Spring is sprung

The weather recently has been ideal for the past month, with rain a couple of times a week at least. This makes gardening very easy since everything grows steadily and you can spend time weeding and planting instead of watering. Can we arrange for it to be like this every month please?

I had given up hope that the clover I seeded early last year on the vegetable garden would grow. It seemed to have been overwhelmed by the grass and weeds. But these all died in the cold, and now the clover is running riot. I've never seen such big clover leaves. They look really good for green manure and mulch, especially because when you cut the big leaves, there are little ones already growing underneath. Also, I ripped up a few clover plants and the roots have the little white and pink nodes on them that I believe contain the bacteria that fix nitrogen in the soils. Clover seems to be a valuable ally to have in the garden. I had thought of having a covering of green as a prerequisite for keeping hens, and now that green has appeared I'll have to start thinking about the next step. It occurs to me that I have no idea where you get hens from.

I've constructed yet another bed. The offcuts left over from the house have been very useful for this, and there still seems to be another couple of beds' worth left. This bed is being used for green peppers, two sorts of aubergine (including one of the very long thin type popular in Ehime), and 'asparagus lettuce'. I have no idea what this is, I just found it at the seed and plant shop. I wonder if it will make our urine stink like actual asparagus does? It seems to be the very useful 'cut and come again' type, and if it really tastes like asparagus, we'll be in salad heaven - until it flowers anyway.

The broccoli all flowered which meant that it stopped producing tight, edible green heads. The bees seem to rejoice in the yellow flowers, and the missus suggested I display some flowers indoors. Something rural and weird must have gotten to her, because a few years ago this sort of thought would never have crossed her mind. Hopefully this new bucolic free thinking will extend to the keeping of hens, but I wonder...

I left a bit of broccoli standing for the bees, and put the rest in the compost, hoping that the large amount of green material will get it hot at last. At least once I want to succeed in hot composting.

Now the peas are coming along well and the onions. The peas are a variety with purple shells that I picked up in the garden shop. The flowers are also a pretty purple.

In addition, the garlic seems to be nearly ready, and the potatoes are beginning to leaf. I planted yellow and purple varieties instead of the usual spuds, and according to the packets, they all have amazing health-giving properties that will make you live to 163, if'n you don't get hit by whatever kind of bus they'll have in the future.

This year, the vegetable patch is actually beginning to look something like what competent gardeners of many years standing produce. I find myself admiring it with an idiotic grin of total happiness on my face. The other morning I noticed that the cilantro had started its spring growth. I pulled a bit to sniff and got cilantro scent on the end of my nose. I couldn't stop smiling about the whole thing for about 5 minutes. I got the cilantro plant from my friend William at his Thanksgiving Dinner last October and it survived a drunken ride home in a yoghurt pot. This makes it all the more precious. I never thought I'd be so pleased with a herb.

Wolfberry - Goji to some

I've always been interested in those little red, oval berries you get floating in soups and that sexy little white almond desert you get in Chinese restaurants. They're Tibetan wolfberries or goji. (I rather prefer the name wolfberry as its constituent parts mean something to me.) In Japanese, kuko. They're very good for you, apparently.

Plants are impossible to find in shops, and they only seem to be available online. I got mine from Nikko Seeds, which sells them as 'cancer-preventing plants, so t'is said'. Nikko Seeds offers the best deal I could find - four plants for 2,940 yen including shipping. Not cheap, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp wolfberry (these things have thorns, you know).

Growing instructions are confusing. Online sources suggest they require very good drainage (not having on one's clay mound) and full sunshine. The bumf that came with the plants however suggested one should create an environment 'like unto a riverbank or paddy embankment'. These directions seem distinctly contradictory. However, since I have an environment quite like a paddy embankment, I took heart. Anyway, these things apparently grow all over Tibet which I imagine to be quite harsh in many ways, so I think we'll be OK.

Our neighbour has a nice little beagle/terrier mix that he lets roam all over the neighbourhood. I've devised some quite effective means to keep it off our property, lovely though it may be, but in hot pursuit of a cat, it will still launch itself off the embankment and run all over the young vegetables looking for a way out. So I'm thinking that a row of prickly bushes at eye level ought to present an effective barrier to flying beagle/terrier mixes.

