"Shopping" for lumber

 Written by Logan Sander, December 3, 2016 (edited by Laura)

Shopping for lumber is a little different when the nearest hardware store is two hours away and the final 20 minutes of the trip requires that we haul in our purchases by hand. Despite this, we still have many needs for processed lumber, from repairing the stairs that ascend the hill towards the field station to building the planter beds and other nursery infrastructure. To solve this problem (and because it’s what they’ve always done), people in Pitikele make their own boards from the trees in their homegardens and around their homes. In particular, whenever rot- resistant boards are needed for outdoor projects local people use kitul, or fishtail palm. Palms are an extremely important group of plants throughout the tropics, and in particular the kitul palm is both economically important and a keystone of Pitikele cultural life (more on the uses of kitul palms in a later post).            

Tillekaratne high in a tree after the kitul palm was hung up

Somaratne and Tillekaratne located several older kitul palms on the property and together we set about felling them. These trees had already flowered and were in various stages of mortality. The first tree was very large and was felled with a 2 man cross-cut saw. After releasing this tree from the stump, it fell directly into another large tree and a tangle of vines and branches – not the desired outcome. Our friends, however, were not phased – Tillekaratne promptly grabbed his axe and climbed the tree ours had fallen into. At this point, concerned for his safety, we tried all manner of communication (mostly non-verbal) to get him to come down to safety. He and Somaratne expressed a total lack of concern, and we eventually calmed down and let them proceed with their work. Swinging the axe with one arm and hanging on with the other, he deftly freed the kitul palm while managing to stay in the other tree... not something a forester sees every day in the woods! Once we were all back on the ground, we bucked the palm into the lengths we needed with the crosscut (about 8’) and Tillekaratne made a series of splits with the axe running the length of each segment. The core of a kitul palm is a wet, sweet- smelling pith: very soft and mushy. The outer wood, however, is extremely hard and rot resistant. With the fissures in place, Tillekaratne would twist his axe 90* (something that would break the thin strip of wood through the eye of the axes we’re familiar with in the States) while we jabbed and pried with the digging bar and poles, eventually splitting the 8’ segments into a several boards. The final step was to chop away the mushy pith with a mattock and Viola! We had twenty finished boards. These boards were hauled through the forest down to the nearby river, bound together by vines, and floated back to our nursery. Every part of this process was hard work, but our reward was valuable rot-resistant wood and a fascinating cultural learning experience. We turned two more palms into boards over those couple of days (with all five of us working) and that gave us enough lumber for our nursery beds and new stairs to the field station.

Logan and Blair bucking the kitul logs with a crosscut saw

Preventing the saw-blade from pinching while cutting to length

 

Splitting the bucked logs to make boards

A straight lengthwise split then twist & pry

 

Somaratne chopping off the soft pith

Laura chopping off the soft pith

 

Cleaning up freshly cut boards with various hand tools

 

Hauling the boards back to the nursery in bundles

 

River walking makes for easy hauling!

Tillekaratne's surprisingly strong son Tarindu also helped us out

  Several weeks later, we devised another small project for which we went “shopping.” We wanted to bring the overflow water from the field station’s water tank down to our nursery, so we could easily fill our watering can. For this, Tillekaratne suggested we use some of the larger bamboo growing along the riverbank. These seem to be clumping bamboo varieties, with a diameter of 4-6” and a height in excess of 40 feet. Similar to the kitul wood, we split the canes of bamboo with an axe and pehija (small hooked knife) and twisted ninety-degrees with the tool to split the stems along a line. In this case, we didn’t need more than two splits per cane, as we wanted to end up with open-faced irrigation “pipes”. Next, the solid nodes of each half of the cane were chipped out with the backside of the pehija blade. Within minutes we had several 20+ foot water pipes - much easier than preparing the kitul wood!    

Carrying bamboo canes down the Pitikele road

 

Processing the bamboo canes

Creating lumber out of trees from the land we live on is a first for me. In my work as a forester, I’ve decided which trees will be cut and sent to a mill. However, I’ve never cut those same trees, and I’ve almost certainly never purchased the products that those trees are used to create. Here in Pitikele, we’ve taken a task through to completion - from selecting trees to processing them to their final use in our nursery - much more satisfying than a trip to Home Depot.