Matsuyama eco-home

Seascape with buzzard

2011-03-26T22:12:00.003+09:00

I went for a bike ride along the seashore and this buzzard was enlivening an already spectacular seascape. In Japanese, buzzards say "pee-hyoro-hyoro-hyoro".

Sundry blossoms

2011-03-26T21:49:00.005+09:00

If you're not particularly concerned about the blossoms of the weeping plum, I'm afraid this post will hold little interest for you.

For those who have grown tired of plum blossom, here are some apricot.

Goodbye Jack

2011-02-08T21:03:00.002+09:00

C'mon boy, let's go.

Lowdown
Feeling pretty bad
Feeling like I lost the best friend
That I ever had

Jack is dead. Jack was running down the road and got hit by a kei-truck that didn't stop. I wasn't there and don't know the details, but I have a feeling my anger would be uncontrollable if I did.

Jack was a great companion and I feel his loss intensely.

Jack!

Kingfisher

2011-01-22T20:48:00.002+09:00

Recently I spotted a kingfisher fishing in our local river, the Konogawa. It was the biggest kingfisher I've ever seen.

And as an added bonus, here's a regular visitor to the blueberries. I don't know what kind of bird he is, but he's very pretty and quite assiduous in fertilizing the ground under the blueberries.

Various scenes

2011-01-08T21:51:00.006+09:00

I got an iPhone a few months ago, and I'm quite impressed with the photos it takes. Here are a few recent ones.

From our balcony. There was some precipitation at sunset.

The temple thingie. November storms tore the doors off and broke the glass,
but the day after I reported the tragedy to the village headman, they were as new again.

Not a bad spot for a house.

The weather has been quite weird of late, with some spectacular skies.
This lopped-off double rainbow with triangular sunbeam was one of the
more spectacular phenomena. It lasted for about 5 minutes and was hard to ignore.

Mikan trees, lakes, sea, islands

What have we here? African dancing girls!
Christmas evening at the African night was a blast.

Crime scene

2011-01-08T21:35:00.003+09:00

I went for a walk at lunchtime the other day up the valley where a French fellow and his wife are building a new house (very international we are here), when I came upon this grisly scene.

It's a tanuki with a smallish hole in its rump (it probably felt like a largish hole to the tanuki in question).

The question is, whodunnit? There are certainly hunters around here because I've seen them with their guns, but I don't think they'd shoot a tanuki, nor would they leave it lying dead on a pavement. Would a boar be able to gore a tanuki, and would it have reason to do that? The corpse was gone the following day.

Round pond resurgens

2011-01-08T18:46:00.005+09:00

In April last year, I took out my round pond and replaced it with a bath. Having pondered (ha!) where to put it next, I decided that the very place where it has sat since April would be fairly ideal.

So I dug a hole with a remarkably perfect shape for the steel pot, and rolled it in.

A well-dug hole.
Note the long-handled, small-headed spade which I cobbled together myself.

Now I'll just have to avoid falling into it in the dark.

Two ponds now. Boy will the frogs be happy!

New nata

2010-11-28T21:50:00.004+09:00

A while back, I wrote about my ebinata and kukuri, offering a wealth of false information.

Of the ebinata, I wrote "I've used it savagely, especially when splitting very big culms of bamboo. This involves driving the tool through inch-thick material by hammering alternately on the spine of the blade and on the tang with another stout piece of bamboo. The tool is not harmed in the least by this rough usage."

Five years of this rough usage have unfortunately wrecked the connection between the blade and the handle, and only some very ingenious work will be able to replace it. However, it did serve magnificently during that time.

Of the kukuri, I wrote "The whole thing, sheath included, is a beautiful piece of workmanship, and the two-tone handle is especially attractive. However, a 12" blade is imposing and heavy, something I began to consider carefully only after I had ordered it. It does chop well, although not vastly better than the ebinata. The handle however fits nicely in the hand".

In fact, it isn't a particularly good piece of workmanship. The steel is rather soft and it doesn't hold an edge very well. Also, in an unplanned confrontation between the kukuri and a concrete wall, the kukuri lost – part of the edge tore and folded over, and a chunk of the 'hardwood' handle chipped off. (I was splitting bamboo against a wall, and the bamboo gave way suddenly.) The handle is not ergonomic either. It's far too thick where the thumb and forefinger grip it.

To replace the ebinata, I got a straight nata. Oh, but this thing is a beauty. Look at the curves on it! It has chopping written all over it.

It's also remarkably compact, and in its case, it fits snugly against the body. The steel is far superior to that of the kukuri, and the handle is a much better shape.

I think I'll try to refrain from using this one as a hammer, and see if it lasts longer than the ebinata.

Second water butt

2010-11-28T21:34:00.004+09:00

I originally built my shed so that I could have another roof for collecting rainwater. But having no tank to put the water in, the water simply ran off without purpose. Now I have my 200 l lorry tank however, things all come together rather nicely.

Gutter on

Hole drilled and fitting attached

Attached with a hose

Now when it's time to take the water tank to the ditch in the summer for some pumpin' action, it's just a matter of pulling the hose off the gutter and sealing the fitting with the little screw cap that came with it.

But there's a persistent little voice in my head that keeps saying "Another 400 l would be nice...". We'll have to see about that.

Summer veg in autumn

2010-11-21T21:49:00.003+09:00

This is the summer veg that we were supposed to be getting from July and August that failed to appear due to lack of water. It feels a bit odd to be eating our first homegrown peppers in November. The mini plum tomatoes are very sweet.

Ehime EV art

2010-10-29T20:23:00.003+09:00

I can't help myself. The photos of the Ehime EV just inspire me to get out my crayons and make pretty pictures.

Ehime Electric Vehicle Project

2010-10-24T18:56:00.007+09:00

On Friday, I put on my suit and went to the first meeting of the Ehime EV Promotion Council, of which I'm now a member. The goal of this council is to promote the Ehime EV Project for establishing an electric vehicle business in Ehime.

This is a very grassroots sort of endeavour, represented by the concept of 'Small Hundreds' put forward by Yoshihisa Murasawa of the University of Tokyo. 'Small Hundreds' stands in opposition to the 'Big Three' of U.S. car making, and instead of a few large corporations slowly moving to introduce EVs, hundreds of small organizations will convert the existing vehicle fleet to electric use.

Yoshihisa Murasawa checks out the interior

And since this is an Ehime-based project where fishing and agriculture are major industries, it's not limited to cars. The goal is to electrify fishing boats and agricultural equipment too.

Kazunobu Saito of Ehime University has already converted a small, high-performance electric car from a Daihatsu petrol two-seater.

Murasaw-sensei and Saito-sensei talk to the local media

This is a very positive development. When Matsuyama started promoting the Saka no Ue no Kumo project, I thought at the time it would have been better to have begun some sort of sustainability-related project based on resources available in Ehime. I'm glad that something of the sort is now under way.

These scooters are also electric. See = Want

Another conversion job being recharged

Festival

2010-10-24T18:00:00.010+09:00

It was festival time again, so we all got out our koikuchi pyjama suits and did the whole crazy thing of drinking from 6 am and hauling heavy wooden god-boxes around the neighbourhood again.

Here are some choice scenes of the occasion.

The first day, Saturday, was rainy, and it was touch and go whether the evening's trundlings would go ahead or not. However, the local god ensured that the rain lifted so that we could celebrate his generally quiet presence.

Less cooperative was the generator on our danjiri. It kept huffing and puffing and cutting out, and it smelled very petrolly. All the chaps who know about these things (only one in fact), gathered round and got the backs of their happi coats soaking wet from squatting down. (The Wikipedia article says "It is believed that spirits or gods reside in the danjiri." However, I checked, and all that resides in our danjiri is lots of empty Asahi Super Dry cans.)

When the generator got sorted out, it was time to roll off into the sunset.

Things quickly got fairly raucous. People from all around wheeled their danjiri to the local Fuji supermarket car-park where we pushed the wagons up and down, lifted them up and waved them in the air, and feigned concern when a rather fat and drunken youth from another district fell off one. What's nice about the festival is that all sorts of charming people who you don't normally see around much get all chummy with you.

Another day, and more of the same. Rendezvous at the shrine at 6 am for sake from a big barrel. They have devils in red-face masks so that those who tend to colour -up after a single drink won't feel abashed. (Note to beginning students of Japanese culture: don't take my word for this.)

After light refreshments at the shrine, there was more trundling. The sun came up over Takanawa-san and it instantly got really hot.

However, the young people didn't seem to mind. They blew their whistles, waved their batons, and shrieked "Yoi-sa!" fit to burst.

On the last day, Monday, we did the omikoshi thing. The children had theirs, and we had ours. Ours is a lot heavier. We hoicked the boxes hither and thither, stopping at various houses to sup and enjoy more Asahi Super Dry.

Typically, the two omikoshi are taken to newly built homes in the village. It's alarming enough having heavy wooden things being moved about right next to your new windows and siding and all by people who are not exactly sober. But then after some slight debate, somebody called out, "Sasun-zo!". This roughly translates as "Stick 'em up", and it involves raising up both the omikoshi at 45 degrees and crossing the poles in the air. Bearing in mind that these boxes weigh a ton anyway and just carrying them around is hard enough, you can picture for yourself the amount of desperate staggering and grunting that goes on to get them up in the air. And this is in somebody's front yard. The new householders looked on with barely suppressed horror. (I wasn't able to help this time because I had to take a photo...)

"Sasun-zo!"

After terrorizing the new people, it was time for a rest. Adults and children alike couldn't resist a bit of a splash in the double drains.

After all this excitement, we took apart all the various heavy appurtenances for moving spirits about, stowed them away until next year, and adjourned to the local meeting house for an entirely unnecessary meal and more beer.

I'm already looking forward to next year.

Water carrying car: Update

2010-09-27T19:37:00.005+09:00

Yesterday, Sunday, I hauled two 200 L tankfuls of water from the ditch using my car. Today, Monday, the forecast changed from cloud to rain in the space of an hour.

Now, it's raining 21 mm per hour which equals about 200 L every three minutes, and the garden is pretty much waterlogged.

I'd like to spit at Fate, but it would only add unwanted moisture.

Water carrying car

2010-09-26T18:47:00.009+09:00

I haven't posted for a while because it hasn't rained more than three times in nearly two months. This has meant that every spare moment I've had, I've been either laboriously watering my acres or trying to make my acres more absorbent by digging holes and filling them with compost. After the compost ran out, I've been scavenging material to make four new piles of compost for later.

While my garden has been gradually drying out and dying off, I've become a little disgusted by how much water is available in our neighbourhood, without any of it being available to me. Although my feijoa and figs put forth a good deal of fruit this year, none of it swelled to edible size due to lack of water. But when I go down from our promontory and amongst the fields, I can see running water everywhere and hear it babbling amongst countless irrigation ditches and rivulets.

You aren't really anyone in the country
until you get a lorry tank

So I looked for ways to get this water to run uphill. First I asked the village headman if I could take some water from the lakes or ditches. He told me not to take from the lakes, but to make free with the ditches (a distinction I don't fully understand, but it's really all the same to me). Then I got a 200 L 'lorry tank' as they're called, and a Nakatomi PSP-70NS Portable Submersible Pump (220 W). I already owned a 300 W inverter and various bits of hose. I phoned my friendly Honda dealer to check whether my plans would break our car, but he assured me they wouldn't. He did advise against using the cigarette lighter as a power source for anything with large output. Notwithstanding the Honda man's assurances, the missus saw fit to add the warning, "If you make the car unusable, I'll kill you".

I drove my Chevy to the levy, and the levy was wet. Rather gingerly, I set everything up and began pumping operations. I must admit, I did half expect to suffer electric shocks and burns and to witness the utter destruction of my car in a fiery and watery apocalypse. However, all in all it went rather well.

A hose can be more dangerous than an anaconda

I did make a number of elementary mistakes at first. When you run a hose from a ditch up into a tank placed in a car, the hose has very little weight. However, when you start pumping water through the hose, it suddenly becomes heavy, and gravity works on it in dramatic fashion. The hose slides downwards as fast as a snake, while the end of the hose flips out the top of the tank and flails about inside the car spraying water all over the upholstery at an alarming rate. The second time, I tried tying the hose to the opening rim of the tank, but the end of the hose still flew out like an angry cobra and started spraying everything, me included. Finally, I tied a small dumbbell to a length of string so that the head of the hose was fixed firmly, pointing downwards into the tank. As the water level in the tank was nearing the 200 L mark and I was congratulating myself on a very well-managed pumping operation, I suddenly became aware that I had forgotten to close the spigot on the tank, and was in fact pumping a large amount of dirty water straight into the upholstery. It took about 30 minutes of bailing and mopping to get all the water out of the back of the car in the end.

Gurgle gurgle

I did in fact ignore the advice about using the cigarette lighter, and at about the 150 L mark, the pump stopped with an electronic "peep" from somewhere. When I pulled the hose out of the tank to discover where the problem might be, the pump started up again, soaking the front of my shirt completely. Then it stopped. I took the plug out of the cigarette lighter socket and found it too hot to touch, so I decided henceforward not to risk this attractively easy option again, and to use the alligator clips on the battery instead.

Pumpin'

The car handled fine with 200 L of water in it, although it sat quite low in the back. Emptying 200 L of water into various parts of the garden at one go feels like very luxurious behaviour, and the ground took it up with an audible hissing noise. I put gallons on the figs, the feijoa and the jaboticaba. I also soaked the ground cover in the hope that it will recover a bit before the cold comes on. The new compost piles (just dead leaves and chicken manure) also got a good dousing, because I want to be sure of huge amounts of compost to soak up the large volumes of water that my new tackle has brought within reach. They should heat up and break down pretty quickly now.

Wetting the figs

This really does seem to be a satisfactory arrangement, and I expect it will help to get the garden established such that it can ultimately withstand the summer droughts without too much stress. I don't think it's particularly 'eco', but if it ultimately reduces watering from the tap and makes the garden productive, then it's an improvement. If I can only remember to close the spigot when I'm pumping...

Fig frog

2010-06-19T21:11:00.002+09:00

The fig trees are beginning to look like they may be productive this year. Today a little green frog was taking his ease among the big leaves. Sometimes when the wind blew up sideways, he looked a bit like a surfer riding a wave.

More than one

2010-06-19T21:06:00.003+09:00

Last year, my apricot tree and almond tree produced one of each.

This year, there are more than one.

