Dave's Cave

I can't believe that it didn't occur to me before, while thinking about making spoons out of the madrone branches, but some of the other harwoods on our property are also considered good carving woods. We have huge quantities of beaked hazelnut, oceanspray and dogwood, as well as two young bigleaf maples and a vine maple.

I hate the oceanspray because their stupid flowers dry up and get in your hair and clothes all the time, so I am constantly cutting lots of that down. The hazelnuts around here are a real weed, and they are multi-trunked, so I could easily cut down several good sized trunks every year to start drying out. It seems that hazelnut is a preferred wood to use for carving walking sticks, so I think I might have to try one of those too.

I was looking around on the web for chile seed sources, and I noticed the madrone bowls and spoons at NativeSeeds.org. Two things occured to me, first tey were really beautiful, but even more than that, is that we have over 100 madrone trees on the property, and we are regularly going to have to trim off branches that are big enough to make wood cooking spoons!

According to the Spoon Lady page on carving your own, you only need and 11 inch long by three inch wide piece of wood. No problem! We have lots of those.