Now if I may share a little dream with you: These things will grow well. I'll plant cuttings and have them sprouting all over my garden. Birds will eat lots of them, and passers-by may pick some too (there are a number of interesting middle-aged couples who take walks up our street and who stop to chat.) But even after we've eaten some fresh, put some in alcohol, and dried some others, there will be a surplus of berries. By the time the wolfberries are growing like billy-ho, we'll have chickens. Using the eggs from the chickens and the dried wolfberries or the wolfberries scooped out the alcohol, we'll make pound cakes -- absolutely sublime, organic, 'cancer-fighting' pound cakes. These we'll sell at an exorbitant price through local marketing. With that, the figs, the olives, the eggs, and the lemon marmalade, we'll be well on the way to replacing translation with a high value added farming enterprise. Oh, and did I mention the avocado?

Citrus

Today I planted a load of citrus trees.

I planted:

• Mikan
• Dekopon
• Ponkan
• Iyokan
• Lemon

These varieties should see me through the winter season as they each fruit in succession. All of these fruits are available in Ehime Prefecture in abundance, and at very low prices. For example, a bag of dekopon costs 100 yen for about 8~10. But since we eat so many of them, it makes sense to grow them ourselves. I eat 4~5 of these citrus fruit at one meal... The peel also makes a good composting material.

The lemon will be good for making lemon alcohol which is yet another drink I like. I expect we'll also make lemon marmalade with it too, something you rarely see in shops here. We once had a surfeit of iyokan when my rented allotment included several iyokan trees, and we made some very good marmalade out of them using a pressure cooker.

All these varieties are produced by grafting, which seems like a very clever technology. The trees have a little bit of black plastic wrapped around the cut. I wonder what happened to the tops of the rootstocks after they got supplanted by citrus...

Hello, Blossom

In addition to the glorious new weeping plum below the dining-room window, we have an indoor cherry blossom, care of the Co-op. The beauty of this is that while it smells wonderful and has little petals that fall in a picturesque manner, nobody can get in and spread a blue tarp under it, grill cheap, smelly meat, and talk drunkenly at the tops of their voices. I call this, "The Return of Wabi-Sabi" and chuckle to myself, although nobody else seems to know what I'm talking about.

It's even supposed to produce an abundant crop of real cherries, all indoors. Bring it on! (as we venturesome types like to say).

Frankenfood! - Dainan

Today I noticed that one of my daikon was going weird. It had started to shoot, but instead of daikon flowers, it was a nanohana (rape) flower. Frankenfood! The nanohana are flowering all over the place here, and I suppose the pollen landed on the daikon.

So I pulled it up, and it was a respectably sized daikon, for all its weirdness. The missus cooked it with pork in the pressure cooker (heating time - 1 min. Super-efficient.) It was very sweet and tender. Some of the leaves went into miso soup. It all went very well with some local sake.

In these days of rising wheat prices, we must learn to put bread and beer aside, and eat and drink rice again.

New trees

On Friday, Chiba-san the tree man came with a weeping plum (shidare ume), 3 olives in 2 varieties, 2 feijoas and 1 dogwood to replace the one that died (blamed squarely on my mismanagement - humph, I'm innocent).

The plum apparently produces plums that can be used for umeshu (plum liquor) which is good, because I make a lot of it.


Chiba-san and his mate had a lot of bad things to say about our soil - how bad the drainage is, how hard it is, how full of weeds - nothing I didn't know. He suggested getting a small digger in, putting down a good supply of weedkiller, and mixing bark into the soil. Since I differ in my approach, favouring the biological over the petrochemical techniques that Chiba-san quietly supports, I bought a pick-axe and started working over the soil to a depth of one-and-a-bit picks. I mixed in a load of rice husks, bark, and chopped dried ... weeds. It was hard work, but we're not afraid of that.


Olives are becoming a very popular garden tree in Japan, and frankly I can't see why. I don't think they look that good, and most people here don't do anything with the olives, if indeed they manage to produce any with only one plant. Doing something useful with the olives requires a lot of work, but this seems well worth the effort. I rather like the idea of processing them with ash rather than brine. Bamboo ash is more readily available than brine on this particular hillside, and is easier to dispose of when the olives are done.

Fig orchard

On Sunday, the coldest day of the year so far, I betook myself to the local Daiki DIY store to buy up their complete stock of fig saplings. They only had three, two of the 'Nihon Omi (Big Fruit)' variety, and one of 'Masui-Dauphine'. The former are the big, roundish green ones that tend to split wide open, while the latter are more teardrop shaped and purple.

Braving the cold wind on the very exposed top bit of land, I planted the saplings and made little bamboo fences around them.

I hope to get at least one more variety of fig, and plant some other small fruit bushes in between them, like wolfberries. The idea is to eat what we can, and sun/wind dry the rest for the winter. Although dried figs are available, they all come from Turkey or Iran, they have some sort of bleach on them, and they're expensive. If one may indulge in a bit of fantasy, when the trees begin to fruit, one hopes to run a few chickens in this space to eat the fallen fruit. If the model seems to work, one may even expand it.

