Rice husk charcoal

I took a trip to the shops to buy sake for discharging various debts of gratitude, and on my way I was excited to see a chimney poking out of a pile of rice husks, disgorging clouds of white and brown smoke. A strange cause for excitement you might think, but this is a procedure for making a very effective soil amendment, and I've been interested in this for some time, without being aware that it's being practised in my neighbourhood. Here's a PDF explaining the method and the benefits, and the same information in HTML format.

I hopped out of my car, made my way through the stubble fields to where the pile was smoking and greeted the old lady who attended it, hoping not to make her jump. Not only did she not jump, she graciously answered all my questions and even offered me a bag of processed husks for my garden. Care is required to water the heap at suitable intervals to prevent the husks from burning up to grey dust. The lady had been tending her fire constantly for two days.

So with the young master pushing the wheelbarrow, we went to claim our bagful. In the storehouse of the farm we could see the clean and modern de-husking machine that had produced all this chaff, in marked contrast to the not clean and not modern charcoal making 'facility' outside in the field. It occurs to me that the de-husking machine could really do with a charcoal burning attachment that can capture and cool the smoke to use as an organic pesticide and fertilizer.

The question is now what to do with my precious rice charcoal. A tiny bag of charcoal a fraction of this size costs nearly 300 yen, so this is a sizeable treasure. Having already planted my winter veg, I'm wondering how best to apply this.

I went across the fields in the dark after the charcoal burning work was finished and had a look at the can and chimney arrangement - simplicity itself. I already have a can, and a chimney is easy enough to come by. And rice husks are available for the asking. Terra Preta in our lifetime?

Just another sunset

Since the sunset pictures have drawn favourable comment, here's a sunset recorded last year. The way those wisps oriented themselves to the setting sun was a sight to see.

Junk

Antique shops are all very well, but you have to get used to handing over sums of money where the decimal point seems to be at least one digit too far to the left. Call us cheap, but when we buy old junk, we like to pay old junk prices too. On the coast road between Hojo and Imabari, we spotted not one but two junk shops, and I believe we picked up or otherwise touched every last item in both shops.

We bought;

Two wooden stools

Some drawers

Some more drawers

A crab

And a lantern

These characterful items all fulfil our household needs at a fraction of the price of similar new items, and they offer a reminder of the beautiful things people used to make when they had more time for that sort of thing.

Man cannot live by bread alone

My initial aim was that everything we grew would be edible. But not everything edible delights the eye quite like brightly coloured flowers.

In our perambulations around Matsuyama, we see gardens that are full of beautiful flowers. I'm not keen on the trend for 'English gardens' with their carefully pruned roses and hanging baskets. The gardens that I like are generally found around old Japanese houses. There are low trees interspersed with flowers native to the warm south sea islands, with rich dark leaves and bright flowers, typified by the hibiscus. There's often a spray of dark pink or a vine with orange trumpets hanging over the fence onto the street. These gardens manifest a spirit that goes beyond the need to fill one's stomach.

The area around our postbox was a mess, so I raked the gravel into a little path and planted some ground cover and flowers. The effect is not a little bourgeois, but it's an improvement on bare dust, random gravel and weeds.

Again, the ryu-no-hige recommends itself as a hardy green space filler

Sunset

We see some good ones. Some weeks I want to record the sunset every night. But this one was a ripper. There were different cloud formations in each quarter of the sky, and they changed colour as the sun got lower.

Play

One of the advantages of living in the sticks is that when it comes time to do those summer holiday activities like getting in the river, or going to the sea, you don't have to get in the car to do it. You just pack your Thermos flask of water and your snorkels in a bag, get on your bikes and ride for 5 minutes. And you're there.

The Tateiwa River is perfect for those baking hot afternoons of mid-August. Excitingly cold when you first get in, it's shallow enough not to be freezing. It's clean, clear and full of different kinds of fish. And it has deep pools where you can actually swim. After an hour immersed in the river, the exhausting summer heat is gone from your body, and everything is cool -- especially if you haven't bothered with swimming gear and just got in the water with your normal clothes.

And if you want a bit of saltwater for a change, the Tateiwa River runs straight to the sea with a nice cycle path along its bank. Another 5 minutes and you're there too. If it's too cold to swim, there are always rock pools to investigate.

During the summer holidays we took the boat across to the island Kashima which we can see from our house. We made our way round the base of the island, jumping in the sea wherever it looked good.

The water here is really cold, but there are some largish fish to be seen swimming around the rocks, so it's worth putting up with it.

It's strange to think that we used to have to travel for a whole day to get somewhere like this.


August provided some fantastic rain and thunderstorms. The thunderstorms are hard to capture with a camera, but the squalls over the sea can be seen in this pic.

Produce

The efforts to prepare the soil by digging the rubble out of it and digging organic stuff in have borne fruit. Here are some pictures of it.

Tomatoes, green peppers, aubergines, okra, goya, and pumpkin. Keeping the pumpkin vine free of grass is a Sisyphean task. Okra do well in hot weather, and the flowers are very beautiful (for a vegetable).