Apricots

Almonds

Almost enough to imagine some sort of almond cake with apricot sauce.

Stag beetle

2010-06-19T20:52:00.005+09:00

This morning I was surprised to find a big stag beetle lying upside down on the balcony. It looked dead. But when I went to pick it up, it clung to my finger with that rather scary grip they have and started making its way up my arm, swimming through the hair.

Normally the young master is reluctant to get up on Saturday mornings, but when I went into his room and announced absently, "I have a stag beetle on my arm this morning", he got up rather quickly. Apparently I was handling it all wrong, and he rushed out in his pyjamas and stuck it on the big tree. We hope it's happy in our tree.

When I was moving the compost from its old location, I found three or four huge white grubs buried in the ground which I think must have been stag beetle larvae. I carefully reburied them in rich soil elsewhere in the garden, and I suppose this might be one of them. How it found itself upside down on the balcony is anyone's guess.

The stag beetle will have to take its chances with the brown butterflies that come to suck the sap. These butterflies don't take crap from anything that comes to the tree. They even tangle with the huge hornets that come to visit.

Goodbye goji

2010-06-19T20:38:00.003+09:00

I've had enough of goji bushes and I've torn them out.

If they're not being 'skeletonized' by leaf beetles, a process which leaves them without leaves, they're being 'powderized' by mould which leaves them 'skeletonized'. For something which is supposed to make you live until 108, the life-force seems to be very weak in these plants. I'm tired of seeing their thorny, leafless, flowerless, fruitless boughs hanging all over one corner of my garden. I'm going to plant something useful in their stead.

Bullfrog

2010-05-23T20:40:00.003+09:00

Since the recent heavy rains have filled up my water butt, I've been putting bucketloads of water from it into the bathtub pond.

Tonight when I went to put the remains of dinner in the compost, I spotted a dark shape on one of the flagstones by the pond.

It was the bullfrog, and tonight is probably the first night he's had a chance to get out of the pond.

Let a thousand flowers bloom

2010-05-23T20:31:00.005+09:00

Even if they're all exactly the same type that you've seen before.

These garish things look amazing in the spring sunshine after a colourless winter. Hurrah!

A bike-ride up Mt. Takanawa

2010-05-09T21:15:00.004+09:00

When we used to live in Osaka, I got into the habit of jumping on my bike and running for the hills to get out of the city and into some nature. Even after we moved out of the city and into nature, I continued this cycling up mountains thing until our son was old enough to start taking up most of my free time. Now that he's old enough not to require that much fatherly attention, I decided to jump on the old bike again and pedal up a mountain. Specifically, Takanawa-san which rises up gradually starting from our house (from a certain point of view).

Not without some trepidation however. The last time I went up a mountain under my own steam, I blew my left knee, and it's been blown ever since. I've been running in jika-tabi recently which has felt sort of good, but there's still an elastic band or two in my knee that feel a bit spastic.

Takanawa is the one in the distance with the antenna on top.

The steepest part is the road up from our house to the last hamlet.

Pretty soon into mixed woodland. New bamboo shoot.

You can sea the see!

Not the most perfeshnal looking cyclist. Very much the armature.

The tower at the top. You could grow a lot of peas up a frame like that!

The evidentiary photograph. The water bottles sort of prove
the bike wasn't driven up on the back of an SUV.

The view from the top

Back down in the last hamlet.
There are not two young people to rub together unfortunately.

It was a pretty good ride actually. The knee performed well in the circumstances. I sweated like a pig on the way up, and half froze on the way back down in the cool spring air. The dappled woodland arrayed on the steep slopes was most beautiful, and the songs of birds and frogs echoed marvellously all around. And I was back down in time for lunch.

Poppies

2010-05-09T21:06:00.002+09:00

We've got pink pom-pom poppies at the moment.

And delicate little petally red poppies.

The pom-pom poppies are a bit triffid-like in their intensity and exuberance.

I understand that if my intention towards these plants were suddenly to change, I'd be committing a crime. Odd thing, the law, ain't it?

Bathtime

2010-04-24T21:20:00.005+09:00

OK, what have we here? A stainless steel bath, sitting around in my garden... Hmm, what can we do with this?

Wow, it's pretty fancy. It's got like, Greek gods and stuff on it. Well, we probably won't be needing them, but it's nice to know they're there.

Right, so this is the old metal pot that we buried a few years ago. Not very thoroughly since some of it sticks out of the ground.

Actually, it served its purpose pretty well. In fact, it's teeming with life. It contains several medaka, an American bullfrog (naturalized), several types of snail, lots of small, dragon-like nymphs and one big ugly nymph that seems to have eaten most of the medaka, and millions of water fleas. In fact, the water is thick with these minute fleas.

Indeed, it felt a bit brutal 'liquidating' this particular pond so that a bigger, better one could take its place. But the die was cast last weekend when we went to our friends' house which they're renewing, and I spotted the bath 'going begging' as the expression has it.

I spent a good part of the day digging this hole, all the while reflecting on mortality for some reason. My own for a start, and also that of the various life forms that had come to live in the old pond. Since I hadn't enough vessels to hold the water, most of it had to be put on the ground, with all those millions of water fleas. I rescued the last surviving medaka, and a lot of snails and small nymphs. The big nymph I took to one of the big local ponds, an environment which I'm sure it will find tougher than my garden.

The bullfrog although very large, is expert at hiding. But as I was scooping out the mud and leaves at the bottom with a ladle, I noticed that I'd also scooped up the frog. Clearly deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, he sat there in the ladle with his head sticking out among the leaves, pretending not to be there, as I put him in a bucket. I had been expecting trouble, but it was quite a classy performance in the end.

When the missus came home from shopping, hilarious banter was exchanged about graves, rotenburo, and what the neighbours are thinking. It all had a certain inevitability about it and you can probably figure out for yourself how it went.

The challenge now is to make it look less like a stainless steel bath buried in the ground. As the sun was beginning to set and it became cold, I laid a few stones which suggest that some pleasant combination of naturalistic/bourgeois may be possible.

The old big pot (looking a lot bigger now it's out of the ground) and another little pot that came with it may be reburied further up the garden with a cascading sort of configuration. And all the little water fleas will be welcomed back with open arms!

Kukri vs. Ebinata

2010-04-04T18:21:00.009+09:00

Kukri and ebinata

When I first set about cutting bamboo many years ago, I bought an Ebinata (literally "shrimp bill-hook", dunno why it's called that). It cost about 1,500 yen from the DIY store and it came with a fairly useless leatherette blade cover, but no sheath or holder. I liked it a lot at first. It feels good in my hand and it does swift destruction to anything it's used on, from bamboo to tree branches and even clumps of grass. The hooky bit on the end can be used as a hammer, as can the flat of the blade if need be, and the hook also keeps the blade from getting dinged. And when you've cut down a big bamboo and find that it's too heavy to move, the hook can be inserted at the bottom of the culm as a means of dragging it to an angle so that it falls over by itself.

Being a cheap and easily replaceable tool, I've used it savagely, especially when splitting very big culms of bamboo. This involves driving the tool through inch-thick material by hammering alternately on the spine of the blade and on the tang with another stout piece of bamboo. The tool is not harmed in the least by this rough usage.

However, although it's an excellent tool, I began to find the handle less than ergonomic, with a tendency to fly out of my hand when wet. Binding it with string helped, but not as much as I'd hoped. A bigger pommel would be a huge plus. Also, since it didn't come with a sheath and the cover fell to bits, finding somewhere to put it between bouts of chopping became a problem. I often just threw it down on the ground in the bamboo grove, but then finding it again later was not always easy. I put a hook in the end to attach it to my belt loop, but it keeps falling off. And the main problem was that I began to feel it was taking too many swings to cut through any size of bamboo. I felt that if it were just a bit heavier and bit more choppingly balanced, it would save me a few strokes.

Chopping comparison test.
Kukri marginally better, more fun.

So after reading that the Nepalese kukri is a crazy chopping tool, I figured that it might be what I was looking for. After looking through the extensive and annoying bullshit-filled catalogue at www.thekhukurihouse.com, I decided to get the 12" Chinautee. Since Khukuri House makes their knives to order and they accept modifications, I opted not to have the traditional kukri notch since I'm not a devotee of the goddess Kali or whatever the notch is supposed to be for. Also, the traditional kukri has a sharply tapered pommel which is commonly reported to jab painfully into the wrist when chopping, so I asked to have a rounded off pommel. Finally, I asked for none of the ridges on the handle that would seem to promise flayed hands after a few minutes' real work. The knife itself seems very cheap at $40, but the shipping was the same again making it a good deal costlier than the ebinata from the DIY store.

My knife arrived almost a month later than promised due to some power problem across the whole of Nepal. The whole thing, sheath included, is a beautiful piece of workmanship, and the two-tone handle is especially attractive. However, a 12" blade is imposing and heavy, something I began to consider carefully only after I had ordered it. It does chop well, although not vastly better than the ebinata. The handle however fits nicely in the hand, and the pommel prevents unwanted droppage. Wielding it presents more of a hazard than the ebinata since the kukri has a sharp point. A mistake with the ebinata would leave a nasty bruise on your shin -- the kukri would cut your shin right open.

Having a rather inventive nature, I very quickly gussied up the sheath attachment by cannibalizing a defunct bum bag. It now has quick-release frog with leg strap to stop it flapping about. The kukri sits perfectly, out of the way of work, but right within reach.

Sharpening the kukri presents problems that the ebinata doesn't. The ebinata can be brought to a very sharp edge simply be running an oilstone up and down it a couple of times. But the blade of the kukri is a rather eccentric S-shape and getting an even edge on it is not easy. I bought a kitchen knife-sharpening tool, but quickly found that the kukri is too big to fit in the slot (but boy, our kitchen knives are sharp now...). Incidentally, there are some good videos about knife-sharpening here.

So which 'wins', the kukri or the ebinata? Well on balance, the cheap ebinata has a lot of merits, and I won't be throwing mine away. (I didn't mention that it doesn't rust readily either.) But the kukri is a thing of beauty in itself, and actually chops better. Now I'd really like to try a 10" kukri which I think would be a more convenient size.

Bonus thoughts: A word about tangs.
Who that has heard the phrase "full tang" could not but experience anxiety when buying a knife that was not "full tang", but had a "hidden tang", or even worse, a "rat-tail tang"? The full tang is knife that goes all the way through the handle, so that's one handle that won't ever break off, no sir.

Well the ebinata has a tang that's a fraction of the length of the blade, and of the handle. It's fixed with a little metal ring and two very inferior looking pins that scarcely merit the term 'rivet'. And yet, the ebinata is made for a lifetime of constant impact with very hard bamboo. This fixture, laughably inadequate compared to a full tang, serves very well. I've seen ebinata that have been sharpened down by about one-third over many years of hard use, and their miserable little tangs are still holding up.

It's the same with the traditional "hidden tang" of kukris which are glued in place with some poxy natural epoxy. There are antique kukris on the market that are a century old and that have seen hard usage chopping the enemies of the British Empire into beefsteak tartare. But their tangs are still strong and in place.

I firmly believe that the cult of the full tang is nothing but a simple-minded dependency on the redundant appearance of strength, which adds weight and nothing much else. The history of cutlery offers abundant proof that a little tang is a good thing.

Extra thought
Since I bought the kukri, I've discovered the Razel SS7 which looks like this;

This too is said to be a wicked chopper and I believe it. It comes with a very robust sheath too. If anybody would like to send me one for review, I can be contacted at ocean11 at gmail.

3-bay compost

2010-04-03T21:31:00.003+09:00

I can't believe it's taken me so long, but I've finally built a 3-bay compost system.

The idea is that you can have a pile that receives new kitchen and garden waste, alongside an old, curing pile. Since compost works best when it's chucked around periodically, the middle bay allows space for this chucking.

It will be observed that the left bay contains something that looks quite like compost, but actually it's full of very stinky mikan rind and some viable potato peelings that will produce potatoes unless I use that middle bay assiduously.

This is the time of year when the combination of daytime heat and frequent rain creates just the right conditions to make the compost heat up and give off vapour when you stick a fork in it. It's all full of luridly purple and pink worms that are quite obviously enjoying a riot of multiplication.

Things blooming

2010-04-03T21:15:00.003+09:00

From mid-February, things have been blooming, starting with the weeping plum. A friend criticised me persistently for having cut back my plum so harshly. I didn't have the heart to riposte with the timeless Japanese wisdom "He who prunes a cherry; complete idiot. He who fails to a prune plum; stupid bastard". (The English seems to depend a lot on the translation, but the original Japanese expression is quite unequivocal.)

Weeping plum

Apricot (close-up)

Apricot (distant)

Almond.
People keep walking past and commenting that my cherry is looking pretty.

The thing that produces the not very palatable berries around June.

Actual cherry blossoms.
We can see these blooming from our kitchen window. I went to have a look at them close-up, and strangely enough, I could also see our kitchen window in the distance.

Today I went to the temple Zenno-ji just up the road where a lot of big old cherry trees blossom. In the quiet of the temple grounds, the hum of the bees harvesting the pollen sounded like ... like ... well, something a bit Zen-like I suppose.

Here, clever people will suppose that they've detected a category error. However, this newly emerged butterfly looked so much like a flower when it first caught my eye that I don't mind taking the liberty of posting it as a blooming thing.

To dog, or not to dog - Conclusion

2010-02-14T21:53:00.003+09:00

You might remember Jack, the dog who appeared in our neighbourhood. If you are soft-hearted, you may even have been feeling a little anxiety about what become of him. Well, my neighbour on the corner who has two dogs built a kennel for him by the roadside and feeds him. He's now officially called Jack (the dog, not my neighbour). I take Jack for walks, mostly at night when I've finished work. Jack is used to people again, and doesn't shrink away from them.

In the summer, he got bitten on the nose by a poisonous snake and his whole face swelled up. He looked like a lion for a few days, but the poor lad could hardly move and lay in his kennel for nearly a week. The neighbour took him to the vet who said that four-legged animals generally survive snake-bites. I'm glad about that. He's fine again now, and still sticks his snout in all sorts of places that might hold snakes.

A bit of colour

2010-02-14T21:13:00.005+09:00

Recent photos have all been 'dun' colour. Dun is not an attractive colour, but pretty much the whole landscape is dun between October and around now, when patches of more interesting colours appear.

The weeping plum which I pruned with such skill in June, is now putting forth pretty pink flowers. I left a few small branches to see whether or not they would flower (I think that was the purpose -- maybe I just missed a few), and they aren't flowering. They seem to be getting ready to put out some leaves.

