Chthonic Calendar

The central device of Franklin Chthonics is its calendar. Most of our activities are seasonal in character, with the inherent potential to become annual activities, traditions. But even one-off events and projects tend to happen at an appropriate moment of the year. Members of the Franklin Chthonics community are encouraged to participate in projects that interest them and propose new initiatives to add to the calendar.

Virtually all the specific dates listed below are provisional and some might have to be postponed, even to another year. An *asterisk indicates activities members can participate in by arrangement. 2025 indicates one-off improvement projects. Bold italics text are reports of how the scheduled calendar activity actually unfolded.

WINTER

Summer

SPRING

Autumn

Winter

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After 40 years of non-participation, our farmstead contributed to the aggregate, road-facing, annual public display of holiday lights, taking advantage of the 50 to 75% drop in the price of colorful LEDs that always kicks in the day after Christmas.
-Neighbors Adam and Daniel introduced us to the peculiar rite of wassailing to the apple trees, which involves such things as hanging bread from their branches, singing encouraging songs to them and cajoling them with strong drink. In a few months we will see the efficacy of all this and in a few years we should have established wassailing as a chthonic tradition with roots.
The cold was largely successful in caging us indoors, but it could not prevent us from browsing the astounding possibilities that tree and garden nursery catalogs seem to offer. Pawpaw, figs, medlar? This January we ordered a dozen exciting apple cultivars (Esopus Spitzenburg, Calville Blanc, Goldrush), several types of cherry and serviceberry, as well as another cohort of PG hydrangea for a new orchard that will flank the new watercourse in the Fieldhouse field. Also ordered was 20 or so American sycamore. An effort to establish this remarkable tree at FC last year failed because all of the saplings were dead on arrival. Groups of enormous, gleaming white sycamore are established along creeks and brooks in our region but not yet along our brook, a galling absence that we must void.
When there is 8 inches of snow on the ground and the temperatures stay below freezing, Chthonic Sledding happens, as you can see in this video and learn more about here. This is the most fun that is possible to have. When conditions allow (which is not every winter), FC community members will be informed and have the opportunity to experience FC winter sport by arrangement.
2025 Update: Conditions did allow and right on schedule! The snow cover was rather thin but very icy and very fast, as these videos will show.
Inspired by the ice harvest at Hanford Mills, we bought an ice saw and, for the first time, cut blocks of thick, clear ice from the upper pond. A few weeks later, Dylan used a chainsaw to cut blocks from the Garden Pond. He then built a small but cozy ice house in the Old Maze. We will store this captured energy until summer, when it will be used for a summer ice party, perhaps with a game of water polo using slabs of ice for balls, and shaved ice with maple syrup for dessert.
Brining sauerkraut connects us directly to a time here when cabbage was virtually the only green vegetable available through the winter and brining was a fundamental means of preserving food. The list of ingredients for sauerkraut is complicated: cabbage and salt. The two have to be gently combined, with violence. We brined 8 gallons of it for distribution in the winter subscription boxes.
Another ancient method of preserving food is curing. (Curing and brining both use salt to fend off pathogens; curing is dry and brining is wet.) Smoking doesn’t actually preserve salmon, it just makes it irresistible. Winter is conducive to cold smoking because it helps in keeping the temperature in the smokehouse under 85 degrees, above which fish starts to cook and will crumble when sliced.
Hot smoking*
The same smokehouse that cold smoked can also cook with smoke. This is barbecue, but we can also make venison jerky from deer taken by a neighbor who hunts this land, salmon jerky from the meaty parts of fish that weren’t cured, smoked largemouth bass fished from our ponds, or bacon from local producers of pork.
2025 Update: We made our first batch of venison jerky on March 10th, thinly slicing the meat and combining it with some lime juice, paprika, gochugaru, Tajin spice, garlic powder, salt, pepper and refrigerating for a day. The venison was then smoked at about 165 degrees F for three hours. The results are terrific, compulsively chewy, a perfect vehicle for venison, which is completely lean and generally suffers in comparison with domesticated meats when roasted or braised. But here, the flavor of the venison shines through even the intense seasoning and the smoke. Eating venison is the closest you can get to eating the land itself. The deer feed on almost everything that grows here, including mushrooms, berries, nuts, mosses, leaves, buds, bark, twigs, flowers, grasses, lichen, apples, and, it seems, anything you particularly don’t want them to eat.
Maple sugaring is a winter activity, albeit ambiguously; the running of sap requires both the cold of winter and the warmth of approaching spring. We will collect maple sap in February and March, reduce it through reverse osmosis, then boil it down to syrup in the wood-fueled evaporator. Maple syrup is

Sugaring 2025 Report: January and February were relentlessly cold, with the temperature rising above freezing only a couple of times. Sugaring weather finally arrived in March and remained for most of the rest of the month. The 200 gallon cistern sitting in the rear of the gator filled with sap, drip by drip, from two tubes running downhill from the maple trees of the sugarbush, as such a group is termed. The sap was concentrated through the magic of the “RO Bucket” and then tediously, interminably boiled down to near nothingness. This nothingness was actually a couple of gallons of maple syrup. The entire process was repeated again and then again, piling up tedium and yielding again next to nothing, in this case, about five gallons of it.