Tomatoes, aubergine, sweet green chili peppers, and round courgettes. The courgettes took a hammering in a couple of typhoons and that solitary but precious courgette was all that two plants have produced. However, the plants look about ready again to produce. It's probably about time for another typhoon too.

Mulukhiya (moroheiya) . This nutricious green is very prolific and the cut and come again growth makes it very convenient. A plant popular in Arab countries apparently.
　
A handful of blueberries every morning. Good with yoghurt and honey. A handful like that would cost about 100 yen in the shops.

These seeds are from the one and only 'Cannonball' watermelon that we managed to harvest. The vines got swamped with grass, the melons split or we harvested them too early. But the one we did eat was delicious. I'm going to see if I can plant the seeds next year.

Oh, and an obligatory sunset.

Clover update

In February or thereabouts, I bought some clover seed and planted it in the vegetable patch as ground cover where there was no veg. It took a very long time to sprout, in which time all sorts of other more invasive grasses and weeds thrived. Since the seed is also very fine indeed, it got washed away by the slightest rain, gathering in corners wherever the water tended to pool.

However, when the weather started to get warmer in April, the clover began to grow rapidly, forming a dense, juicy carpet. When you walk on it, it squashes down and looks like it's done for, but it's back up and fluffy again in a short while.


Not that you can see it well in this picture, but the clover is intimately coexisting with nasturtiums, shiso, Italian parsley, and lots of grass. This slope tended to erode in the rain while it was bare, but the clover and grass has helped to stabilize it. (Also visible is corn, pumpkin, and melon. There's clover in amongst that too.)

In other places, the clover didn't do so well. The area around the house has lousy soil. It's had chippings dumped on it, and heavy equipment has been driven back and forth on it. I broadcast clover seed on this area in the hope of greening it a bit, but the seed simply washed away. To prevent this, I scraped lines with a hoe, and broadcast the seed again.

The results are quite miserable. Although the clover is semi-established, it isn't luxuriant growth. Even clover needs a bit of soil to work with. So in an attempt to provide something nutritious for the clover to root down in, I brought down some leaf-mould and organic debris from the mountain to scatter on top of the hard soil. Onto this I broadcast yet more clover seed just as the rainy season was getting started. This time it's thrived.


I had hoped clover would form a dense ground cover that kept out other weeds. But the grasses are much faster growing and very robust. Even when the grass is torn out roots and all, it can recover somehow even when the clover is doing well. And clover is really a weed too. But by sowing clover, you get to choose one of your weeds, and add some diversity to what's growing. You also get another flowering plant for the insects that like them, although I've only seen one clover flower so far.

I understand from people who plant lawns that they only last 5 or 6 years before they go threadbare and need replanting. In the meantime they require constant weeding. I'm hoping that by opting for a weed lawn in the first place, I'll be saving us that trouble and expense.

Over the weekend, Typhoon No.4 swung by near Ehime and dumped gallons of rain on us. There were some good cloudscapes before and after.

Big cooking pots => Ponds

We found a junk/antique shop in Matsuyama that specializes in local 'aged articles of value' at reasonable prices. Here I spied 3 large cooking pots. At our favourite garden center, Tokiwa Garland, they have a similar one filled with water plants. I had always wondered where you get something like that, and how much it must cost. Well mine was just 6,000 yen for the big one, and another 4,000 yen for the smaller ones, delivery to the house included. Considering that a pond liner of a similar size and no character whatsoever costs around 30,000 yen, I think I got a deal. The big one used to belong to the Dogo Japan Agricultural Coop where they used for parties. I'm confident that these ponds won't leak.

Getting dug in

Water plants from a local lake and the DIY store

And little 'Daruma medaka' fish from our local medaka outlet

The medaka man and his elderly dad assured us that medaka do not live in rainwater. In fact, rainwater is like poison to them, and if we were cruel enough to try it, our five little fish would be dead within 4~5 hours. The pH of the acid rain that falls would be the death of them. Instead, we were to mix tap water with the right amount of pH adjuster, and let it stand until it was the same temperature as the fishes' water.

I confess I was nearly persuaded, but the young master pooh-poohed all this nonsense, and we put the medaka straight into the poisonous environment we had prepared for them. 4~5 days later, they're still not dead.

Rice planting

With the onset of the 'rainy season' (what is generally called the 'monsoon' in Asian countries), the time has come to plant rice. It's not something we normally do, but Kawabe-san of Selco Homes invited us to join him, his father, wife and daughters in planting the plot they own below our house.

We got up at an early 7:30 and hurried to get to the rice paddy for 8:30 as arranged. We were digusted to find that they hadn't arrived, and figured they had lingered in bed, so we went looking for them. We found them at their other rice field which they had already planted...
The young master joined Kawabe-san on the planting machine for the ride to the second field.

I had a turn driving the planter for one row, and it's amazingly easy. All you need to do is keep the 'whiskers' of the planter aligned with the outside row, and the busy little mechanical fingers at the back plant 4 rows of rice.


Our neighbourhood has taken on a new face, with even more water around. You wouldn't know by looking at it that conditions are actually on the dry side. The frogs are fantastically noisy, but we can't hear them with the windows closed.