New plantings

2010-02-07T22:45:00.005+09:00

This weekend, I planted a feijoa of the type "Mammoth", a Papaw, a gooseberry, a rose of the type "Mini Rose", and a Senryo (Sarcandra glabra).

I already have two feijoa of the type "Dunno", and so selecting a different type was a bit of a gamble, but judging from the size of the leaves, "Mammoth" seems not to be the same. You can hardly see it in this picture, but I'm hoping it will grow into something that provides both privacy and fruit.

The new feijoa. That's it in the middle ground.

The papaw. I thought these were supposed to be evergreen...

I plant my first rose. I wish sellers were a bit more communicative
about the type of plant. "Mini Rose" doesn't seem to mean much.

The Senryo. This has inedible red berries that birds like to eat.
We have a lot of birds in the garden now, and I like to see them around.

This wall-type thing will be planted to provide fruit, flowers
and privacy.

A single gooseberry plant. It will be interesting to see if the fruit
are popular in our household.

I went into town last weekend to meet a fellow from London and Tokyo about providing web, translation, and information services to help local companies expand their market. The moon was full and at its closest to the earth, and it dominated the evening sky. I tried to photograph it by the moat of Matsuyama Castle, but as expected, it appears as a pathetic dot in the sky. The actual thing was dramatically beautiful.

Yamamomo

2010-01-24T20:38:00.005+09:00

Today I planted a yamamomo (Myrica rubra) on the site where there compost used to be. This is an evergreen tree that grows quite large, and so hopefully it will screen off the garden from the footpath that passes further up the hill. It also produces strange red fruit. These aren't terribly pleasant to eat fresh, but my mother in law makes a very nice drink by soaking them in cheap brandy. Most medicinal it is. The fruit should also serve quite well as jam. For those who are interested in such things, the type is 'Moriguchi', whatever the hell difference that makes.

The missus has said that our (my) garden looks like a 'shizai okiba', that is, a scrap yard or lumber yard. The description is not without justice, and I've felt the same thing myself. But it hurts to hear it out loud. Today, though, with a small fruit tree where the compost used to sit, visible to one and all from the front gate, and with a naturalistic stone wall where there was originally a very scruffy agglomeration of lumber and bamboo, I can't help feeling that things have been tidied up considerably. One of these fine days I feel I might challenge the missus to look out the window and see if she can still say that it looks like builder's merchant's.

I'm hoping that the yamamomo feels blessed, sited as it is on a one-time compost enclosure.

What I did over New Year

2010-01-03T18:27:00.006+09:00

The young master is studying hard for his junior high school entrance exams and so this New Year, we didn't go anywhere or 'do' anything. However, I was not idle.

Here's what I did.

I finished my bamboo fence, with two styles.

Since this involved visits to the bamboo grove, I felt compelled to tidy things up in there.

Before.
Dead wood everywhere, stifling new growth.

After.
Room for new shoots in the spring.
It's actually possible to see from one end of the grove to the other now.

I went to the local sake brewery, Yuki Suzume and bought a bottle of junmaishu of which I drank quantities, warmed in the microwave.

All full of sake, I photographed the moon on New Year's eve.

I built a stone wall to replace the untidy wooden rows I put up in a hurry to stabilize the soil when we first moved in.

I liquidated the compost piles as backfill in the new wall. The compost piles were also situated in haste when we moved in, and they weren't put in a very good place.

I built a new compost enclosure on an old raised bed and filled it up with the remains of the summer vegetables (tomatoes and eggplants).

All of this manual labour took a toll on my hands which are now as rough as sandpaper and covered in cuts and purple blotches. At these times I'm reminded of the film The Killing Fields where the horrible Khmer Rouge felt people's hands to see if they were labourers, killing those who weren't. I wonder if I'd pass, or have to claim that I was a taxi driver. Handling stones dries out the skin wonderfully, and touching bamboo cuts it to ribbons and implants little splinters that must be dug out. Still, the physical tiredness at the end of the day feels very good compared with intellectual labour. If only it were as remunerative...

Managing a bamboo grove

2009-12-27T20:44:00.004+09:00

There are a couple of bamboo groves within a two minute walk of our house, one of moso, and the other of madake. Both of them are a real mess of half-fallen dead wood which forces all new growth to grow up at the same slant. As a new soft culm forces itself up through the tangle of dead wood, it suffers damage which is then subject to attack by insects and other rot. And although the grove persists, each bamboo fails to reach its fullest size, and none of it is usefully straight.

I've been wanting to do something about it for a while, and I've been gradually cutting out the dead wood from the moso grove to make charcoal with. Recently, having decided to complete my bamboo fence with the easily manageable madake, I began to tackle the dead wood. Hacking it into pieces with my bill-hook/machete thing is a very violent activity, and showers of rotten bamboo come crashing down from on high. Luckily, most of it is pretty light so it doesn't hurt much if it lands on your head.

By the time I've smashed up great swathes of dead wood and cut out the mature culms that I want for my fence, it's generally too dark to stack the cuttings tidily. But unless I do that, the new growth will no doubt be as twisted as ever. So I guess at least part of the New Year holidays will be spend sorting and stacking dead sticks.

It occurs to me that chickens could be kept in a well managed bamboo grove. The cuttings could be used for fencing all around parts of the grove, the trees would give the birds some protection from the weather and predators, the birds would be able to find quite a lot of insects to eat, and they would provide the trees with fertilizer. A few berry and seed-bearing plants around the edges would bring more insects and provide the birds with more nutrition. It seems like an interesting idea in theory.

Addendum:
I've finally found out who owns the grove. When I was in there tidying up the other day, a mikan farmer with storehouse next to the grove hailed me through the trees to offer me several sacks of mikan. I took the opportunity to ask if he knew whose land it was, and he told me that it belongs to a doctor who lives on the other side of Matsuyama. He never visits apparently. Absentee landlords, the old problem...

"Fungal Exuberance" by Mike O'Rizal

2009-12-27T20:28:00.005+09:00

Put some charcoal in a bucket. Use the bucket as a urinal for a few days. Mix in some of the powder that you get after polishing rice (nuka*). Cover and leave to stand for a week or so. And enjoy the absolute riot of fungus that results.

I'm not sure if this is going to be beneficial for the soil or not, but I'm fondly hoping that this is going to be the start of a truly beautiful mycorrhiza. I chucked several spoonfuls of it on a few areas of the ground cover to see if it makes any difference.

* I can't seem to say the word "nuka" normally. Whenever I'm about to say it, some kind of primitive spirit takes over and forces me to say it in a really deep voice, and then repeat "nuka - nuka - nuka" in the same deep voice while rolling my eyes. It's hardly surprising that I attribute special powers to nuka.

More bamboo fencing

2009-12-27T20:05:00.002+09:00

The fencing method using bundles of bamboo twigs was getting to be a real hassle. I began to think I'd be an old man before I got my fence finished. So I changed to a new method, with cross pieces of moso bamboo split into four, and uprights of madake bamboo cut into roughly similar lengths. This method is also time-consuming, but nothing in comparison to the twigs.

Twiggy

"Teppo-gaki" or "Gun Fence"

Hojo Matsuri

2009-10-17T17:12:00.011+09:00

Saturday

On the first evening, it was looking a lot like rain. As the sun went down, it backlit the Takanawa Shrine flags. The flags creak like sails in the wind.

The activities of Saturday night were essentially the same as Sunday night, so I won't bother going into them in detail -- needless to say though, there was beer, noise, exertion and shouting.

Sunday

The morning started in Takanawa Shrine following a breakfast of beer and custard-filled bread. The dancing dragon-lion thing was finally tamed in the traditional method with a couple of shots to the head from a musket, whereupon it could be led about quietly.

An exceptionally heavy omikoshi was bounced around the shrine grounds. This monster is an old portable shrine from the days when our area had a bigger, younger population that could bear the weight.

View from the shrine gate

Looks like a question of too much beer too early

After the diabolical entertainments in the shrine, it's time to wheel the danjiri up and down the street. I'm wearing my new black koikuchi pyjamas which my neighbour kindly brought to my house from his workman's clothing shop.

Shortly after this picture was taken, I ducked aside to avoid the corner of a portable shrine that was making straight for my head. Whereupon I experienced an intense crushing, burning sensation that I couldn't quite place. Then I realized that the danjiri had run right over my foot. No harm done, but gosh, your fully laden danjiri is a very heavy thing.

Not that omikoshi are light either. The one that missed me was laden with a young father clutching his baby daughter who was dressed in full festival fig of course.

The sun rises over Takanawa-san in the background

A young lady in boots appeared to watch the danjiri, but she wasn't left in peace for long. A farmer promptly gave her his happi jacket and recruited her to grab a pole. Now as I understand it, for safety reasons, nobody is allowed to ride or manipulate the danjiri unless they're wearing tabi, but it seems exceptions can be made under special circumstances.

When I declared that the little girls looked like a herd of some species of animal, there was a strong and mutinous reaction, but when I showed them this photo, it turned to general agreement.

The morning bash ended and I went home to brush my teeth, weed my garden and gird my loins for the second evening's session.

Now the evening session is quite a business. All of the danjiri from the local districts gather on a wide stretch of road and are pushed together side-by-side in rows of six. While the young folk ride on the danjiri, hammering on bells, thrashing drums, blowing whistles and waving batons, their ageing parents push on the poles like galley slaves. Some of the older folk, myself included, like to yell 'Yoi-sa!" in time at the top of their lungs until they're hoarse. Then they like to croak impolitely at the womenfolk for beer.

Local teenage girls who normally drift by unnoticed in school uniforms suddenly appear in full make-up with earrings and big smiles.

After the evening bash, there was a solemn ceremony in Takanawa Shrine to invite the god down into the portable god-box. However the solemnity was broken by a series of loud farting noises from the assembled kneeling children. It was hard to tell if the noises were real or feigned, but nevertheless they produced uncontrollable giggles. The adults did their best to suppress the hilarity by saying things like "If you keep that up you'll really shit yourself" and "Cor, that was a nasty one". It seems as though the Shinto aspect of the festival is not treated with great respect by all parties, and at one point I noticed that the younger kaminushi or 'god master' was getting seriously riled by his parishioner's lack of piety.

The little ones were not still for long

The next morning, Monday, we were up at a leisurely 7:30 for a breakfast of beer, sake, and horrible little dried fish at the shrine. The sake tasted pretty good as a change after all the beer. We set off from the shrine singing the shrine-carrying song, a nice call and response ditty which extols the virtues of our region. I have the melody down better than most of my neighbours and received some joshing about stealing the limelight -- "Roddo bakkashi yan".

The region is certainly worthy of songs of praise

We carried the shrine here and there to different people's houses and were treated to more beer and some rather good snacks.

Farmers, men of industry, and salesmen

The view from the roof of the wedding hall

More stops, more beer

Of course, after three days of drinking beer from dawn till dark, hauling danjiri and omikoshi along flag adorned streets, these heavy articles have to be disassembled and put away carefully in storage for next year. This can seem a bit of a fag. A pleasant meal and more beer is served after the work is done.

The last picture is one I took on my way home on Monday evening. Like the strips of land, I felt like I was suspended in space, and my thoughts, such as they were, mirrored the wispy clouds. Home, to an early bed.

Tuesday

It appears that the shock of getting up on Tuesday and not drinking several bottles of beer before 7 am has undermined my constitution. I have a terrible cold and my hips don't seem to be functioning properly at all.

Festival preparations

2009-10-04T19:05:00.009+09:00

Next week we have our festival, Insh'Allah. And so today, in spite of it being Sunday, I rose at 7:30 to join my neighbours at 8 for the 'michizukuri' or 'roadmaking'. This is a jolly business of going along all the roads pulling up weeds, trimming the verges with weedwhackers, and setting fire to the banks of dams. It's also a good chance to shoot the breeze with one's neighbours, most of whom have lived here all their lives and offer some interesting descriptions of how things used to be. Now that most pathways are paved with poured concrete, the literal meaning of 'michizukuri' has largely vanished, and the petrol-driven weedwhacker has also made things a lot easier, if a lot more noisy.

Women sheltering in the shade of a shed. It was hot.
I wonder what they talk about together.

One bloke who farms was showing me where a wild boar had entered a rice paddy and knocked down a lot of stalks. As we walked, I failed to notice the dip by which the farm equipment enters the paddy, twisted my ankle, and nearly ended up in the paddy myself. It didn't hurt at the time, but now it does. I obviously haven't been here long enough, because nobody laughed at me.

Moonlit shrine on Friday night.
The boys were practising their Drum n' Bell while the girls
were pasting 3,000 little flags on bamboo twigs to decorate the
danjiri

In the afternoon, it was time to put together the 'danjiri', or what might I suppose be called a 'juggernaut'. This involves getting enormous wooden poles from inconspicuous storage next to the shrine, and various parts from the storeroom adjoining the village hall. Also, bamboo is cut from the mountain to make fenders for the main unit. These bits and pieces are all tied together with ropes which are pulled and hammered tight until they feel like steel.

Roping up the poles to the body of the danjiri.
Lots of headscratching about the method of winding.

Putting the cross-braces on. Everything wound and hammered.

Putting on the bamboo fenders.

All wrapped up against the typhoon expected tomorrow

The Japanese passion for 'monozukuri', or 'making things' is apparent in the collective care that goes into making a good, safe danjiri (English monozukuri also made itself apparent in a rather fanatical zeal to take the sharp edges off the cut bamboo with a lathe, since this alone is something one knows how to do...).

Jaboticaba flowers

2009-10-04T18:53:00.004+09:00

The Jaboticaba didn't do very well during the two months when it didn't rain. It gradually shed its leaves and took on a sad, strained look. I watered it every few days, but I forgot what I'd read about it liking heavy irrigation. However, with the first decent fall of autumn rain, lo! it put forth lots of little white flowers, all over its branches in that thoroughly weird way it has.

The little white flowers that bloomed a few days ago have turned into little green fruit. We'll be watching their development with the most intense interest.

In my joy to see flowers, I put my bee suit on and grabbed my cotton bud to ensure that all the flowers got properly pollinated in the absence of real bees. However, as I buzzed between flowers, I noticed that ants were going between the flowers and I also nearly bludgeoned a hover fly that was taking darting flights at each flower. It appears that hover flies also pollinate the goji bushes (amongst other pollinators) and they seem to play a role similar to that of the largely absent bee -- they're present throughout the whole spring and summer whereas bees only appear to be active in the early spring.

