“When an old grove in Calabria is cleared, the trunks get burned. For 38 years I’ve turned them into cutting boards instead.” — Now, at 68, Nello Ferraro’s hands are making him stop.

His father left Calabria for the steel mills of Hamilton in 1956. When his uncle’s olive grove above Rossano was cleared in 1988, every trunk went onto a burn pile — and Nello had one of them shipped to Ontario. Thirty-eight years on, that same cutting board — cut from one piece of wood, never glued up from strips — is still the only thing he makes. This batch will be his last.

Beamsville, October. The workshop is an old bank barn behind the house, under the Niagara Escarpment, and it smells of sawdust, warm machine oil and, just faintly, olives. The bench is worn pale in two spots where his forearms rest. A bandsaw, four hand planes and a single photograph hang on the wall: his uncle with a mule on the olive terraces above Rossano in 1956, the year his father left. Niagara is wine and tender-fruit country — the last of the grapes on the Beamsville Bench are coming in this week — not olive country, but in the Ferraro family the grove in Calabria was simply where the oil on the Sunday table came from.

“My uncle Vincenzo kept those trees,” Nello says. “My father grew up between them. Some years we went back in November for the harvest, and I picked there.” In 1988 the grove came out. The old trees were cut to the stump and burned to make room for young ones, and the whole hillside went that way in a single winter. Nello was thirty.

“I was not saving a tree,” he says. “That tree was already gone. I just could not stand there and watch that wood burn.” He had one trunk shipped to Ontario in a sea container. It sat in the barn drying for two years. The first board he cut from it went to his mother. It is still on a counter in Hamilton, used every day for thirty-six years. These days his cousin Franco in Rossano still sets the trunks aside whenever an old grove is cleared, and every couple of years a container of them lands in Hamilton.

Two things that ruin a wooden board

“Everyone buys the cheap one once,” he says. “Twelve months later the middle has gone grey, the glue seam has opened and it rocks when you chop. So you buy another.”

The first is the glue seam. Flip almost any wooden board over and you will count four or five narrow strips, glued together and sanded flat so they pass for one piece. They don’t. Water creeps into the seams, the strips work against each other through a year of seasons, and the joint opens into a dark line that no amount of oil will close.

The second is wood that was dried too quickly. A freshly cut olive trunk is more than half water. Nello air-dries his wood for months, finishes it in a kiln, then rests it again before a saw ever touches it. Skip that step and the board looks perfect on the day it arrives, then shows a hairline crack six weeks later for no reason you can see.

He throws out one board in five to stay ahead of the second problem. The first one he doesn’t have at all — there is nothing in his board to glue.

Why a glued board can’t be saved

Most weeks someone turns up at the barn with a board under their arm, asking him to save it. In the corner sits a crate of the ones he had to hand back: a maple one with a black line down the middle where the glue gave way, one gone soft in the centre after a few runs through the dishwasher, a bamboo one that split into three layers like a wet book.

He can tell you what killed each one, usually in about four seconds. What nobody can do is put them back together. “There’s nothing in there to fix,” he says. “Once a glue seam opens, that board is done. Sand it, oil it, leave it in the sun for a week. The line comes back.”

Most of those people go home with one of his instead.

What comes off a plastic board

In 2023, engineers at North Dakota State University measured something nobody had bothered to measure before: what actually comes off a cutting board when a knife hits it again and again, the way it does in a real kitchen.

On common white plastic cutting boards, the answer was somewhere between 14 and 79 million tiny plastic particles a year — depending on the plastic. Their equipment could only count the larger ones, so the real figure is higher.

Every board gives up a little of itself under a blade. What matters is what it gives up. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic doesn’t break down — not in the garbage, not in the ground, not in you. Wood gives up wood.

What makes Nello’s board different

• One solid piece: Sawn from a single slab, never glued up from strips. The dark grain runs from the top face right through to the back — that’s how you can tell.
• Rescued, not felled: The wood comes from old groves cleared and replanted in Calabria, southern Italy. No living, fruiting tree is cut to make a board.
• Hard enough to keep its face: Olive rates around 2,710 on the scale woodworkers use for hardness — nearly twice as hard as sugar maple — so knife marks stay shallow rather than turning into grooves.

• Dried slowly, then rested: Months of air drying, a kiln cycle, then another rest before the first cut. It’s the step cheap boards skip.
• Food-safe finish only: Hand-scraped and oiled with food-safe mineral oil. No varnish, no sealant, nothing to flake off into your food.
• No two alike: Each board comes out of a different trunk, so size, weight, colour and grain all vary. Yours is the only one like it.

One board, two sides, two jobs

Nello scrapes and oils both faces, because he knows how a cutting board really gets used. One side takes the knife — onions, herbs, a chicken. Flip it over and the other side goes on the table with cheese, olives, bread and a knife stuck in the middle. One board, two jobs, and nothing about it looks like a kitchen tool once the guests arrive.

What his customers say

• ★★★★★

  “I bought it for my mother’s eightieth and very nearly kept it. She turned it over twice looking for the seams, then called my sister into the kitchen to have a look. It’s been on her counter since May and she’s started apologizing to guests for using it, which I take as a good sign.”

  – Debbie M., 58, Burlington, ON
• ★★★★★

  “The dark grain runs right through to the back, which is how you know it’s one piece. My old board was four strips and the centre seam had gone black. I cut on this every day, oil it once a month, and eight months on it still sits dead flat on the counter. No rocking, no splits, nothing.”

  – Doug K., 64, Kelowna, BC
• ★★★★★

  “I chop on one side and put the other side on the table with cheese on it. That used to be two things I owned and now it’s one — and the one looks better than either of them ever did.”

  – Lise L., 61, Moncton, NB

One man, one pair of hands

Nello is 68 and works alone. There’s no second bench in the barn, no apprentice, nobody in the family who wanted the trade. “It takes years before you have it in your hands,” he says. “Nobody has that kind of patience for a wooden board anymore.”

What leaves that barn in a good week is what one man can make on his own, and one in five never gets wrapped. That is the whole supply — no factory, no second batch on a shelf somewhere.

His granddaughter Chiara (22) set up the little online store for him over a single weekend. “At my age I don’t know the first thing about all that internet business,” he says. “She told me I wasn’t going to spend another winter behind a folding table at the St. Catharines farmers’ market in January. She was right.”

Why this is his last batch

Turning wood that was headed for a burn pile into something beautiful is what Nello loves. But olive is one of the hardest woods there is, and at 68 his hands have had enough. “Some mornings I can’t hold a coffee properly until ten o’clock,” he says. “A full day at the bench costs me the next one.”

There is nobody to hand the barn on to — no apprentice, and Chiara is finishing university. The trunks stacked at the back of the barn are the last he will cut.

Where to get one

The cutting board is sold only through the small online store Chiara runs for him, Backroad Goods. Not on Amazon, not in a store, not through anyone else. When this batch is gone, the store closes with the barn.

One tip: a glued board with a natural edge looks just like a single piece in a listing photo. Only the back shows the seam.

Chop on it. Serve on it. Put it in front of fourteen people at Christmas dinner. If it isn’t right — the size, the weight, the grain, or no reason at all — send it back within 90 days for your money back. No restocking fee, and nobody will ask you to explain yourself.