For the past two months, like many others our family has been staying close to home. Both my wife and I have been working from home. The schools are closed, so we’ve also been trying to homeschool our kids. Despite my career choice, I would rather learn by doing, and work with my hands, so I can’t blame my kids when video classes and homework assignments for Dad don’t hold much of their attention. But we have been trying to do some of our own projects as well, ones that let my kids learn and practice new skills and connect us to nature in different ways. Three of the projects that we did were to build a compost bin, make wooden mallets, and build a bench for the neighborhood.
Compost Bin
Even though I listed it as a goal two years ago, we never did build that compost bin until this spring. This was the first of the projects that we did. Once our family was spending so much time at home, we found that we were producing a lot more garbage that was disposed of at home. Watching the increase in garbage made us want to do things to mitigate it, including being mindful of the trash that we produced as well as composting those materials that could be composted.
But first, we needed to actually build that compost bin. We went with a three compartment design that is open to the top for good air and moisture exposure, as well as access for depositing fresh organic waste. The compartments are also open to the front, but removable wooden slats allow the compartment to be blocked off to the height of the compost material, while enabling access in the future for turning the pile or for digging out our compost. With three compartments, it will enable the compost to rest on a three year cycle, giving the organic matter plenty of time to break down into healthy soil. We will have to decide if we let the pile sit for the three years, or if we use each compartment successively, turning the pile over into the next compartment each spring so that the fresh material will always be placed in the right-most compartment while fresh soil is removed from the left-most compartment.
The compost bin has also helped to solve one of our other problems. In the summertime, we like to have fires in a fire pit in the back yard, but we always struggled with the question of what to do with the ash. However, when used in limited quantities, wood ash is a good additive to compost, helping to neutralize the compost which becomes naturally acid as the organic matter breaks down.
Wooden Mallets
My boys have been interested in learning to use the basic outdoors tools of an axe, a saw, and a knife. While I’ve demonstrated each of these tools a few times, and they have had a chance to try each of them a little bit, I was looking for a project that we could do that let us use each of these tools to practice these skills. Crafting wooden mallets from pieces of wood off of our backyard wood pile gave us just the project to practice each of these skills.
The project also helped with 3D visualization. We started by looking at the piece of wood and talking about the parts, shapes and qualities of a mallet. From there, we first practiced using a hand saw to saw in from each side, through the wood until the rough diameter of the handle was left.
Next, we practiced using the axe. Because we were only looking to remove targeted portions of the wood to define the rough shape of the handle, contact chopping was a very effective method, as well as the safest method for learning to use an axe. The axe head was placed in position on the wood outside of the desired diameter of the handle and the axe and wood moved into contact with the chopping block, splitting the wood down to the saw cut.
With the handle roughed in, our mallets began to look like our desired product. We moved on to the knives. The size of the handles facilitated safe manipulation and handling of the wood while my inexperienced boys moved their knives. The large size of the mallet head provided a reliable stopping block for knives to cut into. As the knives smoothed and shaped the handles, I asked my boys how their tools fit into their hands and what needed to be done to make an individualized handle that felt good in their hands.
With our mallets complete, we put them to use that night setting up a tent in the back yard, with the mallets to drive in the tent stakes.
Bench
Our last woodworking project came about from a sense of wanting to give back to the neighborhood. With us staying close to home, the neighborhood became our sole outlet to enjoy the outdoors and to take in nature. While it had been generally overlooked, there is a ravine at the back of the neighborhood. The village owns the area surrounding the creek, but save for some flood remediation a few years ago, there has not been much maintenance or care of the area. Some networks of use trails cut through the woods on either of the steep sides of the ravine. A small creek runs in the bottom of the ravine. A little over a mile, and the creek reaches Lake Michigan.
A silver lining of all of this has been our “discovery” of the ravine, and it has become our neighborhood sanctuary for nature snacks when we couldn’t get out elsewhere. We’ve seen deer, turkeys, ducks, woodpeckers, and other wildlife while walking to and in the ravine. We weren’t the only ones, we frequently saw other families from the neighborhood walking past or in the ravine.
As a family we wanted to do something to improve this area that we had underappreciated for the past five years, but had now become an important part of our days. Sure, we picked up trash and tried to limit our use to the existing use-trails, but we wanted to do something a little more substantial, we decided to build a bench.
Our bench is of a simple “Leopold” design. I can’t confirm the actual relationship of the design to its namesake Aldo Leopold, but I’ll take any connection to Aldo that I can make. While I did all of the cutting, the simple design enabled my boys to try using the drill and working to secure the through-bolts holding the bench together. When it was complete, we brought it to the edge of the ravine where it now offers a place to sit in the shade and look down on the stream that helped our family to stay connected to nature while remaining at home.