Ground cover spreading

2009-10-04T18:44:00.003+09:00

What I like about ground cover is the way that it covers the ground. That is, it covers the ground if the ground has been prepared carefully by digging and the addition of organic material. Also if it's watered every night laboriously with a watering can, and when the rainwater runs out, with a hose, for the nearly two months when it didn't rain. However, it's nice to see it spreading out, and it's also nice to see how it stops all the topsoil being washed away when it eventually rains. It's also convenient to be able to dump spadefulls of compost on it when the compost piles get out of hand. Thanks to the ground cover, there's now a thin layer of dark, absorbent soil taking shape on top of the clay.

Jaboticaba, and an almond

2009-08-10T21:12:00.005+09:00

With two Feijoas and a Jaboticaba, South Americans should feel at home

I was very impressed by the flavour of the Jaboticaba fruit I tasted at the garden shop the other day, and after checking that the tree is supposedly cold tolerant down to -6°C , I bought it (in Matsuyama, the average temperature gets down to 1.9°C in February). When it arrived, I gobbled down a few of the fruit to get the energy to plant the tree, and decided that the fruit is a delicious cross between a cherry and a grape, but with much more reliable sweetness.

A little beetle makes a tasty meal of my pips

The Jaboticaba is said to like a deep soil with a lot of organic content, so I dug a hole about half a metre deep and filled it with compost and charcoal. Digging the hole in the solid clay/quartz mix was a major undertaking which took nearly an hour. It seems miraculous that the roots of plants can penetrate this medium when a pick axe can only penetrate a couple of inches with a good hard swing.

This hole goes a long way down, and is full of Terra Preta goodness

I'm saving the seeds of the Jaboticaba fruit and I'll try planting them. I believe that the cultivar I have is probably "Sabara" which is said to be "precocious". I hope so, because waiting 8 to 10 years for a seedling to fruit would really try my patience.

The almond tree has given up its single fruit. In the rains of the last few months, it gradually took on a very disreputable appearance, and today when I poked it cautiously with a gloved finger, it fell off the bush and some little poisonous ants came streaming out of it.

Inside the half-rotten "fruit" portion, the pit seemed to be in reasonable condition. Presumably, when this is cracked open, there should be a pristine almond inside. Whereas in California and other dry places like that, the fruit is left to dessicate and fall off on its own, in Japan where fruiting coincides with wet weather, the husbandman is supposed to devise measures for drying the fruit before it rots. Next year, I can see myself either hoping for a dry snap (but only in relation to the almonds!) or leaving matters to the ants, since no harm seems to have been done this year.

Pomegranates and other fruit trees

2009-08-08T22:50:00.007+09:00

I was surprised the other day to see vivid red flowers blooming in the garden, not aware that I had planted anything with red flowers. In fact it was the pomegranate that I planted last autumn, and it shows how little I actually know about what I plant. I know what a pomegranate fruit looks like, but hitherto, I had no idea what its flowers looked like.

Indeed, when I first noticed the buds, I thought that they were in fact the fruit, and so I was surprised when they morphed into flowers.

Today I went to the garden rather superior garden shop Tokiwa Garland to pick up the seaberry plants I ordered. One of the two I planted last spring died. The seaberry comes in male and female varieties, and since I forgot which was which, I had to plant one of each again. At Tokiwa Garland, I encountered the Jaboticaba (Myrciaria cauliflora) or 'Kibudo' in Japanese.

This rather bizarre tree has grape-like fruit sticking out of its branches. I rather surreptiously picked a few and popped them in my mouth. They had a slightly sticky, waxy feel which heightened the feeling that one was running a hazard by ingesting them. The inside of the fruit, which pops outside with a spurt when you bite into it, is sweet like a grape but with a custardy texture and also a slight sourness. This is quite a delightful combination. The skin is bitter and I spat it out, along with a couple of largish seeds, although a taste for the skin could probably be acquired. At a price of 10,000 yen for a tree taller than I am with fruit already on it, I'm very tempted to add this one to our growing collection of uncommon fruit.

Ground cover

2009-08-01T21:46:00.006+09:00

After pulling up all the previous ground cover -- clover, and liming the soil, we had several weeks of torrential rain. I feel confident in saying that all the lime got completely washed away, along with a good deal of topsoil. When the clover was in place, the soil was never washed away. But ironically, the heaviest rain I've ever seen, anywhere, fell just after we pulled up the ground cover.

The soil did a pitiful imitation of the Mississippi River, carrying our topsoil off to the sea.

The next lot of ground cover that we decided on is a sort called Lippia nodiflora (iwadare-kusa in Japanese) which is said to grow like billy-ho, and be reasonably resistant to drought. I really hope it is, because I'm not in the habit of watering 'lawn' space.

As a means of preventing the whole plot of land washing away completely, I carved out channels running across the slope, with the soil piled up on the downhill side. The Lippia is planted along the little berms.

This actually worked quite well for a few days more of the torrential rain, but without any well-established ground cover, the ditches and berms are beginning to get flattened.

The rainy season was officially declared over on Friday, when we had some typical summer weather. But then on Friday night and Saturday morning, we had a massive thunderstorm that shook the whole house, and on Saturday evening, we have the same son et lumière again, with more Biblical quantities of rain.

I never thought that the anxieties I'd face in life would include the loss of my precious topsoil. More rain forecast for tomorrow...

The enduring fascination of large beetles

2009-07-06T21:38:00.005+09:00

We have a big pollarded acorn tree on the edge of our garden that was left from when our plot was a small patch of jungle. Its wounds and crevices are home to beetles of various sorts, but most conspicuously, stag beetles.

Personally, I'd be happy to leave these things alone and not pay them any attention. However, the young master will not recognize this as a valid approach, and insists on going out with a torch after dark 'just to check'.

He says, "Come out and look for beetles with me".
I say, "No, you're old enough to go out on your own".
He says, "Last night when you came back from putting out the compost, you said you saw old Mrs. Takaichi from the graveyard next door collecting acorns, so you have to come out with me to take responsibility for saying frightening things".

Being a responsible parent, I then have to go out with him, which also involves getting dressed up against mosquitoes, which don't seem to bother the young master at all.

We then have to bring the beetle inside for 'scientific investigation', until the investigation discovers that the beetle is infested with parasites, whereupon it's very quickly taken outside and stuck back on the tree.

New look for the garden

2009-07-06T21:05:00.004+09:00

We got a little tired of the clover growing well when it's wet, and going all crispy and crunchy underfoot when it doesn't rain for a few weeks. Also, the feijoa and olive trees were planted too close together, and because the ground wasn't prepared properly they weren't thriving.

So we asked Y's garden to remedy the situation by pulling up all the clover, improving the soil, and moving the trees somewhere more sensible.

Y came with a crew of three gardening men and they worked all day with much sighing and lamentation, pulling up the deeply rooted clover. They proposed to take away the clover in their truck, but I'd sooner lose a finger than let such a large amount of composting material out of my hands.

When the gardeners pulled up the trees, they promptly baled them up with sacking, as is their way. The root balls were no bigger than when the trees were brought in two years ago, attesting to how miserly the last lot of gardeners were with their ground preparation -- the roots hadn't grown at all.

The medium selected for improving the soil was this Canadian peat moss. English peat moss being a very dodgy, unsustainable sort of material, I promptly looked this up in alarm. It's supposed to regenerate itself, but I wonder if say, composted shredded bamboo wouldn't be a better option in Japan. Not that it's available...

My contribution to soil amelioration is this pot of charcoal with other secret ingredients. My reading on Terra Preta leads me to believe that charcoal alone won't be enough. Something biologically active is required. The high aroma of this preparation and its attractiveness to flies of all sorts suggests that a certain level of biological activity has been achieved. As I worked it into the soil, I recalled my visits to restaurants in isolated parts of France where the owner would bring out his most challenging homemade cheeses to test the mettle of rare foreign visitors.

Feijoa

2009-07-03T22:24:00.003+09:00

When we bought our two feijoa trees, our gardener told us that he had never heard of anyone being able to harvest the fruit in Matsuyama. Our trees grew spindly, lost most of their leaves, and didn't even flower, let alone produce fruit.

But then we visited the garden shop Y's Garden on the recommendation of a friend, where Y herself was growing flowering feijoas. She said she harvested about 10 fruits last year, which were simply heavenly. Loud condemnation of our former gardener all round, and naming of names. Y imparted the knowledge that the feijoa is a robust plant that does best when pruned harshly. Also, the flowers may need help with pollenation by brushing with cotton wool.

Back from Y's I was barely out of my car when, with garden scissors in hand, I lopped off the spindly, leafless growth with both relief and hope.

And today, when Y visited us with three 'crew' to make some adjustments to the garden, the feijoa were covered with beautiful soft green leaves sprouting from every conceivable point, and three gaudy pink flowers. Tomorrow I'll put on my bee outfit and make the rounds.

How many praying mantises are there?

Double decker charcoal

2009-07-03T22:09:00.003+09:00

This sinister-seeming scene reminds me of the holy martyrs of another age. But rather more prosaically, I'm going through my old and shapeless T-shirts using them as lids for my charcoal cans which need to be up-ended without all the contents falling out. The lids however have to be combustible. (This is not going to be a sustainable practice...)

The bamboo and rice husk-filled cans all piled up look a bit too stupid to function properly.

Another raging fire. This time I kept it going for about an hour and fifteen minutes. It was a very hot day, and I thought about the blessed sacred martyrs as I stoked the blaze.

But the contents of both cans was cooked to perfection. Two cans full of very good charcoal seems almost like an embarrassment of riches, but I suppose when they're laid out on the ground, they won't look like much.

Miracle fruit

2009-07-03T21:57:00.003+09:00

When the 'miracle fruit' can be purchased from the Coop in a cardboard box labelled clearly as miraculous, perhaps its days of miraculousness are, in absolute terms, largely over. However, we hope to keep the thing alive long enough to be able to drink 500 yen wine on a regular basis after a bite of one its berries.

Flooded paddies

2009-07-03T21:47:00.003+09:00

It's become a tradition with this blog to post a pretty picture of the sunset when the rice fields have been flooded. This is the second year of this particular tradition, and last year's photo looks remarkably like this year's, but if you look carefully, you'll spot the awful shadow of recession hanging over everything in the current picture.

In Japanese, the word for sex is 'etchi', and it occurred to me that the frogs are saying "etchi, etchi, etchi" over and over again at the very tops of their voices. I made this observation to my wife, and she didn't seem to find any value in it whatsoever. Strange...

Why people come here

2009-06-23T08:46:00.003+09:00

I sometimes check the stats about visitors to this blog, especially the search strings that have led people here. There seems to be an element of misdirection involved, for which I'm very sorry. I'm posting the latest haul of search strings captured by the stats, and it's a very representative 'Top 20' sort of deal. I've also endeavoured to provide succinct answers so that people searching for the same thing won't have to delve around through the back issues.

Queries answered include;

i keep finding little mothlike flys in my house
bamboo bee hive
insight versus fit
how often should i spray peony bush with neem oil to prevent powdery mildew?
pickled habaneros jar
can-o-worms smelly liquid
train go under water to matsuyama

I hope this is helpful, but I offer no guarantees.

Hog-wild for charcoal

2009-06-21T21:34:00.002+09:00

Since I learned how to make easy biochar, I've been at it hammer and tongs. I discovered that it needs at least 1 hour of burning to make sure that the content of the inner can is properly carbonised. 45 minutes is not enough -- the central part of the material is only half-charred.

Having laboured several times to fill a small can using a handsaw, I finally took myself to the DIY store and purchased a nifty little electric chainsaw. A task that took nearly two hours now only takes about 15 minutes.

I also took a metal saw to my incinerator and opened up the top so that a bigger can will fit inside. Next weekend I plan to try a double-decker can tower, or what we in the defence community call a multi-stage biochar weapon.

Now that I have the means of cutting up bamboo very quickly, I can achieve my long-cherished dream of taking out all the dead wood from a bamboo grove so that everything can grow straight and without disease. Amazing as it seems, the small oil drum in the bottom left of the picture above contains all of a single mature 'moso' bamboo culm, nearly 10 meters tall. Plus quite a lot of rice husk. Of course.

Pruning a weeping plum tree

2009-06-21T21:16:00.005+09:00

In Japan there's apparently a saying "Sakura wo kiru baka, ume wo kiranu baka", which roughly translates as "Twerp as prunes a cherry, idiot as doesn't prune a plum".

Not wishing to be condemned as an idiot, I got to work with my pruning scissors.

But first I consulted the interweb, because it really isn't obvious where to make the cuts. However, I found a very helpful website with the following pictures on it.

With these as my guide, I got cutting. It's a fairly savage business, because nearly all of last year's growth is amputated.

The result is a very stumpy-looking tree, much reduced from the many-tentacled thing that we saw in spring. I had assumed that the wilted-looking leaves that were folded in half along the long axis were a sign of stress due to the prolonged drought. But according to a garden shop lady (more about her later) who visited the other day, it's a sign of good health. Could have fooled me...

More than one of each

2009-06-21T21:00:00.003+09:00

The single almond and apricot were, truth be told, disappointing. But the figs are a different story. I don't believe that anything much can go wrong with the figs. And there are more than one.

The fig in the photo below is the 'Banane' variety. If you're thinking of planting a fig, this is one type I strongly recommend. As you can see, the plant is small, but even last year it bore two delicious, sweet figs. This year, it's set to bear more, and it has weathered the drought very well without wilting. If it does well this year, I may even pull out some of my Japanese varieties and replace them with more Banane. I daresay these figs when dried would be fantastic.

One of my bigger fig trees is populated by miniature praying mantises. I learned the other day that figs in Japan are traditionally planted next to the privy. This is because the big rough leaves make a very good bottom-wiping medium in the absence of toilet paper. This is also the reason why figs are not typically planted close to any other part of the house. This 'fact' has been intimated to me by countless people before, and whenever I asked if it was because the roots might undermine the foundations, I always got a cocked head and a long "Mmmmmm...." in response. I'm glad at last to have met a gardening lady who is not squeamish about mentioning bottom-wiping.

Praying not to be 'wiped out'?

Rice planting

2009-06-21T20:46:00.003+09:00

It's the weekend for the farmers to plant rice, and our neighbourhood has been flooded with water, much to the joy of the frogs. And me. I think this time of year is very pretty. We seem to be having a respite from the drought too, as the monsoon rain front has moved up from Okinawa for a while.

