherry, peach, plum, pluot, fig; the trees all look the same when bought in this juvenile, leafless state; bare branches with a flurry of fine roots beneath. This is, however, the ideal time for planting, while the small trees are dormant.

There is a sense of excitement and exuberance in the nurseries during January’s grey, wet days. Gardeners converge for this eagerly anticipated event: the bare root trees are in! As we mill about the saplings, I smile happily at the elderly couple that proudly share their bare root plum tree: “Isn’t it beautiful? what us ivermectin We may not make it long enough to harvest the fruit,” they say, “but isn’t it a beauty? how much ivermectin to give a dog per pound “. Planting a tree is truly a gesture of hope; an investment in the future that I can understand better than any stock or bond.

bare root

bare root trees, shipped while dormant, ready for planting

I leave the nursery thinking there should be a holiday, a national day of planting trees. Then I remember Arbor Day. Julius Sterling Morton had the prescience to establish this holiday in 1872. While each state has their own date for Arbor Day, I advocate a National Holiday, allowing everyone a single day off from work to plant or tend to trees in their community.

“I can’t live without the green trees, and nor can you. I’m humbled by the understanding that they could get along without me though! They sustain us, not the other way round. kilox gotas precio guatemala ” -Wangari Maathai

Click here to read more about the revolutionary impact of planting trees in Africa.

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Murphy’s Law Corollary

sea lion1a sea lion briefly beached itself on Doran Beach this morning as we were walking by

During our morning walk along Doran Beach, Ene and I were greeted by a friendly sea lion, who watched us from the surf before proceeding to briefly beach himself within yards of us as if to say hello. We’ve made hundreds of trips to this beach over the past few years, but have never seen this kind of behavior. Of course, this would be the one time I forgot to pack my camera- luckily, I had my trusty cell phone. As a corollary to the Murphy’s Law adage, anything that can go wrong will go wrong,  I would add, be equally prepared for when things go right.

As any crafts person can attest, there are occasions in the course of making that deliver uncanny coincidences, yet we most often do not prepare for success with the same ardent fervor that we do calamity. I’m not advocating unbridled risk-taking when it comes to safety or security, but suggest making room for the little successes that share equal probability with failure.

sea lion2the sea lion returns to the sea after about ten minutes of staring us down

Note: After some thought, my theory about why the sea lion would behave this way is that he thought we might have food for him, mistaking me for a Bodega Bay fisherman, whose boats the sea lions are known to trail. Bundled up in my yellow slicker and ‘Sitka sneakers’ for a chilly morning hike, with a two week beard, I kind of resemble those ‘old sea captain’ carvings (see below). I’d love to hear if anyone has had a similar encounter.

old sea captain

I’m beginning to make an image archive of ‘old sea captain’ carvings

Sitting with Nature

estuary4With enough rainfall, Estero Americano drains to the sea, becoming seasonally tidal

My favorite chair, by far, is an ocean kayak. To unwind after an intense week of new projects, I spent a quiet afternoon idly paddling down Estero Americano, my favorite local slough, now flooded to the coast. The marshy, seasonally tidal estuary is like a living almanac of coastal California birds, evidenced by my encounters with numerous cormorant, dowitcher, egret, snipe, willet, loon, night heron, bufflehead, black skimmer and, closer to the beach, a flock of white pelican.

It’s coming up on two years since I created this site, whose first post was inspired by a paddle down the same stream. This time around, my voyage taught me less about the material provenance of my chair design, and more about the simple pleasures of sitting with nature.

The white pelican takes flight over Estero Americano

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estuary1