Broccoli - the gift that just keeps giving

I fought a long and bitter battle with Cabbage White butterflies and their juicy green offspring that grew fat on the leaves of my two varieties of broccoli (a well informed gardener would be able to give you the names of the varieties - I can't). For most of the summer and autumn, I diligently plucked about 20 of the little green buggers off the broccoli every day, and gently stood on them. I also chased the butterflies with whatever tool I happened to be holding when they came near my plants.

At one stage in late autumn, it seemed as though I had lost the battle. Many of the leaves were just a ragged mass of holes, and the budding heads of broccoli had also been eaten in places. But then the cold came and the caterpillars disappeared. Suddenly the heads began growing like blazes, all over the plants. The big heads on the main stems were excellent - tightly packed flowers and very sweet. There were so many I gave some away.

With the big heads gone, little flowers start growing out of the leaf stems, and these are the gifts that just keep giving. And very convenient they are.

Compost bliss

I've finally achieved my long-term goal of double, side-by-side composting bays (triple, if you count the green Dalek). While one bay is left alone to mature, the other one can be filled up and tossed about. Visible and invisible composting critters can pass freely between the bays.

It's hard to express how much joy was involved in this whole enterprise.

On reflection, the bays would have been much more convenient divided the other way with the bays open at one end for ease of access. Achieving this will have to be a source of joy for another time.

Wind update

The other day, Kawabe-san from Selco Home dropped by with Nemoto-san from Selco Head Office. Nemoto-san is well up on housing matters, and he happened to know that the evil utility Yonden (Shikoku Denryoku) doesn't purchase wind power. That is to say, Yonden doesn't allow privately generated wind power on its grid. If I want to try out a MotorWave turbine array, I'll have to use all the power generated, store it in batteries, or discharge it somehow.

Yonden runs sickly, greenwashing ads on TV, featuring its dangerous nuclear reactor in the middle of a lush natural scene, and its handful of poorly sited and managed wind turbines. Seeing these makes me want to puke, considering how resistant the company is to clean, reliable, distributed, democratic, sustainable power generation.

Matsuyama City is promoting solar generation since the area has a high ratio of sunny days. Recently they had a big double page spread on the Matsuyama Sunshine Project in the news bulletin that the city distributes. It was very vague and short on detail, and it didn't mention anything about the good wind resources in Matsuyama as a whole.

So I called the number given in the paper and spoke to the man there. I mentioned the problem with Yonden and suggested that this would be a problem for his plan. He mumbled that it might be. I mentioned that the low rates that Yonden pays for private generation compared with say, Germany, militated against his plan. He agreed, lamenting that Germany has a national plan for solar whereas Japan doesn't. I asked why private wind generation was ignored in Matsuyama's plan, and he waffled a bit about how Matsuyama's geography wasn't suited to big turbines. It took a while to get him to understand that people want to use wind privately too, and that indeed in Hojo you can see a several small turbines dotted about. He seemed unaware of the possibilities for small generation, and hadn't heard of MotorWave. I asked him to look into this aspect, and to consider expanding the project to include all renewables. I don't hold out much hope of seeing anything done.

For quite a while now, it's been apparent to me that what we need is an organization of solar panel owners, wind enthusiasts and anybody else who has grid-connected renewables. This would be a pressure group that would lobby local authorities and put pressure on the local power gen company (including through shareholding) to ensure the most favourable purchase rates and conditions. Local groups could then band together into a national body. It might well be in the interest of building companies to get involved too.

There seems to be a basic lack of understanding that the power gen companies are the enemy. Users of electricity are blamed and blame themselves for causing global warming by using electricity. But it isn't the users who generate the CO2 - it's the power companies that haven't foreseen the problem, and haven't done anything to prevent it. It's their responsibility. When private individuals are prepared to invest hard earned money in power generating facilities and get into the business of selling power, they should take a hard, nay a savage, look at their competitors and their practices. In this case of course, our competitors are the power utilities. We private generators need to band together to increase our clout.

Birds

Although the birds have shunned the bird-box we built (to a specification which apparently doesn't match any known species of bird), we do have quite a few birds visiting the garden. In fact, they often come and sit on the fence in front of my porthole so I can see them when I'm working.

Fat little brown bird on a fence post

In the season when the blueberries are fruiting, I try to suppress my fury when they gobble up the unripe berries, but at other times they represent a charming diversion. A big black rook is always impressive. They're very big up close and they seem to be the most wary of the visiting birds, so you have to keep still if you don't want them to fly off right away.