We buy our rice from the field where the little rice planter is at work, bottom right. As far as food miles go, this is at the close end of the scale. The farmer's mother and other relatives are buried in the graveyard next to our house. Most of the people planting rice here are over 50, so I'm thinking that I might go down the hill one of these years and ask if somebody is prepared to show me the ropes.

One of each

2009-06-07T21:41:00.004+09:00

It has been apparent for a few weeks now that our almond has not fulfilled the promise of its flowering. Either a large number of the flowers were not properly pollinated, due perhaps to the absence of bees at that time of year, or the tree decided that conditions were not conducive to heavy fruiting yet. Whatever the reason, the result is just a single almond. The rest shrivelled to nothing after a promising start. However, a single almond is far, far better than none. We will observe with great interest the process by which it turns into a single, edible nut.

The apricot which also arrived from the Co-op bedecked with flowers only produced a single fruit this year too. As soon as the fruit appeared, it was -- well, damaged-looking. A nearby branch was constantly rubbing against it, and something obviously tried to eat some of it at an early stage.

I plucked it after I determined that it was now quite soft, and left it on the front step where the missus and young master mistook it for a potato (they reported this ghastly mistake with no apparent shame whatsoever). I ate the apricot and it wasn't nearly as bad as it looked. It had the right balance of sweet and sour, even if the meat lacked something in juiciness.

I also harvested a single green pepper, and single carrot. While not much more can be expected of the carrots, one hopes that the pepper will be the first of another abundant crop.

One of the figs, the 'Banane' also looks set to deliver more than one fig this year, in spite of the plant being very small. If the fruit is as good as the couple I got off it last year, I'll be tempted to plant several more of this variety.

Terra Preta holes

2009-06-05T21:25:00.006+09:00

We are currently in the midst of a 'stealthy drought'. It's been raining off and on, but the amounts have apparently been trivial. The first hint of drought was when Matsuyama City suddenly announced that groundwater was at 40% levels. Everything came up nice and green at the beginning of spring, but when we had a full week of sunny weather recently, the new growth suddenly started to turning brown. Or even black in some cases, where the new growth is especially new. Once again, the clover has all wilted and makes a crispy, crunchy sound underfoot. This seems all the stranger since my rainwater butt is still full.

There's quite a stark contrast between my vegetable plot and the garden areas around the house. In the vegetable plot, I buried a lot of compost from our old house, leaves, straw, rice husks -- charred and raw, and new compost. This organically-charged soil holds a great deal of moisture making the plants very resilient.

But look at the soil in that white bucket below from in the garden. It's just rock dust. When rain falls, the surface turns to mud while below the surface it remains a hard, dry, compacted mass.

I bought a metal tool with which I fondly imagined I could dig out deep 'cores' of soil. But after digging six or so small holes about 18 cm deep, the inside of my knuckles were beginning to get sore from gripping my new tool and banging it into the ground. (Panic! I type for my living!)

If you look at the far side of this hole, you can see streaks of white powder. This is where the tool has crushed some of the grains of quartz in the soil. The whole situation screams "Inabsorbent!"

Having made some biochar, the question arises, what to do with it. I hit on the idea of making Terra Preta holes. Since it's impossible to deal at one stroke with the great expanse of dryness that currently presents itself, I resolved to make small areas that retain moisture and contain the ingredients of fertility.

This hole contains bits of biochar mixed with compost. The compost contains a lot of rice husks, weeds, and kitchen waste, including seashells.

If I make enough of these holes, they should eventually join up into a single layer ('horizon' as we scientists call them), and the garden should be able to withstand drought better.

Well, even if my soil is rather horrible at the moment, it is located in a good spot, generally speaking.

Medaka condo

2009-06-03T21:39:00.003+09:00

A friend gave me this old charcoal brazier, but since we don't burn charcoal to keep warm (having other purposes for charcoal and other less smelly heating options), I put some medaka ('rice fish') in it.

It sits outside my office window, and it seems to attract a young lad with a bag of fish food. I hope to make this piece of decking into an attractive spot with more containers of water plants and perhaps a pergola-type thing with ivy

Easy bamboo biochar

2009-05-30T21:15:00.008+09:00

The other day, my internet friend Patrick popped up on Skype to tell me about a simple method of making biochar. He'd been to a talk in Tokyo, and he knew from my blog that I'd be interested. How did we used to manage without the interweb, and how impoverished would we be if it was taken away?

The trouble with this method is, most metal cans are of standard sizes, and they haven't been designed with charcoal making in mind. However, being one who takes a keen interest in places where rubbish accumulates, I managed to find an eccentrically-sized can that just fits through the hole in the top of my incinerator.

Cutting the bamboo to the right size took much longer than I had bargained for. A frog in the bushes got rather excited by the sawing noise and felt stimulated to compete. Consequently, there was a general cacophony this morning in the garden. Fitting the slivers tightly in the can also took a while and involved some hammering.

It seemed a shame to waste the space between the bamboo, so I pressed some spare rice husks into service as filler. (Is there any purpose to which rice husk is not ideally suited?)

I put part of a thick rice bag over the top of the can to get it into the incinerator without all the bamboo and rice husk falling out.

There seemed to be a lot of scrap wood and bamboo around the garden to use for fuel, but I made two trips to the bamboo grove anyway, to scavenge dead culms. In the end, I used a lot of fuel.

Ignition! Off to a good start...

Oh shit! I hadn't expected quite such intense calorific output...

Fortunately, I'd prepared two buckets of water and a watering can too. The heat was phenomenal, and when embers spilled out from the holes in the bottom, the already dry grass around caught fire very easily. I had to resort to the watering can a number of times, and if I hadn't been paying attention, the fire brigade would have been out.

The instructions say that you can easily tell when the pyrolysis gas catches fire, but perhaps because I had such a jolly old conflagration going, I had no idea. Not that I wasn't paying close attention either -- I was most anxious not to burn everything on our property to charcoal.

The seemingly vast quantity of fuel burned down to very little ash

After more than an hour of cooling, the inner can was still very hot, but not so hot as to reignite.

Since I hadn't observed pyrolysis, I was concerned that I might still have a lot of brown bamboo. But all of it was gratifyingly black, except for the tips of a few bits in the middle. The quality of the charcoal seemed to be very high -- clean, glassy and brittle. I expect it will be very easy to crush and mix into soil.

Judging by the way the bamboo was all bent and twisted, I suppose it must have got rather hot in the little can.

In general, this seems to be a good way of making charcoal, but next time I'll use much less fuel. Bamboo burns very hot and fast, so I believe the same result can probably be achieved without the 4 ft flame.

Biodiversity

2009-05-30T21:03:00.003+09:00

When I was a kid, I used to go to Bristol City Museum and see their displays of grotesquely large insects from exotic countries. I always thought, Ye gods!, what must it be like to live in a place where these things exist?

Now I know.

This thing is actually about as long as my index finger, held up for the sake of scale. However, to show the scale properly, I would have had to put my finger closer to this monster, and NO WAY did I want what it has on those hairs to get onto my skin. I already have enough grief at this time of year from the poison of the moth called the 'chadokuga' which leaves fantastically itchy blotches all over the parts of my body covered by clothing. Weird. Horrible and weird. And the chadokuga is just a small thing.

Garlic

2009-05-30T20:36:00.004+09:00

Last year, I was careless with the garlic I grew, leaving it lying around in the garden for a long time, then hanging up in the eaves of the pergola. Consequently, some of the bulbs were eaten by maggoty things and became unsightly. I think one reason for my carelessness was that I couldn't imagine needing so much garlic anyway.

However, as it turns out, the amount I made last year was just enough to see us through a whole year, and now as the last lot is coming to an end, the new lot is ready. This year I produced a bit more than last year, and I intend to be more careful with it, so there may be enough to bottle in miso as a tasty, breath-enhancing complement to fried rice and other dishes.

If you eat garlic and fancy trying your hand at producing veg, garlic is a good thing to start with. Just plant bulbs a few inches apart around October, mulch the ground very heavily, and forget about them until May. That's it.

Goats

2009-05-30T18:58:00.005+09:00

Recently the missus has been claiming to hear sheep or goats. I pooh-poohed this idea because I get about the neighbourhood a fair bit and have not seen any cattle other than the black cows at the university farm over the way. I figured she was probably hearing one of the three bullfrogs that lives in our pond. The little teeny-weeny bullfrog has quite a squeaky voice that might be mistaken for a goat (if one was, say, of the frail sex).

However, I myself distinctly heard a goat while we were having our Pilates lesson, and snatching up the binoculars that sit in the living room, I espied two white spots on the grassy bank near the golf driving range. Come the weekend, I went over to have a closer look and found a mummy goat with a little frisky boy goat. She was on a rope, but he was running about all over the place freely, jumping straight up in the air at times like a mad thing. The bank is bordered on both sides by a lake and a drainage ditch, and at either end of the bank there are scaffolding fences with netting fitted.

At last, somebody has taken a sensible approach to mowing grass. While pleasantly bucolic in general, this area is blighted by the frequent noise of two-stroke weedwhackers. These are horrible things for both the user, who has to put up with the smell of the exhaust and engine-benumbed hands, and for anybody within several kilometers who has to hear the awful noise.

But the occasional bleating of goats is a very pleasant sound, and there are beneficial side products, like goat's milk cheese and ice cream. I'm hoping to see more initiatives of this sort in the neighbourhood.

Car

2009-05-30T18:47:00.004+09:00

We got the Honda Fit Highway Version. Not that we go on the highway much at all, but the package was going cheap for some reason. For those who take an interest in these things, it's a 1.3 l, front-wheel drive, small compact car. It comes with ETC built in, but no navi. It has steel wheels, but I got the dealer to agree to put second-hand aluminium wheels on when he gets hold of a set. It has UV-cut glass and diffusion headlights. It cost 1.5 million yen.

The brochures claim it gets 27 kilos to the litre but this isn't true. It gets at best 16.4 kilos, according to the fuel economy gauge that features prominently on the dashboard.

After having done some fairly exhaustive checks of specs and prices, we concluded that the Honda Fit was the closest we could get to an 'eco-car' for a family that only fills up the tank once a month, if that.

I'd still prefer an electric car...

G-g-golden Week!

2009-05-06T21:12:00.011+09:00

Lest my dear readers think that I spend all my time toiling on my plot to grow fruit and vegetables, I present this little photo report of our Golden Week visit to the mother-in-law's. Belying its name, "Golden Week" is possibly one of the stupidest national vacations imaginable since it includes two business and school days, rendering it useless for serious vacationing. However, we make the most of the hand dealt us, and try not to fume too much when the man on NHK news declares that we are entering the 'Ogata Renkyu' -- the Big Collection of Days Off, Interspersed For No Good Reason with Days On.

Anyways, we got in our old car and drove to Matsuno on the border with Kochi Prefecture. There isn't much in Matsuno except rice fields, running water, dogs, monkeys, an onsen, a sake brewery, an aquarium featuring river fish, a farmer's market, and a very useful service whereby loudspeakers play a tape of 'physical jerks' at 6:00 am. Yes, that's really 6:00 am, when one generally hopes to be asleep. However, with help from the products of the sake brewery, one usually manages to sleep right through the physical jerks by the second morning.

The highlight of my trip this time was a visit to Nametoko Gorge, about 20 minutes by car from Matsuno. I went by myself this time, because apparently, on previous occasions, I’d made myself obnoxious saying things like, "Do you think we could make it to the next bend in the river before turning back?", and "One day, I'd really like to go right to the top", and "Oh, for Christ's sake, stop moaning everyone!"

Nametoko was a riot of colour. Mostly greens and browns in fact, but with some interesting, unseasonal red.

Some effort had been made to Shinto-ize the absolutely enormous rocks, but this petered out the further the pathway traveled from the carpark.

Where the Shinto stopped, the informal stupas started.

The fairly small river that runs through the gorge has cut some fantastic shapes out of the rocks. This little cove is often full of little children swimming in the summer, but it was too cold for that in May.

I was fascinated by the weathering on these rocks, but I'll understand if you're not particularly impressed. Being there and seeing how the hollow of leaves had left their stain on the rock told a compelling story of the Passage of Time.

I took a side route marked "Bad Path" that went straight up the side of the gorge to a waterfall that we've never visited before. Other than being steep and giving no indication really of where it was going, the path was superior in many ways to some that I've followed in life.

The trees along the way were certainly spectacular. This variety stood out in the sunlight like a streak of lightning.

The waterfall that the Bad Path led to was this huge wall of stone that the water ran down every which way. Somehow, most of it managed to pool at the bottom again to continue on its way.

The meandering path taken by the waters creates environments that appeal to certain forms of life that we don't generally run into in the normal course of things.

I was taken aback to hear what I thought was the distant barking of dogs. For a moment, I thought I might find myself in the middle of a boar hunt. But when I focused my ears, I realized that the sounds were much closer, and the whole bank of rock I found myself in was populated with no see 'um frogs hiding in the dripping wet cracks. My mobile phone video doesn't really do them justice.

The trees were in a magnificent state of confusion. Many seemed to be refusing to die in spite of calamities like being knocked over at 90 degree angles, finding themselves atop huge rocks without any soil for yards around, being crushed under fallen boulders and logs that actually succumbed, or being split and twisted by some unrecorded event in the 70s.

River of moss and stones

This tree, somebody had painted with great care.

If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you

Nietzsche might have said, "If you gaze into a giant rock, about 25 meters across and maybe more, the giant rock also gazes into you". The phrase doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but the effect of the gazing is, I think, much the same.

Rooting success, actually

2009-04-30T21:33:00.004+09:00

Not so long ago, I declared that my attempt at propagation had ended in failure. Not so fast! Although the leaves fell off everything and the twigs looked thoroughly dead, there was in fact life on the inside. (Well, in some of the twigs anyway.)

Four out of six of the wolfberries rooted, and one out of three blackberries survived. The boxwood and peach cuttings all died. Now I'm going to have to think carefully where to plant these little babies. Things are getting a bit crowded around here.

Flowers and fruits in season

2009-04-30T21:07:00.004+09:00

The almond that was seen flowering robustly in March has now produced a little crop of fruit, at least a couple of which look promisingly large, even allowing for a certain amount of skin on the outside. This is a self-fertile variety, and it gets good sun for most of the day. Since the missus has developed a penchant for baking with almond powder recently, I can't help thinking that we're pretty much all set.