Spring

2025 Update: The best group of hydrangeas got pruned and several unwisely caged trees were liberated. Whether they will survive on their own without using the cage to support their branches remains to be seen. No apple trees were pruned, however.
Left over from last year’s agenda is the project to make a Japanese-type shiitake mushroom “laying yard”. This involves inoculating short lengths of freshly-cut hardwood logs with mushroom spores in a shaded woodland location that encourages air circulation and moisture retention. The logs can be arranged in several ways, including an alternating A-frame pattern. After months or possibly a year or longer, the logs should begin to sprout studded masses of shiitakes, introducing an era of abundance that will, we hope, challenge our ability to use them all.
This project might seem like something exclusively in the purview of hydrology nature spirits. How can we mere mortals invent a source of water to support a stream that doesn’t already exist? The alchemy here involves the gathering and concentration of water that seeps into this field in several places making, at present, only a great deal of sogginess. We know that once a small channel is made where seeps, springs and run-off can access it, the channel will run with water and make itself permanent. Technically, this watercourse will be a rill, about a half mile in length but only a foot or so in width in most places, only an inch or two deep in most places. The plan is to allow this water to make pools at a couple of spots on its way to West Handsome Brook. The major question is whether the rill will run all year round or be seasonal to some degree, at least in some years.
2025 Update: The first pass at excavating a channel for the rill was made in mid-March, starting with a couple of small pools in the Garden field and making its way down to Bennett Hollow Road. From there the water travels along the road for a short way before passing under it through a town-maintained culvert. Dylan then made a channel guiding this water into the main stream that drains the tract’s watershed, which then runs a couple of hundred yards to West Handsome Brook. A good deal of work developing this rill and its several pools remains to be done, including dispersing the soil excavated in digging the channel and placing excavated stones back into it. Another possibility under consideration would be to divert additional spring water further uphill from the source of the rill into this new watercourse. This would extend the rill another hundred and fifty yards as well as increasing its volume of flowing water and decreasing the number of days in a year that it appears to be dry.
The main task in creating this orchard is not actually planting trees but building something that will protect them from deer and other smaller animals (rabbits, mice, shrews) that would nibble the tender, vulnerable trees to death if given full access. New trees can be guarded in two ways, by cages surrounding individual trees or by a perimeter fence. We chose the latter option, which offers greater flexiblity for adding plantings in the future and easier circumstances for mowing and weeding. The orchard will have a dozen varieties of apples, some cherry trees, several varieties of serviceberry and a new cohort of PG hydrangea. We made such a botch with our hydrangea plantations years ago that the opportunity to try again in the right way could not be passed by.
2025 Update: Construction of the perimeter fence commenced on April 8th under time pressure heightened by the arrival of trees shipped by the nurseries. These trees have to be in the ground by the time they emerge from dormancy in May. The fence will enclose considerably more area than required for the number of trees we will plant this year. This leaves room for additions in coming years but it also means the surrender of more terrain previously available for winter sledding at the most important field for this essential activity.
To make a flat site for the unusually wide footprint of the Fieldhouse, it was necessary to deeply gouge the existing field, creating a rather steep embankment behind the building that will be difficult to plant or mow. After things thaw, the idea is to rent a powerful, commercial-grade pressure washer to attack the embankment, removing all dirt and gravel until we expose bedrock, perhaps a wall of pure bluestone.
The geology club of SUNY Oneonta will undertake an investigation of the geological character and history of the FC tract.
A quintessential activity of spring throughout Appalachia is foraging ramps. These celebrated wild leeks emerge from the forest floor, moving north as the first new green in the woods. They surface in Delaware County in late April and remaining diggable through most of May. Ramps are in every way a remarkable and mysterious plant.
Again, FC community members are invited, by arrangement, to forage ramps with us, but the ramps will come to you in mid-May, as they did last year, in the form of a Ramp Dinner. The menu will feature sauteed ramps, ramp potato soup, pickled ramps, cocktails with a ramp pickle, and a bag of dirty ramps to take home.
Every garden requires work to shake off winter and prepare for planting. This year that work includes assembling ten new raised beds and importing quite a lot of material to fill them. After the danger of frost diminishes in June, the beds will be planted with a lot of cucumbers for brining a serious quantity of dill pickles, green beans for serious canning of dilly beans, as well as, probably, sunflowers, rhubarb, broomcorn, assorted flowers and cannabis. As it happens, some of us at FC have not the proverbial green thumb; volunteer gardeners who might help at times throughout the year would be welcomed.
The plans for 2025 call for an ambitious program of tree planting with several separate initiatives in different locations:
-Most significant is the new orchard we schemed and ordered trees for in January. This undertaking will require the installation of a deer fence several hundred feet long running along the eastern bank of the rill described above. The orchard is planned to have over thirty apple trees of a dozen varieties, several kinds of cherry and serviceberry, and an attempted re-do of PG hydrangea.
-Also bordering the new rill will be several additional varieties of basket willow, an extension of Brendan’s basket willow plantation that adjoins the Garden.
-25 American sycamores, the white-barked, water-loving tree that can grow to be the most massive of all eastern trees, will be planted along West Handsome Brook and in several places along the new rill. We currently have no sycamore trees at Franklin Chthonics, making a tragic void in a riparian landscape that should include a herd of these snow-white giants thundering through the hollow.
As was done in the past two years, several additional, currently uninteresting wild apple trees will be selected to take grafts of scions of interesting established varieties, thus skipping several years of vulnerability from deer and vole grazing and adding unexpected features to the landscape. May is also a good time to prune apple trees grafted in previous years, as well as other wild and orchard trees that we will want to harvest in the fall, if only we could make a dent in the vast number of trees that need heavy pruning.