Bamboo dome - "Romanchiku"

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.