The big one

The 'Handkerchief Tree' has not been idle either. I was worried for the whole winter that it might be dead, in spite of my careful attention every night of the summer with the watering can. But after putting forth leaves, it promptly flowered, with the exactly four of the rather ridiculous-looking blossoms from which it takes its name.

I put the heads of last year's poppies in the compost which I then spread here and there in the garden and veg plot. Obviously my compost didn't get hot enough to kill seeds, because here are the poppies again this year, everywhere that I put down compost -- including in close embrace with one of the citrus trees which is also flowering.

These are a variety known as 'peony poppies', for a rather obvious reason. The whole business of flowering appears to happen in time lapse with these plants. Magnificent, they are. I'm tempted to use some of the seeds to make these tasty-looking Central European pastries, although the quantities of the seeds available may not be quite be sufficient.

Neem oil

2009-04-19T22:01:00.009+09:00

Neem seedlings appeared in garden shops a few years back, advertised as having remarkable insect repellent properties when mashed up and used as a spray. I can't remember the details of the process, but I had my doubts that I'd ever be bothered to try it. However, I bought a couple of seedlings out of curiosity, and both died with the autumn cold.

Recently however, I read that neem oil 'may be' effective in treating powdery mildew on wolfberry plants. My wolfberries put out some very pretty green leaves this spring, many of which were promptly affected by this dusty mildew which makes the leaves shrivel and fall off. I also noticed legions of sex-crazed leaf-beetles copulating all over the shrubs, which means their horrible turd-coated offspring will soon be eating what leaves the mildew spares. I wondered if neem spray would solve both problems.

Powdery mildew on wolfberry leaves

So I found a place that sells sprays, Ide Shokai, and bought three bottles of spray. They recommend spraying every 3-4 days. I tried spraying the tops of the broad beans that were invisible for green fly, and the spray made them drop off with almost comical alacrity. Then I sprayed four wolfberry bushes, focusing especially on the mildewed parts.

Greenfly on broad beans

But I realized that already, one of the three bottles was half empty. At a rate of every 3-4 days, this method is not going to be economically (or environmentally) sustainable, however well it may work. As a slight application of scepticism, I tried spraying greenfly with plain water, and lo! they dropped off with exactly the same alacrity. It remains to be seen if the neem will actually suppress the mildew. I have tried milk and water spray in a 3-7 mix which is supposed to work, but my testing wasn't rigorous enough to tell. I could try some slightly scientific tests to see what actually works. The milk option would surely be cheaper if it actually has any effect.

Another very tempting option is just to do nothing and see if everything is still tolerably productive...

More car talk

2009-04-18T21:24:00.006+09:00

Today we went looking for cars again, and this time we test-drove a Subaru Impreza, a Toyota Prius, and the Honda Fit again. It looks like we're going to have a Fit (ha ha).

The Subaru Impreza is quite nice to drive, but we weren't very imprezzed by its declared fuel economy, nor by its price (about 1.9 mil. yen). The new tax breaks for 'eco cars' apply to the Impreza, but they don't result in spectacular savings. The Impreza shown in this rather pointless snap also had the new car smell at a level that most normal people would find alarming, and which caused the young master to hold his breath (and mysteriously expostulate on the chemical stink at the same time).

The Toyota Prius we drove was the highest grade of the current version, and it's a very nice car in many ways. The quote for the soon-to-be announced EX version was 2 mil. yen as near as dammit, although sundry desirable maintenance offerings would push up the price a bit more. Also the missus wants to dazzle other drivers with diffusion headlights, and the pleasant but slightly robotic Toyota salesman didn't recommend installing a non-Toyota brand kit.

But we're not big drivers, and since the Fit is significantly cheaper, we figured we'd need to drive the Prius for ten years before it paid off the difference in price from savings in petrol. The 'Highway' version of the Fit is on offer for 1.5 mil. yen, and it comes with diffusion bling lights, a built-in ETC highway card system, and rain dissipating windows and mirrors. Also, it has the jolly, dodgem-car like handling typical of a kei-car which I really like. The new tax regime favours it almost as generously as a hybrid, making it something of a no-brainer. (Once one has become acquainted with the very unexceptional Fit body, one can't help noticing that there are an awful lot of other people with no brain too. They're all over the roads and supermarket carparks.)

It feels disappointing to be buying yet another petrol vehicle, particularly at this juncture when EVs are finally supposed to making a reappearance after an interval of about a century. But they're going to cost 4 mil. yen, and be largely unavailable anyway. While hybrids are attractive in many ways, they seem like technical overkill for limited driving. However, we take some solace from the fact that the new wheels should get about twice the mileage of the current set.

We also test drove a pair of Harleys* with extra small fuel tanks and little pig figurines on the disk brakes, but they had nowhere to put shopping and rice husks.

* This is not actually true.

Goya sun curtain

2009-04-14T11:45:00.007+09:00

In the summer, my north-facing office window gets blasted by the westering sun from 4 o'clock until sunset. And pretty though it may be, it makes the room very hot. Having whittered on at length about the merits of passive solar architecture, when it came time to build our house we couldn't resist putting most of our windows on the north where the spectacular views are, so now we get the full effects of north winds in winter, and afternoon sun in summer.

This year however, I plan to take shelter behind a curtain of green leaves and weird knobbly gourds. Goya, or bitter gourd, grows prodigiously and climbs up anything. The gourds themselves are very good to eat too, principally with tofu. The plant itself does give off a rather pungent smell when agitated, so it will be interesting to see if the breeze wafts the funky scent of jungle weed into my room.

A couple of hooks in the deck and some more on the roof gable with some string between should provide an adequate support for the goya vine. If all goes well, the missus won't have to ask, "Do we have any goya?" She can see the lovely grotesque gourds a-dangling there when she goes out to hang out the washing.

When I was planning the growth pattern of my goya, I couldn't help humming the melody to Making Plans for Nigel. "Nigel's whole future is as good as sealed... di-doo-doo-doo"

I did think about growing another mokkobara (Rosa banksiae) in this spot as a permanent measure to protect from the sun and wind, but they like full sun in summer and winter. This place only gets full light from around now when the sun is high enough in the sky to reach over the house. If you know of a good plant (vine or evergreen tree) that would thrive in this situation, do let me know. Bamboo of some sort?

New green

2009-04-11T21:39:00.004+09:00

Now this season is more like it! The garish cherry blossoms have all blown away, and the brilliant new green leaves are bursting out. And it's consistently warm. This morning as I was making the coffee, I glanced out of the window and did a sudden double-take when some bright-green thing in the middle distance caught my eye. It was the new leaves on one of my fig trees, with the early morning sun providing vivid backlighting.

When I go out to get the newspaper on days like this, the song Morning Has Broken always comes to mind, not that we have blackbirds here. We were forced to sing it at primary school and it annoyed me because it was just another part of our wishy-washy Church of England indoctrination ... until I realized that it's a damn good song about the real joys of mornings.

The bay tree in the outsize terracotta pot is also sprouting new leaves. One day soon it might outgrow the clover that quickly invaded.

Bling! Today's new poppy. These are springing up all over the place, and they look a bit goofy with the two halves of their green pods stuck to their petals -- like a bloke whose shirt tail hangs down behind his business jacket.

The pomegranate is bucking the trend by leafing out in red. The cabbagy-looking 'North Korean poppies' beneath it should be flowering soon. In the background, the blueberries are putting out very pale green leaves and purple flowers.

Gosh, the pond looks very murky all of a sudden. What to do with this nasty-looking water? But there are some green shoots appearing in the middle, and there are still fish, frogs, and insect larvae in there. Should I refresh the water maybe, or just leave it?

Praise for the singing, praise for the morning, praise for the breakfast, tra-la-la!

Cherry blossoms

2009-04-11T21:23:00.005+09:00

There's nothing particularly 'eco-home' about these pics, but they may be diverting nonetheless. I'm not that crazy about the cherry blossom thing because it's usually too cold to sit around enjoying them, there are lots of people making whoopee and the smell of burnt meat, and the pressure of the expectation of enjoying cherry blossoms often leads to disappointment. However, we managed to have a passably pleasant cherry blossom experience this year.

Getting a bit more secular here, with some 'guts pot food' in a park with thousands of other common folk.

Abject rooting failure

2009-04-09T20:52:00.003+09:00

My attempt to grow saplings from cuttings has ended in abject failure. I watered them with solicitous care, and tried to keep them from being blown all over the place by the spring wind, but they all just went brown and curled up.

Next time I'll try putting them in pots of water to see if they do any better. One lot will have some rooting powder dissolved in it, and another lot will be just with water. Hopefully this will prevent the instant withering that occurred with the first try.

Honda Insight vs. Toyota Prius

2009-04-08T12:06:00.004+09:00

Our gas-guzzling Subaru Impreza is coming up for its shaken again this year, and the replacements get more expensive each time, so we're looking to get a new car. So last weekend we went to test drive the new Honda Insight hybrid.

A few years ago I test drove the Toyota Prius and was very impressed. Apart from the poor visibility out the back window, it felt like driving a normal car. Indeed, the quiet inside made it feel like a luxury car. The integration of the engine and motor is seamless, and if you don't look at the display which indicates which is in use, it's impossible to tell.

The body of the Honda Insight looks a lot like the Prius (which actually copied an earlier version of the Insight). Inside, it has a very 1970s space-age 'driving interface'. However, when I lowered the steering wheel to a relaxed position just above my knees, I couldn't see the speedometer at all. The engine and motor are not perfectly integrated. Indeed, there's a distinct jolt when the car switches between the two. This even happens when you have your foot on the brake waiting to turn -- the car just jolts on the spot of its own accord. This is disconcerting, and not what you want a car to do.

I took the car up a steep hill and it totally lacked poke. I wasn't able to put my foot right down to see if more power could be got from it because there was a kei-truck in front of me, but the Insight didn't feel as though it had power to spare.

When we got home, we calculated the likely economic benefit of buying an Insight, and unless the cost of petrol more than doubles, we'd be better off buying a cheaper car. Since we don't drive far or often, a normal car seems like a good choice. No electric vehicles appear ready for the market yet. The Insight has sufficiently obvious deficiencies in driving characteristics that buyers must convince themselves that they're doing some good in the world by driving it. I don't think the same thing applies to the Prius which offers grounds for smugness all round, albeit at a commensurate price.

On a side note, the difference between the Honda salesman and the Toyota salesman corresponds to the difference between the cars themselves. The Honda salesman was chatty and keen to sell. After a short while in our company, he felt sufficiently familiar to talk about his two-year old daughter. Somehow I don't think the sales gentleman from Toyota would have unwound himself so far.

Faggot fence

2009-03-28T21:54:00.005+09:00

I have long wished to make a fence of bamboo faggots, and since our bamboo fence is showing signs of its age and lets in animals freely, I decided to tie bundles of bamboo twigs to it. What I didn't know when I started is how many twigs are actually required to make a worthwhile barrier. The answer is: several million. Indeed, planning a bamboo twig fence only seems worth it if you have a number of slaves at your disposal, which I don't.

Going to the bamboo groves and cutting the twigs is not itself unpleasant, but they often have leaves attached, and waiting for them to fall off is time-consuming. Baling six or seven twigs into a faggot with two bands of galvanized wire is also quite satisfying. However, attaching them to the fence would be easier with three arms instead of two, and there's a lot of "Gosh! Another millimetre and that twig would have stabbed me right in the eye" moments. The final effect is really quite attractive -- in Japanese we say "soboku" -- rustic and unsophisticated. But generally only achievable with slave labour.

Last year, two birds persistently ate the blueberries, and this year they've come back with their offspring. By planting this bristly fence in front of the blueberries, I'm hoping that the birds will find other gustatory options more tempting. However, it will be interesting to see what effect adjusting the microclimate in this way will have on the blueberries' health.

To dog, or not to dog

2009-03-28T21:19:00.005+09:00

Today I got in considerable trouble for transporting rice husks and bamboo twigs in our car. Apparently they leave a residue which sticks to female clothing. It was suggested, with some ferocity, that I vacuum up the residue in all haste. When I went out compliantly with the vacuum cleaner, there was a little dog of the shiba variety standing on the corner.

I squatted down in the regulation 'Approach, Dog!' position, and the woolly little critter ambled up with a very matey look on its face -- up to within just out of reach. After a long period of negotiation, he came up to fingertip range, and started doing 'Paw! Paw!' For a dog, this is getting things in the wrong procedural order, because a bit of stroking definitely comes before 'Paw!', but it was extremely fetching behaviour for all its wrongness, or perhaps because of it.

Clearly, this was once somebody's pet, and obviously it could very quickly become somebody else's pet. I'm quite partial to dogs myself, although there are things about them that are inconvenient. I quickly canvassed opinion on the matter indoors. The missus (who is not partial to dogs in the least) said "We don't need a dog", and then relented saying, "You can keep the dog if you don't want to go back to England in the summer", while the young master noted that the said dog, who was often seen at his school, was renowned for being stupid.

A dog guarding the door looks surprisingly good

Actually, as soon as the dog came within inspection range, I couldn't help noticing that he had a largish tick embedded just under his ear. I hate to be regarded as calculating, but when Jack (as I came to think of him) was taking a familial interest in my vacuuming, I did wonder how much vets charge to remove ticks, and how much a month of dog food costs.

Jack makes himself at home, temporarily unfortunately

Country of the gods, innit

2009-03-28T21:12:00.005+09:00

Not so long ago, the hapless ex-Prime Minister of Japan Mori Yoshiro declared "Japan is a country of gods with the Emperor at its center". He took a lot of stick for saying this. I don't think he was really right about the latter part, but as to the former, who can say the old duffer was far wrong?

If you look carefully, you can see some yellow and pink gods in this scene (Hint: they're hiding among the green gods.)

These ghastly scenes of witchcraft and superstition are to be found in the bamboo grove where I cut my culms. The one below is a well, while the one above is a..., is a... umm, I'll be damned if I know really.

If I had a productive well on my property, I think I'd want to celebrate it somehow too.

