Return to Leather working...

Now that my garden has shut down for the winter with all of the attendent grunt work complete, I decided to continue a previously aborted attempt at leatherworking.

I had decided to embark upon the mystery of leather working last spring, but my attentions were quickly diverted towards the arts of bow-crafting and metal working. Thus, after the consumption of enormous amounts of food over thanksgiving, I clumsily traversed down the basement of my house to fetch several pieces of cleaned rawhide, which had been drying for the last 5 months.

Now animal hides naturally contain high levels of collagen, the elusive protein that tends to make hide twist and contort in many different directions. Obviously we want fabrics to be smooth and pliant, thus more or less fashionable into clothing, containers, shoes...etc. Thus, rawhide needs to be purged of it's collagen, that is, it needs to be tanned. Pre-industrial societies around the planet found several ingenious ways of acheiving this result, none of them are very pleasant to the senses however.

Stone age North American Indian cultures tanned their leather by smearing a paste made of animal brains all over a wet piece of rawhide. Apparently, certain enzymes within brains neutralized the contorting effects of collagens. Europeans of the Middle Ages figured out that the alkaloids within wolf dung did much of the same thing...thus your average middle age tannery consisted of strips of hide being smoked by a dung fire.

And then there's the middle eastern method of tanning. They apparently figured out that the bark of certain trees contained tannins which easily leached out the collagens within rawhide. Unfortunately, the leather thus produced were more than a bit poisonous to eat.

Thus, when all things are considered, I took the middle eastern option. I gathered all the left over maple and oak branches and shrubbery from last week's compost making and boiled them down. To this potion, I added sheets of rawhide. After hours of this boiling, the hard rawhide absorbed the reddish brown tannin elements and became soft and pliable. Drying took hours more.


I took a small strip of this leather and quickly fashioned the material into an ancient shepard's sling. The leather was very workable. It was easily cut into the right shape and held it's shape and dimensions with surprising durability. Just playing around with the sling, I managed to easily chuck stream pebbles out to 100 yards with it. The creation of the leather took at least 20 man hours of scraping, cleaning, boiling and drying. But the actual utilization of the material to create a very functional tool/weapon took less than 10 minutes.

Primitive Leaf Compost Heap

The annual ceremony was replete with the usual assortment of suburban pagentries. Here in the northeast, the first weekend after all of the foliage have fallen is the weekend of the great gathering....the great leaf gathering that is. Armed with leaf-blowers, lawn-mowers, and an arsenal of rakes, the neighborhood happily proceeded to do away with kilo-tons of fallen leaves. Our entire block ringed with the sound of humming machinery, gossipy chattering, and radio broadcasts of the latest football game. As the day wore away, every house around us accumlated dozens of huge black bags, stuffed to the brim with leaves.

Obviously, tremendous amounts of effort would be spent by all parties, and a great sense of accomplishment is felt at the end. After all, the lawns are no longer marred by heaps of unsightly brown leaves. But what exactly are we doing every year? Well, we're extracting fine organic compost from our properties at great cost, and having them shipped away to be burnt at an even greater cost. Knowing this, I decided to try something different this year. After reading a few chapters from the Rodale's book of composting, I decided to create my own leaf compost mounds. Compost mounds works by the same basic principles as my existing hot compost bins. The mounds are usually vastly larger than bin-based compost heaps. They are uncovered year-around and uses the natural process of decay. The mounds utilize the slower method of cool composting versus the rapid hot-compost method of the bins. Hot composting involves the injection of water and baterial laden animal wastes into a ventiliated humus-rich compost heap. It also involves periodic rotation of the compost layers either through manual labor or through biological organisms(worms, centipedes). With the cool-compost method, none of that effort is required, you just gather the biological materials into a pile, water it, and leave it there. The catch is that cool-composting takes four times as long as hot-composting. So the compost mounds that I set down now, will produce the black compost that I need by the spring of 2008.

Books and theories aside, building the actual mounds were incredibly labor-intensive. Firstly, about 200lbs of leaves were manually gathered into a huge centralized pile. A leaf-mold was used to compress sheaves of foliage into dense layered leaf-packs. Hundres of such leaf-layers were manually constructed. Then another 100lbs of dirt and brush were gathered with the handy shovel and brush-clipper. Then the process of applying a layer of dirt, a thick layer of compressed leaves and a layer of brush were repeated 10 times for each mound. The dirt served to weigh the leaves down, while the brush provided the ventilation structure to let in oxygen and let out the bacterial-processed methane. After the construction of a mound, about 10 gallons of water was poured upon it to fix it's structure and kick-start the decomposition process. I opted to not use any petro-powered machinery for this task. And obviously, I suffered greatly due to that decision. By saturday evening, my entire back felt like a single burning mass of cramped muscles. By the time I finished everything this evening, my entire body was stiff with pain.

After all is said and done, however, I had constructed 4 huge compost mounds, enough compost generation capacity to power a garden 20 times my current plot's size. These compost mounds would be renewable, since every year I would need to only take the processed compost from the mounds, and add in the year's new fallen leaves as replenishment. A garden that uses the entire output capacity of these mounds plus my hot compost bins should be able to produce some 50% of a person's minimum diet. Thus with the completion of the compost mounds, I've taken one giant, joint-stiffening, muscle-cramping leap towards self-sufficiency.

Ripening has taken it's course

The final batch of green tomatos have ripened in the cellar. Over 70lbs of tomatos were harvested this year, which is quite impressive for the two dollars and 50 cents spent on 2 tomato saplings. I covered my square meter garden with leaf molds to prevent soil erosion over the winter. The weather is getting progressively colder here in the northeast, though with stark exceptions. I have to give some small iota of thanks to Global Warming for the 70 degree weather last week.


In anycase, hunting season is in full swing, and I have made a new heavy hunting bow for the task at hand. It has a draw weight of 80 lbs and can pierce an inch thick oak board from 20 yards away. My archery skills are still not up to the task. I have taken multiple shots at small game in the last several weeks without once hitting the target. What really stings is that I've been practicing archery for years. And in this time only 2 rabbits have fallen to my missiles. It seems absurd that humanity had once relied upon hunting to survive. But with hindsight it is clear that as the last Ice Age ended, vast regions of tundra were replaced by forests and the grass-fed Megafauna were consequently replaced by smaller, more agile creatures. Thus man must have been FORCED into agriculture as a way of supplementing the ever diminishing animal resources that were obtainable by his primitive weaponery. The longbow, though elegant in it's design and function, is still outmatched by the cunning and agility of woodland game. While my arrows are fast, they are still not as fast as the speed of sound, and animals like deer and rabbits have more than once dodged the missiles in mid-flight. Moreover, the motion of drawing the bow to loose the arrow more often than not served as early warning for the animal targetted. Thus, successful bowhunting requires great stealth, coupled with extreme accuracy and speed of release. And these skills will take me many more seasons to master.

The last pillaging

Another dozen tomatos were ripened in the cellar. My garden, otoh, has been entirely ravaged by squirrils and rabbits scrambing to fatten up for winter. All the winter kale seeds and turnip saplings have been chewed up. Hunting season has begun in earnest,all of my weapons have been polished and honed to take on a lethal edge. I'm almost certain that I can deliver one rabbit/squirril BBQ by year's end through my skills with the bow!