use of serviceberry wood

Another youtube of skeeter.  I uploaded this about two minutes ago.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/paulwheaton12#p/u/0/yShnD2lfFvs[/youtube]

Somebody gave me an apple on this old post, so that reminded me that this thread exists!  

Serviceberry is the exact same species as "june berry" or "saskatoon".

Here is my favorite wooden spoon which happens to made of serviceberry wood:




A few days ago, we created a thread about carving wood spoons and a bunch of people are whipping out spoons.   I got the urge to make a spoon too.   My property is infested with tons of serviceberry.  So Jocelyn and I went out and cut out a green stick (because green wood is the best wood for carving anything - especially spoons).  


Jocelyn took this pic of us getting a stick from a really big serviceberry bush:




Jocelyn took this pic of me hacking off a chunk:




Then splitting it to make two wooden spoon "blanks"




Jocelyn made a bouquet out of some of the twigs.  She thinks that with some water, the twigs will bloom, making a lovely winter serviceberry boquet.




More pics about the spoon soon ...

A local old timer made all the wood parts for a horse-drawn plow out of Saskatoon wood.  I saw it at an auction after he passed.  Beautiful wood.  

Indigenous folks used the wood for digging sticks, arrows, and drying racks.  

Roberto, that saskatoon wood plow would have been amazing to see!

I was posting about our saskatoon adventures in this post to our couple of pics thread, and then I started searching for a good thread on all things serviceberry/saskatoon/juneberry/Amelanchier alnifolia. I found this thread and several others with some specific questions about saskatoons, though we didn't have one that was about the plant in general.

So I made one:  In praise of the saskatoon / serviceberry / juneberry aka Amelanchier alnifolia. The first post has links to the other threads I found on permies.com about saskatoons.

I had two other pictures about Paul's spoon carving process that he asked me to post here.

And here is the spoon .... almost done and done

Note that Paul has freaky giant hands - so that is a substantial serving spoon!! You can still feel the wetness in the green wood. I'll be curious to see how it dries and how much it might shrink.

(And I didn't run away over how he chose to do a lot of the finish whittling/carving INDOORS! Yay me!! Though there was perhaps a lot of moaning and facepalming. Maybe.)

Makes a good bow:
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/paleoplanet69529/mild-character-saskatoon-sapling-bow-t45275.html

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:(And I didn't run away over how he chose to do a lot of the finish whittling/carving INDOORS! Yay me!! Though there was perhaps a lot of moaning and facepalming. Maybe.)

I did all my carving indoors, on both my mallet and my spoon. It was raining outside, and I kind of needed to watch my kids, so indoors was the only option. MAN, that was a lot of shavings. It didn't help that my kids than tried to "help" sweep them up (spreading them further about the house) and kept accidentally walking through the shavings. I think I'll be finding shavings for years....