Botanical imperialism

2009-03-28T19:55:00.007+09:00

My recent experiences with "Lady Banks' Rose" and "the Duke of Argyll's tea tree" got me thinking about the horrid parochiality of these names. I'm not especially keen on political correctness, but as a republican, I don't like to recognize the Nobs, especially when they're linked almost inextricably to the names of Asian plants. Until very recently, I didn't have a clear idea who "Lady Banks" was, but I felt it strange that a Chinese rose that I know of as 'mokkobara' (scented tree rose) should go by the Latin name of an 18th Century Englishwoman. Since the rose and the berry in my acquaintance have long Asian histories, it seems wrong that they should have British names, especially when these are codified as taxonomic names. Rather coincidentally I became aquainted with the Banks' in a book my parents sent me, The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. As someone who danced naked with Tahitians, Mrs Bank's husband Joseph was a thoroughly cosmopolitan man, and so one doesn't want to be too hard. But the Latin name of the mokkobara still rankles. I was very surprised though to find a footnote in The Age of Wonder that almost perfectly expressed my feelings on the matter.

The psychology of collecting, ordering and naming specimens could be seen as a form of mental colonising and empire-building. 'Taxonomy, after all, is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval surveys were flooding London with specimens to be classified, inserting them in their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy, had undeniable political overtones. Take a bird or a lizard or a flower from Patagonia or the South Seas, perhaps one that had a local name for centuries, rechristen it with a Latin binomial, and presto! It had become a tiny British colony'. Anne Fadiman, 'Collecting Nature', in At Large and at Small.

My yellow and white Rosa banksiae are presently very small. Indeed the white one is almost invisibly small (did I actually pay for these two leaves and bit of stalk?).

White rose: Left drainpipe

Yellow rose: Right drainpipe

However, given a few years, they should look like this:

(Well, I hope it won't look like a really crap 5 min Photoshop job, but I think I saw a house in Bristol last time I was there with roses up it, and it looked cool and wonderful.)

Grow baby, grow!

2009-03-20T20:18:00.006+09:00

Since saplings are priced to give you pause before buying them, I decided it was time to delve into the business of cuttings and propagation. My first thought was to try pulling a twig off each of these peach trees that grow by the road near our house.

One has light pink and the other has dark pink flowers, and they're just about ready to put on a fantastic display. They're also still covered in peach seeds and what must be old, decayed peach, so I assume they're productive, although whether or not the peaches taste good I don't know. Nor care, particularly. If they don't taste that good, I'm resolved to try making peach alcohol with them.

But a little digging on the Web suggested that peach cuttings don't root at all from cuttings, unless you use root hormone. The twig I stuck in a pot of compost without root powder still seems to be about to flower, but I bought some hormone anyway, as I have some other things I want to try too.

I took cuttings of blackberry, wolfberry, boxwood, and peach. The instructions that come with the root powder are rather alarming; Ensure you have no cuts on your hands (I always have cuts on my hands, I'm a gardener), wash your hands four times after using the powder and gargle four times. Jesus Christ, will I grow roots if I inhale some of this stuff?

The blackberry and wolfberry didn't respond well to being cut, and their leaves wilted almost immediately. However, I dipped them in the root powder, potted them up, and I'm hoping for the best. I also gargled a few times and hoped for the best, but I'm willing to bet few gardeners take this step. And when you wash your little ceramic hormone dipping pot and the powder goes off into the water supply who gets to gargle that?

Well, enough hormonal speculation. The almond I planted last year is in full blossom. It had better watch out, because I'll be pulling twigs off it as soon as it grows a few more. These are some of the biggest, most robust flowers I've ever seen on a little tree, and they evoke the frank amazement all our visitors. If it grows into a full-sized tree, it should present rather a dramatic sight.

I also recently planted a Rosa Banksiae at each south-facing corner of the house, one yellow and one white, and I'm hoping to train them up the brickwork by sticking hooks in the grouting. Failing that, they'll have to climb up the drainpipe like a burglar.

Here are the peaches in blossom.

2009-02-22T21:55:00.004+09:00

I am now a person who can produce a mortised hinge. Let there be no doubt on this point. I have produced three of the things, and they work perfectly.

I had my doubts I could do it, but I watched this nice American gent explain it, and then had a go. He no doubt enjoys the advantages of squareness and perpendicularity in everything he does, and these characteristics are nowhere present in my shed. But I actually improvised a plumb line to make sure the hinges were all in alignment, then got to work with my chisels.

Fortunately it was a hot, windless weekend, otherwise the ad hoc scaffolding I used for supporting the door would have collapsed at the first blast of wind. In fact, a little zephyr chanced by at one point, and the door, which was only hinged at the top at that point, showed its eagerness to swing, reminding me just what a precarious operation it was.

My little pink and green screwdriver, inherited from my female predecessor at an English school, was invaluable for getting the screws in snugly. Thanks Kelly!

I managed to get all three hinges completed before the scaffolding collapsed in a heap.

Three latches complete the door. Nothing can describe my feelings of satisfaction in having accomplished this very commonplace task.

The weeping plumb is now at the peak of its blossoming. Here are just a few of the many, many pictures I took. And to think that I used to laugh at old men who earnestly take pictures of blossoming trees.

The birds have been thrusting their beaks into each flower in turn, so hopefully there should be a crop of plums for making the plum drink that warms my winter evenings.

Shed project 3

2009-02-11T20:44:00.002+09:00

As I mentioned before, there are no right angles in my shed, and likewise there are no level surfaces around it. Therefore setting up a ladder and shinning up it requires a certain degree of fatalism.

The ladder did once take a plunge into the orchard next door, lying with its feet up in the air, but fortunately I didn't go with it. There but for the grace of God...

The 2 be 4 method of construction is a real wonder. As soon as you nail the boards on, a horribly rickety structure is instantly transformed into something remarkably solid. The tasteful arched windows came off a bookshelf that I had retained in the face of opposition for lo, these many years. After I painted the frames the same colour as the rest of the shed, for some reason the phrase "Taj Mahal" kept ringing in my head.

Here is my shed, roofed and painted, with another local shed in the background. The older shed has a larger quotient of 'wabi-sabi' than mine. I did think about tiling it in the traditional style, but I have even less of a clue about that than about 90 degree angles.

Today I spent a few happy hours constructing a door that wouldn't be out of place on a barn, or maybe a castle. Indeed, I can hardly lift the thing. I bought a couple of hinges, then took them back and got some bigger ones which also look inadequate for the job. The question of right angles impinges especially heavily on the issue of hinging heavy doors, and I confess it puts me in a bit of a funk. There's also the matter of attaching a gutter and drainpipe which also strike me as highly technical procedures.

Shed project 2

2009-01-25T22:20:00.006+09:00

This weekend was supposed to be unbelievably snowy.
It did snow a bit.

Then the weather went really nice, and my thoughts turned again to shed building. Here are the foundations that I finished last weekend. Note the homemade 'spirit level'. Very effective.

Making a straightforward wooden frame is more difficult than I thought. Simple as right angles are in concept, in execution they are tricky things. I made some very basic errors in calculation, and spent an inordinate amount of time unscrewing screws. It's fortunate that I've largely conquered Time, otherwise I'd have been very unhappy.

Just as I had raised the left and right frames into place and was standing with arms outstretched wondering how on earth I was going to join them together without them falling on top of me, the young master came tumbling out of the house to announce his willingness to help. We had a good 'ole time hitting our thumbs with hammers, and after a longish interval, we had the quite convincing makings of a shed.

Next weekend: Boarding up, painting, floor, door and windows. Insh'allah. (Or maybe that should be roof first. I can't quite make up my mind...)

Shed project 1

2009-01-12T21:25:00.005+09:00

I've finally decided to use up the lumber remaining from building the house for building a little shed. I need somewhere out of the rain to store my tools, and I need another roof in the garden for gathering rain in a new butt. A small shed should serve both purposes.

This is the first semi-permanent structure that I've ever built, so it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. Dry, solid, functional, and picturesque are some words that spring to mind in terms of hopes.

Here are the foundations going in.

It looks dark because it was. I decided around 5 pm that I would build a shed, and the sun was going down. I hastened to the bamboo grove to cut a culm as a frame for some stones and broken roof tiles which will form the foundations. The winter wind was sighing and soughing through the bamboo, and I rather hoped to see a wraith, but none appeared. The darkness forced me to halt operations even though I was all hot to finish the thing in one go.

More another time I guess.

When camouflage fails

2009-01-11T21:29:00.004+09:00

Insect camouflage is truly a wonderful achievement of evolution. But however wintry it may be outside, pretending to be a hibernating twig on a white painted interior simply does not cut it.

I awarded 40 points for effort and transferred the little creature to one of my old business cards. He maintained his façade, or maybe the charade, on the edge of the business card. I tore off the piece that he was clinging to, and tossed it into the bushes on the other side of the hedge. He was still maintaining his carefully calibrated angle and his stiffness has he hurtled and twisted through the air.

Pressure cooking with my own produce

2009-01-11T17:32:00.007+09:00

Happy New Year! Let's hope peace breaks out around the world this year, and the dire economic situation is taken as an opportunity to build a more humane and sustainable economy.

Recently I've been left on my own due to various piano events involving the missus and young master, and so I've been experimenting with making dinner with home-dried ingredients that the missus seems to baulk at using. The results have been most satisfactory to my mind.

We have a 'super-pressure cooker' (a 'kasturyoku nabe' from Asahi Kasei*) which cooks anything in about 1 minute. The first thing I tried was chicken breast with shiitake and wolfberries.

* The word is out on these things. If you want to buy one now, there's a waiting list of several months.

Recipe:
Fry garlic and ginger, then sauté pieces of chicken breast.
Add equal quantities of vegetable oil, sesame oil and sake/shokoshu mix, with sugar and salt in sensible quantities.
Add shiitake with the stems removed, and a suitable quantity of wolfberries (dried).
Bring to the simmer and pressure cook for 1 minute in a super-pressure cooker.
Open the lid and enjoy the smell of ... ramen!

When my family came home, they said "It smells like ramen!" more times than I could count. I served it on rice with boiled broccoli. It had a hearty, wholesome taste and the wolfberries went very well with rice. But the young master was not keen on them and eventually forked the remainder onto my plate, while approving of the chicken, shiitake, and 'ramen' gravy. The many cookery blogs of English-speaking Asians attest to the common theme that wolfberries are not really a children's favourite. Well, tough, they're good for you.

You may recall that in the summer, I sun-dried my excellent mini-tomatoes. The other day I was on my own for dinner and I made a risotto with sun-dried tomatoes and minced pork.

Recipe:
Simmer sun-dried oil-stored tomatoes in a pan with a little water (as to quantity, your guess is as good as mine).
In the pressure cooker, sauté garlic and onion in the olive oil from the dried tomatoes, then add pork/beef mince and sauté until sealed. Chicken or white fish would probably do too.
Put the tomatoes in the pressure cooker, and in the remaining water, dissolve a bouillon cube.
Add a seemingly sensible quantity of rice to the sautéed mix and ensure that it's well coated in oil. Then pour on the bouillon water, simmer, and pressure cook for 1 minute.
Open the lid with trepidation and excitement, transfer to a bowl and stir in plenty of black pepper and Parmesan. Top with fresh, chopped Italian parsley.

Since the water content was calibrated extremely roughly, the result was something between risotto and congee. However, the rice was pleasantly al dente even if the consistency overall was a little sloppy. The tomatoes had the same characteristics as when they were fresh; sweet, tangy flesh, and rather tough skins. The sweet, tangy taste more than made up for the toughness, and drying them intensified the flavour. The whole mélange was very agreeable, especially with a glass of white wine.

From this I conclude something of interest to the agriculture and food culture of Ehime and to parts of Japan with a similar climate. Both mini tomatoes and wolfberries can be grown without the use of chemical fertilizers, and can be preserved relatively easily by sun-drying. They can also be combined with readily available foodstuffs to make delicious, healthy, and easily prepared dishes. Nota bene as we Latins say.

Wolfberry myths and truths

2008-11-29T18:05:00.006+09:00

Now that it's wolfberry season and I have more of the things than I know what to do with, I've been poking about online for ideas. I remember reading that they mustn't be touched, so I checked that out.

If you Google wolfberry oxidize black, you get a whole bunch of sites that say,
"Wolfberries grow in protected valleys of Inner Mongolia and Tibet. The berries are never touched by hand; they will oxidize and turn black if touched while fresh. Harvesters shake the large bushes so that the ripe berries fall onto mats, where they are then dried in the shade."
This contains 4 utter falsehoods. If you have a site that repeats this nonsense, shame on you.

If any wolfberries actually grow in Mongolia or Tibet, they don't grow in sufficient quantities to ship in significant volumes to anywhere else. (Just imagine how expensive they would be, carried from their secluded valleys.) Wolfberries have to be picked by hand since they don't fall off the bushes, which isn't a problem since they don't oxidize when touched, let alone turn black. They have a robust outer skin like that of a tomato. Wolfberries are dried either in the sun, or in enclosed dryers. There's plenty of evidence available online. I've touched my berries extensively, with clean hands and with dirty hands, and they don't turn black, ever. Wolfberries are also not fertilized with unicorn manure in a midnight ceremony involving the sacrifice of a phoenix.

The fresh berry in my hand has been touched repeatedly.
The dried berries from the packet must have been bigger when fresh.

The ones I dried weren't any more pleasant in their dessicated state than their fresh state. Their marginal sweetness and strong bitterness were both enhanced, with the bitterness winning out completely. So I decided to try some from China. All I could find was a small packet of S&B dried 'kuko no mi' for 130 yen. Eaten directly from the packet, they're very chewy, slightly sweet, and slightly bitter. Not wonderful at all. After soaking, they're reasonably palatable and might plausibly make a positive addition to food. So the next thing to do is to try following some recipes that feature them.

Washed and touched berries. Still bright red.
Dried berries from China soaking in water.

And also, since they seem so popular in China where they grow, I assume they must have some better varieties so I'm going to try potting the seeds from the dried wolfberries. The soaked berries are larger than my biggest ones, so I hope to grow a plant that produces bigger fruit, assuming it's happy with the conditions in my garden.

Late summer veg and wolfberries

2008-11-24T15:05:00.003+09:00

Even after a couple of savage cold snaps, the garden is giving up huge quantities of green peppers. Broccoli has started flowering, and the tomatoes are still hanging on. The wolfberries are now producing abundantly. One thing I hadn't appreciated about wolfberries is how difficult they would be to collect. They're small, soft, and grow on chaotic, prickly vines. Gathering this lot took an astonishingly long time, forcing me to rethink some of my more extravagant plans concerning wolfberries. I'm going to try drying these.