Crowstorm

There are huge numbers of crows in our neighbourhood, and they're especially active after the rice harvest. They form swirling storms that fill portions of the sky, and they're always fighting with each other and hassling the herons and buzzards that share the same airspace. While it's really none of my business, I sometimes feel that it's all a bit much and somehow offensive to propriety and something ought to be done about it. At these times, I'm sometimes driven to look again at my link for crow recipes. How one would go about gathering the main ingredient without a shotgun is a little beyond my wit however.

A few weeks ago, a pair of woodpigeons visited. Woodpigeons are not at all wary, and happily sit around very comfortably in full view. Their colours perfectly matched the autumn tableau outside my window.

Woodpigeons

I suppose I could spoil my casual enjoyment of the birds by vowing to photograph everything I see and getting a bird book to identify everything correctly. Somehow I don't think I will though.

His first carrots

I have not had much joy with carrots until now. Carrots, with their leafy greenness and weighty orangeyness seem to epitomize productivity in a home allotment. And hitherto, I signally failed to achieve that productivity. The leafy greenness was attacked by draught and grasshoppers, and was generally impossible to distinguish from a weed. When out of morbid curiosity I pulled the thing up, there was almost nothing orange in the ground to speak of. This was quite depressing, repeated as it was annually for a number of years.

Well, thanks to deep digging, coated seeds, and diligent watering, I've achieved a certain degree of carrot proficiency.

The score is; Out of five carrots pulled, two are perfect specimens, one is overly fat but eminently eatable, one suffers from dwarfism, while another is grotesquely deformed but edible. The leaves of all of them can be fried in sesame oil to go on rice. So the final tally is 3.5 out of 5 which is enough to satisfy me.

Next season, I'm sure it's not unreasonable to hope for 4 out of 5.

The peanuts by the way were quite vile. I think I may even have suffered unripe peanut poisoning if such a thing exists. I shall feed them to the worms and try to plant them earlier this year.

Wind again

The other day, I found a news item about a novel wind power company, Motorwind. The product looks like a toy and is priced like a toy, but the output is anything but.

In the same spirit, I bought a toy to measure our wind resource. The September issue of Gakken's magazine has a wind meter for 1,260 yen, significantly cheaper than a 'real' wind meter at 12,000 yen.

I put the wind meter together with help from the young master, and we took the thing outside. Gratifyingly, the little propeller went around like crazy, and the reading immediately went straight off the paper cylinder dial. 4 is the highest mark on the dial, and this apparently equals a wind speed of 5.5 to 8.0 m/s. This is in keeping with the wind map for our area which shows an annual average of 5.5 to 6.0 m/s at the red blob where our house is located.

Apart from showing the wind speed, my toy was very helpful in showing the direction of the wind, south to north, which is perpendicular to the axis of the sun (as Lucien Gambarota of Motorwind kindly explained to me when I emailed him).

The Motorwind product that interests me costs $199 (21,000 yen). It consists of 8 micro turbines with a generator rated 50W for 10m/s of wind. Daily production is 1.2 kWh. That is amazingly cheap alternative energy, assuming it works as advertised.

I figure that a row of 8 turbines will fit nicely on one of the uprights of our balcony. Once the current is passed through a battery to set the voltage level, it can go into the grid in the same way as our solar generated power.

This is the sort of cheap, smart solution that will revolutionize renewable energy and free people from fossil fuel. If our wind power works out, I'll be aiming to promote this solution to all of our neighbours and friends.
With Inchodon on the roof of his clinic in Masaki-cho. The wind measured 3-4 - probably adequate for generating some power. However, since the clinic is in a very built-up area, there's concern about disturbing the neighbours with noisy turbines.

Mary Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Pretty good actually, thanks.

Having been told that my soil was only good for growing potatoes, I'm pleased to relate that my root vegetables are not doing badly. They do have more than the usual complement of limbs, but who cares?

Stumpy-Dumpy sat on a wall

The aubergines have now stopped growing with the advent of the cold, but just four plants gave a huge crop over the period from early summer to late autumn. Although there were some complaints from the cook wallah about how 'hard' or 'holed' they were, they served very well in ratatouille and sundry Chinese dishes.

I succeeded in growing four peanut bushes. Weird things, peanuts. After they flower, tendrils grow down from the flowers into the ground, at the end of which form peanuts. I'm still drying them, so I don't know how good they are, but they look like real peanuts.

In the Terra Preta I have planted two types of broccoli, carrots, lettuces, daikon in big and small varieties, spinach, and mizuna.

