Note 01 · Vantos
Cutting and drying birch vantos in the ten good days of June
There are about ten days in June when a birch leaf is the right thing to be hit with, and if you miss them you live with stiff, papery vantos until the following summer. I have missed them twice, both times by a week, and both times I knew it in January.
- Written at the pirtis
- 18 June 2024
- Typed up
- 5 August 2024
- Reading
- 7 minutes
- Where
- Ignalina, Utena County
The ten days, and how to know them
The old name for June carries the birch inside it, and that is roughly the instruction. What I wait for is a leaf that has finished growing but has not begun to harden: soft on both faces, matte rather than glossy, about the size of the top joint of my thumb. Around these lakes that arrives in the second week of June and holds for ten days, twelve in a cold year. Birches at the top of the slope, out in the open light, are four or five days ahead of the ones down by the water.
Testing is done with fingers rather than a calendar. I take a leaf, fold it across the vein and rub it once between finger and thumb. If it goes limp and smells green, the tree is ready. If it squeaks faintly and springs back flat, the leaf has started to toughen, and a whisk made from it will be scratchy by September. Two summers ago I cut on the twenty-fourth because that was the day I had free, and every bundle from that week felt like being brushed with wicker.
From the card by the stove
- Leaf matte on both faces, not yet shiny or leathery
- Fold and rub it: limp and green, never squeaky
- Morning, after the dew has gone and never in rain
- Trees in the open ripen days before those by the water
Which tree, which branches
I cut from young birches standing in the light along the edge of a clearing, never from the middle of dense forest where branches grow long, thin and desperate for sun. What I want is a branch about as thick as a pencil at the cut, half a metre long, with side shoots along most of its length and leaves starting close to the base. It should bend into a loop without complaint. A branch that snaps when you bend it comes from a tree that is too old, or one that went thirsty in May.
Taking too much from a single tree is the mistake everybody makes once. I walk a stand and take three or four branches from each, always from the lower third, always from the side already crowded by a neighbour, never the leader at the top. Ten trees give me twenty vantos and not one of them looks cut. The woman who taught me the binding used to say that if you can see where you worked from twenty paces away, you took too much, and I have not found a better rule since.
Binding a vanta that survives the steam
A vanta is built around a core rather than simply gathered up. I lay three or four straight branches together with the curve of the leaves turned inward, then build around that core in layers, so the finished bundle is dense in the middle and soft on the outside. The handle is stripped bare for a hand's width and a half, every twig and leaf taken off, because one leaf left under the binding will rot and take the handle with it. The outer leaves should all lie the same way, like a fan.
I bind twice: tight at the top of the handle with hemp twine, then again three fingers lower, pulling the second turn while kneeling on the bundle to keep it flat. Nylon string is slippery when wet and cuts the palm at eighty degrees, which I learned in a borrowed pirtis and have not forgotten. A well-bound whisk can be held by the handle and shaken hard without shedding. One that sheds on the kitchen floor in June will fill the drain with leaves in December.
From the card by the stove
- Three or four straight branches as the core
- Leaves all one way, the curve turned inward
- Handle stripped bare for a hand and a half
- Hemp twine, two bindings, pulled while kneeling on the bundle
Drying, flattening, keeping
Drying happens in shade and moving air, and it takes longer than people expect. The whisks hang in pairs over a pole in the hayloft, leaves downward, not touching, for about ten days. Sun turns them brown and brittle inside two afternoons; a closed shed turns them grey and sour. When the leaves rustle but the stems still bend, I stack them flat under a plank with a stone on top for another week, and that is what gives a vanta the fan shape that makes it easy to work with.
Storage is where I lost an entire June once. Plastic sacks sweat, and by October the bundles inside had gone black at the core and smelled like pond water. What works is loose in an open crate in the hayloft, laid in hay, with newspaper between the layers if autumn comes wet. Before use, a bundle soaks ten minutes in warm water, never boiling. The water afterwards is worth keeping: brown, smelling of the clearing in June, and it goes over the stones at the end of the evening.