The Black Seaman Tomatoes I got from an American friend were ravaged by slugs and a very large species of caterpillar, so we only got to eat a few tomatoes early in the season. However, after the caterpillars died off, there were a lot of green tomatoes left. Placed on a south-facing window-sill, they've begun to ripen and with their rather salty taste, they make a good addition to a lunch-time salad.

Bamboo dome - "Romanchiku"

2008-11-24T14:11:00.009+09:00

This weekend, the weather was superb - warm and sunny. On Saturday and Sunday, I went to Mugen Mura to help build a bamboo dome. There's already a bamboo dome at Mugen Mura that we built last year. It's the yurt-like thing pictured below. Wrapped in several layers of blue tarp and greenhouse plastic, it's warm in winter and provides good shade in summer.

First we cut several large bamboo poles in the forest above the compound. It's always impressive the way that living bamboo can turned into a building material in a matter of a few minutes.

This time, the dome is being built according to a simplified design. On Sunday, Boy Scouts, most of whom were actually Girl Guides to my way of thinking, were to construct the actual dome, using struts prepared in advance on Saturday. Nishizaki-san explains how the thing is to be built, based on blueprints and a pretty model.

Splitting the bamboo is the hardest part, requiring cooperation, coordination, and a high degree of trust in the hammer man. It all went very smoothly.

The joints inside the strips of bamboo have to be knocked off with a bill-hook, and the edges shaved off if possible for safe handling (we couldn't be bothered, and wore gloves instead).

On Sunday, the Scouts/Guides arrived and we started putting the dome together. This always involves a lot of headscratching and bewilderment, and general tying and untying of string. Those who tend to maintain opinions as a matter of course often like to voice them at this point.

When we reckon everything is in place, there's a concerted heave-ho, and the dome is raised into place. A lot of adjustment is then required to get a smooth and nicely rounded frame.

This time, it was a bit of a fiasco really. The new design, while perfectly good in itself, hadn't quite crystallized fully in Nishizaki-san's mind, and so there was uncertainty about how many struts should meet in one place. In making adjustments, the dome became increasingly wonky, and several of the ties in the struts came loose. Eventually we gave up. Since the dome would have been taken down immediately anyway, this didn't seem like a great shame.

With quiet determination, Nishizaki-san held his own 'hansei' (review) session, splitting some of the struts in half and making a 1:10 scale version to test the design. It worked.

On Saturday, as we sat in last year's dome eating delicious ton-jiru and zenzai, one of our number happened to mention that buying a greenhouse of similar size would cost a small fortune. This is surely something to reflect on, and not only for agricultural purposes. For emergency shelter, the full size thing or a 1:10 version would be easy to make, durable, and cheap.

On the way home, I spotted a howaito kyatto on a shurain. I thought it would make a neat photo, but it's just a skinny cat lying about on an undistinguished religious shed.

Pests

2008-11-08T21:48:00.004+09:00

No, it doesn't all go smoothly. Not at all.

There are pests, that involve themselves at all stages, from growth to storage and consumption.

As I was cycling past my emergent fig orchard, I suddenly perceived that one portion of the leaves on the biggest tree had been reduced to skeletons by some pest. The perception occurred almost as in slow motion - "By Christ! What the...?! My biggest fig...!"

It was some kind of horrible hairy caterpillar that was all over the leaves in a most promiscuous fashion. I cut them all in half with garden scissors. Fortunately the smaller, more vulnerable plants were untouched, although surely vigilance is required.

Then in the arvo when I went into my garlic stock, I found some very significant dust all around, and on closer inspection, blatant round holes in the stalks. I knew there had been little beetles visiting when the garlic was drying, and clearly their offspring had been at work since. Some of the individual cloves had brown bite marks on the flesh inside the skin, and where I was prepared to sacrifice a clove to scientific investigation, I found a nasty little maggot at the heart of the clove.

My onions, carelessly thrown into an orange 'kyari', have also been rotting somewhat at the bottom of the basket. Next year, I'll be more careful.

Momigara madness

2008-11-08T21:08:00.004+09:00

I've posted elsewhere on making charcoal from rice husks, and this year, I made my own.

I took an old petrol can, and using a steel punch and small sledgehammer, cut out a chimney hole and some side-holes. Making round holes with a punch is a satisfying and enjoyable pastime, although inevitably the jagged edges rip bloody holes in one's fingers...

At the height of the harvest season, I went to the local rice mill and asked permission to take some of the husks. "Any time, feel free", they said, and you can see why. In Japanese we say 'yama'.

I was too busy tending the process to take photos this time. You need to be careful making rice husk charcoal. You can leave it unattended for the first couple of hours, but thereafter it needs watching for safety and best results. If you don't put it out carefully when it's done, it'll burn up leaving very little residue. You need to dump rather more water on it than you might think to put it out inside. I thought maybe I could use a chimney of green bamboo, but my friend reckoned it would catch fire, so I sprung for a proper metal chimney. Glad I did, because the bamboo would definitely have burned merrily. 'Hi no youjin' as they say - be careful when you play with fire.

A lot of people don't bother toasting their husks and just apply them straight on their rows. It seems to work OK, but in my experience, the husks take several years to rot down. (When I stopped my bike to take this picture, I put my left foot down 'all wrong' and twisted my ankle so that I suddenly fell, bike and all, off the path and about a metre into a dry rice field. I landed painlessly on my back. If there had been a stone, or a piece of fencing, or some old machinery where I fell, that would probably have been it. All of a sudden, like.)

Hey pesto!

2008-11-08T17:41:00.007+09:00

I was toying with calling the post, "This pesto is the besto", but unfortunately I don't believe it would reflect reality. This pesto was very experimental and ad hoc in nature.

I grow basil every year in the vain hope that it will appear in all sorts of Italian-style cooking, but it never does, and most years it goes straight on the compost heap in November. It always thrives brilliantly, and grows into a big woody bush. So this year I rather belligerently brought the whole bush into the house, and made "Let's make pesto" noises. My friend Yagi-san recently gave us a frozen pot of his home-made pesto, and it was very good indeed, so that acted as a kind of endorsement of the whole idea.

During the process of stripping off all the leaves, an entire ecosystem of insects made it's way onto the kitchen table, including a large, brown and gold praying mantis who resisted fiercely when I put her out, and a stink bug who stank, but not as much as a bush of basil. There were many spiders, as well as a number of mites and something that looks like chaff, many of whom no doubt made it into the final product.

The pesto involved basil leaves, walnuts, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. If it needs Parmesan, it'll have to make do with a shake after serving. The missus put it in a Ziploc for freezing. It looks rather darker than pesto we've had to date.

Fierce debate rages on in our household about the accepted pronunciation of 'pesto'. Obviously I know how to say it, but others insist that 'pesto' is the name of a disease, and I should say 'paste'. This ongoing and general wrongness grieves me considerably.

Wolfberry aperitif

2008-11-08T17:40:00.005+09:00

I picked my first wolfberries (getting the excrement of leaf beetles all over my fingers - yuck), washed them and put them in a jam jar with 35 degree proof alcohol. Since I eat yoghurt daily and it comes with sugar sachets that I don't need and save, I put 3 sachets of sugar in with it. I let it stand for about 2 weeks, and tried it tonight.

It's very drinkable! It tastes like something you might even buy! I'm enormously pleased about this because the fresh berries are frankly horrible.

I'm interested to see how the wolfberries fare over the winter. Their leaves are now almost entirely coated in a kind of white powder which I suppose is probably mould, although there are a lot of red berries too.

The sea buckthorn is also looking different. A lot of the leaves have dropped off, but there are buds all over the stems. I figure these are new leaves and not flowers, but I have no idea when they'll do anything. I was hoping to try the berries this year, but that doesn't look likely.

Autumn festival

2008-10-12T11:08:00.018+09:00

Saturday Afternoon

Assembling the danjiri

Wiring up the lanterns

Portable shrines in the main shrine building

Flags

Sunday Morning

6 am
Danjiri gathering at the shrine

Miyauchi kids

The Miyauchi Taliban. Forced to drink Asahi Super Dry

Cranking out the noise with drum and bell

6:30 am
In the shrine. Sake. Devils. Horseplay

Looking back through the temple gate

Lion dance. Old men drumming.

Acrobatics - cartwheels

Acrobatics - soixante-neuf

Very foxy

Wind getting up

7 am
Running the danjiri up and down the street

The kids are getting excited

By the river

Beer break

8 am or thereabouts
Momo shows up. Dogs aren't sure what to make of human festivals.

Monday

Happi and koikuchi in the house. Must be a festival on

Oh my God

Fancy pants

Japanese weight-saving technology is not generally
applied to portable shrines

Shinto is a primitive, nature-based religion

The following weekend

Jika-tabi washed and drying. My neighbour,
Takaichi-san's family grave in the background

On seeing the first kuko of Autumn

2008-10-12T10:29:00.004+09:00

Yesterday I noticed that the first wolfberries (kuko) are going red. This caused me no end of excitement because it means that I'll soon be on the path to eternal life thanks to all the antioxidants that I'll be consuming.

I thought it might also be a good idea to try a fresh wolfberry, but this proved to be a bit of disappointment. The berries had a distinctly uncooked vegetable-like taste, somewhat like raw aubergine (aubergine and wolfberry are the same family). One of them was also full of seeds.

I'm hoping that when the temperature drops, they'll start getting juicier and sweeter.

Pickled habaneros

2008-10-05T16:27:00.008+09:00

In the summer, the local home centre was selling potted habanero pepper plants as the "hottest peppers in the world". I immediately had an image of the pickled jalapeño peppers I once enjoyed in a Mexican joint in Santa Monica and decided to have a crack at it.

The pepper bush didn't do very well over the summer, but in the autumn, it suddenly took off and provided a small crop of fairly ugly pale green and red peppers. Today as I was picking them, I nibbled part of one that had been holed by some insect and found it very hot. Indeed, my lips went numb and stayed that way for 20 minutes.

With no sensation in my lips, I washed the peppers, cut two slits in each, put them in an enamel saucepan with some 'rakyu' pickling vinegar and a big clove of garlic, cut into chunks. I simmered them for 5 minutes, omitting the salt and baby carrots in the recipe that I found online. Then I transferred them to an empty jam jar and shoved in some Italian parsley as a means of keeping the peppers fully submerged in the vinegar. With this method, the peppers are supposed to be edible immediately, and are said to keep for a month or two. By the almost transparent appearance of the peppers after an hour in the jar, I think I probably simmered them for 4 minutes longer than is necessary.

I'm looking forward to trying my first home-made pickled peppers - not without some trepidation, it must be said.

The Italian parsley has been visited recently by a pair of fantastically coloured caterpillars. Since they're so outrageously showy and more importantly, don't appear to be harming the parsley, I can't bring myself to kill them.

When Blake wrote,

The Caterpillar on the Leaf
Repeats to thee thy Mother's grief.

one can only assume that he had a different caterpillar in mind, because this one was completely silent on the subject.

And for bunce, a sunset panorama.

Conclusion:

Jesus Christ!

I tried one of these goddamn pickled habaneros with the tail end of dinner tonight, and Jesus Christ!

A fair old stink accompanied the opening of the jar, and a few seconds after I took a small bite of one these toxic peppers, pain filled my mouth and breathing became difficult. I experienced several violent hiccups that felt like depth charges going off in my stomach. As my discomfort became apparent, my family dissolved into mirth, with much sarcastic comment, "How is it, is it nice?", "That looks good, are you going to finish the jar off?" Speechless with distress, I could only throw myself back in my chair and sit with my head back and my mouth open. "You've gone all red, ha ha ha!" my family informed me gently. And when I tried to put my distress into words, the smell of the pepper in my mouth flew across the table and made my wife and son screw up their faces in disgust.

I managed to eat only half of one small pepper, and thankfully there was still some tofu on the table to assuage the nerve damage to my mouth. A chilled pear also helped in this regard. But the smell from the remainder of the habanero on my plate seemed to fill the whole dining room.

The question remains, what to do with this hazardous food product.

Wolfberry update

2008-09-09T07:50:00.007+09:00

Autumn is when wolfberries are supposed to start fruiting, and indeed, they're becoming much more visibly active. The long, trailing stalks that the plants sent out in the summer are now covered in little buds and flowers.

During the summer, the plants didn't look too good. The long stalks (called vines by most people, but inaccurately to my mind since they don't cling), lay around untidily all over the place, prey to every kind of foliage eating thing that crawls on the ground. One insect that wreaked particular havoc is a species of leaf beetle, the "kuso ha-mushi", literally, the "shit leaf beetle". The larvae of this attractively-named orange beetle covers itself in its own excrement, of which it has lots, because it has a prodigious appetite. In fact it stripped most of the stalks almost completely, while the leaves that survived were full of holes. At first, I busied myself squashing each larva by hand, but they were legion, and squishing little agglomerations of shit isn't very nice. I then tried breaking up an old cigar (I've given them up) into water and spraying it on the plants. This made them smell interestingly of old cigar, but didn't deter the beetles and their ill-mannered children one jot. Then I tried spraying a 30-70 mixture of milk and water, which made the plants stink of milk. Since the larvae soon disappeared, either this treatment worked, or their season had come to its end. These beetles are supposed to be a significant pest for commercial growers, so I'll be watching out for them next year.

Left: Beetle, Right: Larvae
A photo borrowed from this Japanese site

Once this menace was past, I resolved to tie up the stalks to bamboo canes, and this seems to have been a good move. They look tidier, and they soon grew back dense new foliage. They also look as though they will eventually serve one part of their purpose, as a prickly hedge, quite admirably. I won't be sorry to see less of the concrete wall behind them either. I'm quite excited about my wolfberries, especially since they're putting forth what promises to be an abundant crop, yea, even in their very first year.

Behind the new growth, old leaves have been ravished
by the "shit leaf beetle" larvae

The leaves are supposed to be edible in salads and as garnishes. I nibbled on a young, tender leaf, and it didn't taste good. However, if the fruit proves as abundant as it hints, I shall be quite satisfied with that.

I've been reading up on wolfberries/goji and it seems the name goji is something of a fraud, and the extravagant claims made for Chinese wolfberries apply only to the Tibetan variety. More here.

The black soil that you can see in this photo is my own home-produced compost. I want my wolfberries to be surrounded by strong, drought-resistant clover, and so I reseeded it in compost from the bottom of my pile. It seems to be a rather superior product.

Those who are tempted to grow their own wolfberries may find this page a useful resource. I also enjoyed this page from a gardener in Pennsylvania.