“When a grove comes out round here, the trees get burnt. For 34 years I’ve turned them into chopping boards instead.” — Now, at 66, Sandro Ruocco’s hands are making him stop.

His father planted the olive trees outside Martinborough in 1966. When the grove was pulled out for pinot vines in 1992, every trunk went onto a burn pile — and Sandro pulled one of them off. Thirty-four years on, that same chopping 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.

Martinborough, spring. The workshop is a corrugated-iron shed on a lifestyle block just out of town, 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: a man and a small boy planting a row of young trees in 1966, the year the grove went in. The Wairarapa is pinot country now — the vines across the road are just coming into leaf — but long before the vines his family’s olives stood here, and for most of Sandro’s life looking after them was just what they did.

“My father planted them,” Sandro says. “His father fished out of Island Bay. I picked them until I was twenty.” In 1992 the grove came out. The land went to pinot noir, the trees were pushed over and burnt, and the whole grove went that way in a single summer. Sandro was thirty-two.

“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 brought one trunk home on the back of his ute. It sat in the shed drying for two years. The first board he cut from it went to his mother. It is still on a benchtop in Island Bay, used every day for thirty-two years.

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. Sandro 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 shed 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 pine 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 chopping board when a knife hits it again and again, the way it does in a real kitchen.

On common white plastic chopping 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 bin, not in the ground, not in you. Wood gives up wood.

What makes Sandro’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 grove removals in the Wairarapa and Hawke’s Bay. No living tree is cut to make a board.
• Hard enough to keep its face: Olive rates around 12 kN on the scale woodworkers use for hardness — several times harder than the radiata pine most cheap boards are made from — 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

Sandro scrapes and oils both faces, because he knows how a chopping 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 joins, then called my sister into the kitchen to have a look. It’s been on her bench since May and she’s started apologising to guests for using it, which I take as a good sign.”

  – Wendy M., 58, Masterton
• ★★★★★

  “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 bench. No rocking, no splits, nothing.”

  – Bruce K., 64, Nelson
• ★★★★★

  “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.”

  – Raewyn L., 61, Tauranga

One man, one pair of hands

Sandro is 66 and works alone. There’s no second bench in the shed, 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 shed 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 Giulia (23) set up the little online shop 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 trestle table at the Harbourside Market in Wellington in a howling southerly. She was right.”

Why this is his last batch

Turning wood that was headed for a burn pile into something beautiful is what Sandro loves. But olive is one of the hardest woods there is, and at 66 his hands have had enough. “Some mornings I can’t hold a cuppa properly until ten o’clock,” he says. “A full day at the bench costs me the next one.”

There is nobody to hand the shed on to — no apprentice, and Giulia has her studies in Wellington. The trunks stacked at the back of the shed are the last he will cut.

Where to get one

The chopping board is sold only through the small shop Giulia runs for him, Backroad Goods. Not on Trade Me, not in a shop, not through anyone else. When this batch is gone, the shop closes with the shed.

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 lunch at the bach. 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.