The enduring fascination of large beetles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...