There are also 300 onions, a bunch of garlic, broad beans, and three sorts of peas (green, purple, and snack).

Today, I caught Kawabe-san our builder tilling his onion fields so I begged him to swing by our place and till what is to be our lawn and orchard. This he did with great skill, turning up all sorts of horrible chunks of old cement and spider grass roots.

While we were working on our tilling, a praying mantis was laying its eggs on our foundation wall. The eggs come out of the mantis's bum in the form of a marbled blue liquid and dry into a straw-coloured foamy case. I'm not too sure about playing host to violent religious extremists like the praying mantises, but I guess we're stuck with them for a while.

The winter skies have been pretty good recently, with some massive clouds and clear views to the main island.

Zazen shed

Today as I was a'mulching my hedges, Yano-san came around. He brought me some frozen peas from his father's farm, a bag of naturally dried rice, and a paper model of the zazen shed for which he had earlier sent some plans. This generosity is quite undeserved, but most welcome.

The idea arose from the geodesic dome we built with Mugen Mura (and the fact that I've started doing Zen meditation and want somewhere quiet to do it).

The total estimated cost is about 100,000 yen which is quite a lot for a shed. I could keep my worm bin and tools in there, and meditate. But it might well be pointed out that my worms are already in their own accommodation, the tools have not so far complained about being stored under the overhang, and I seem to manage to meditate in the house.

When we have our new trees in place, we'll have to see how much space and money is left. Somehow a man needs a shed, in the same way that he needs a drill.

Thank you very mulch

Oh god, what a horrible pun to start a post with. This bodes ill.

We got tired of the fact that our tree man Chiba-san wouldn't come around and look at our trees, nor would he suggest what other trees we should plant, so we asked another place, Mishian Green to advise us. A pleasant young lady came right away, looking competent in a grungy sort of way, and knowing the names of lots of plants and trees off the top of her head.

She also recommended that I immediately mulch my yellowed and wilted hedges with a thick layer of fallen leaves. This has always been my inclination from the start, although Chiba-san advised me that the soil should be bare so that I would know when it was dry to water it. Since I watered it every day, this seemed odd advice. So I mulched the hell out of all my hedges and plants, with joy in my heart. I don't believe this can be wrong. The leaves I got from the library - a lady there rakes up all their dry leaves and puts them in convenient yellow bags. I always grab a few when I go. Books in English and bags of leaves are excellent complementary services.

The procedure went; scatter some organic fertilizer pellets (in plastic box on the deck - these things don't look organic), slap down some wet leaves, and before they all blow away, lay down some grass straw on both sides of the hedge, then hose the lot. Apart from the fertilizer, the main ingredients were free (discounting the very pleasant time spent gathering them).

Oh, and now it's winter.

More rice husk charcoal

On a stroll through the local hills last weekend, I found another pile of pyrolizing rice husks. This was a big one with a new-looking chimney. After taking a few photos, I noticed that there was a man tending the allotment behind it (hidden by some nice brassicas). He told me that this was his first try - he got the husks from a farmer. I shared my valuable knowledge on watering the heap to keep it from burning right down. He said he didn't care - he only had the weekends for his plot, and even if he screwed up this heap, he had a promise of lots more husks from the farmer. Then he said that I could come and take however much charcoal I wanted during the week - "After all, you're always at home, right?" Somebody else who I don't know who knows all about me. I'm always amazed how kind and generous the people around here are. I hope I can repay some of the kindness I've been shown.

So I went back several times during the week, and although the chimney assembly had been taken out, the pile was still burning away. It was mostly grey ash with some black grains left here and there. I wanted to put some water on it, but there was none around. By Friday the pile was down to one third its previous size and was still red hot inside. On Saturday I went to get some for my garden, and the heap was already in bags. My friend offered me the remaining six - I took three.

In the evening, I put one a whole bagful on the bed I prepared for my onions. The ash had a wonderful silky feel, and adding it to the still clayey soil was a joy. (I pulled up the moroheya, okra and shisito peppers and hoed the ash into where the roots had been.)

My carrots, planted two weeks ago were also clearly a miserable failure (again!), so I redid the rows, this time adding some of the black rice husks. The soil looked very rich with the black charcoal in it. I've put half PET bottles over the seeds in the hope that the sprouts won't be eaten immediately by slugs and caterpillars.

I found prints of my neighbour's dog, which roams around freely, all over my new carrot beds, so I spent a couple of hours cutting bamboo in a local bamboo grove and making a fence that I'm confident it can't get through. I'm sure it'll just find another way in though. It does leave little smelly patches of fertility here and there though, which seem to disappear quickly when mulched heavily.