Blueberry success

The blueberries that we had planted for us last year produced their first bumper crop. I ignored the urgings of various people to tear out the clover that surrounded them, and instead mulched the beds with pine branches which I'd read on the Net that they like. The clover grew up through the mulch, and I assume, provided the blueberries with nitrogen as opposed to competing savagely with them as our garden man had intimated. I did take care to provide them with regular water, and I daresay they would have done even better with more. One other factor in the large harvest is that the berries are planted in front of my office porthole, and whenever a local husband and wife bird couple came to sup on them I dashed out to chase them away. The fishing line that I tied just above the horizontals on the bamboo fence also denied them a place to sit before they hopped onto the bushes. (I'm sure I heard one of them say "#%$@! What is this damn string doing here!")

For all of August, our two varieties (whose names I forget) provided us with a goodly quantity for breakfast or dessert. One variety is has large and pale berry, while the other is round and black. They each have a distinct and different flavour.

We had so many berries in fact, that some were shrivelling on the bush before we could eat them. Noting this wasteful situation, the missus broke with precedent and ventured out into the garden with a basket to collect them for jam. The young master went out too, but was too busy slapping at the mosquitoes on his legs to help much.

The jam was cooked with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and a mere splash of water. Nothing else. It's rather rougher in texture than shop-boughten jam, but it's naturally sweet and contains no preservatives. It goes nicely with yoghurt.

Incidentally, I have received a complaint from the missus that my photos of food are 'unappetising' and that I should ensure that there are no extraneous objects in the shot to detract from the food. Readers will kindly note that this is not one of those blogs that presents life in an idealized and enviable form, without ugliness and failure. No, this is one of those blogs that shows the clutter that surrounds us as we eat our imperfect home-produced food.

Dry this, dry that

I've always been impressed that you can take stuff like fresh vegetables and even meat that have a strong tendency to rot, and leave them out in the sun, and instead of going bad, they turn into a form that lasts indefinitely, more or less.

So now that we have a surplus of tomatoes and goya, I hurried down to the DIY store to get some drying equipment. I hummed and hahed about getting one of the bamboo trays with the convertible-roof style net, but they look like an invitation to little flies and ants since they don't seal so well. Instead I got one of the tightly zippered kinds that I've seen fishermen using for drying small fish.

The plan is to have dried tomatoes to keep in olive oil with basil, which I also grow, and goya tea which is hellish bitter, but very refreshing if you can actually swallow it. Having once got used to eating and drinking goya, I spend a large part of the year looking forward to the season. I also enjoy the pungent stink of the vine itself.

The wooden balcony gets so hot now, you can't stay in one place with bare feet, so it's a good temperature for drying things. You just have to hop about when you set up the drying net. After two days, the goya is already done, and the tomatoes are coming along nicely. The net keeps even little flies off completely. Since the net has to be taken inside at night in case it rains, which is a bit of hassle, it would seem to pay to do rather more at one go. Something to plan for next time. Today I bought two more tomato plants to ensure a larger surplus towards the end of the summer.

The weather forecast at the moment is 'sunny forever'. This is good for growing and drying tomatoes (I always think of the little suns as mini-tomatoes, and my family no longer even look up when I say "Mini-tomatoes all week".) It's a bit of a concern about the other plants that actually like a sip of water from time to time because there isn't any left, at least not in the rainwater tank. I feel guilty using the hose.

Oh, and I succeeded in growing a big orange American sugar pumpkin. In fact, one section of the garden is positively littered with the things. I hope they taste as good as they look*.


* They taste lousy - watery and thin. I won't be growing them again, although the fruit made an attractive decoration that added a very American Colonial flavour to our house.

Victimhood

No I'm not talking about having my blood sucked by mosquitos and itching for an hour afterwards. I'm talking about economic losses on a dramatic scale.

This week, I lost six high quality, organic watermelons to a crow. The normal chemical watermelons are selling at 580 yen at the moment. So that's a loss of 3,480 yen, more if you consider the value of organic produce. And the stupid vermin didn't eat all of the six watermelons. It ate the equivalent of one, and ruined the rest by pecking at them, leaving beak-sized holes for the ants to get in.

And just now when I went outside to sniff the air, I heard a rustling in the corn, and knew that it was a tanuki. I charged up the garden and heard it get over the fence into the mikan orchard next door where it waited while I inspected the damage. Again, it hasn't eaten in an orderly, economically responsible fashion. It has ripped and nibbled at each corn cob in turn, ruining about five, and trampling down some of the stalks.

The corn incident comes as an especially bitter blow since I spent some time this morning setting up nets over the Cannonball black watermelon patch where a crow had tasted but rejected an immature melon (not counted in the damage tally above). With a little foresight, I could have protected the corn. Last year, I lost all of my corn and most of my watermelons to drought, weeds and typhoons. This year, it's not all, but losing some to vermin is a serious annoyance.

This calls for determined protective measures.

OK, 'vermin' might be a bit harsh. Maybe, 'naughty little tinker' might have been fairer. When I went out to water later, my headlight picked out a pair of green eyes staring at me from the other side of the fence. I approached my nemesis talking to it in a soothing voice, and found it was a very young, very black tanuki, only the size of a small cat. I really like tanuki. They're always wary and maintain a safe distance, but they respond to being spoken to, and don't dart off and cower like cats. I put some of the opened cobs on the other side of the fence for it to eat later.

I'm still going to put nets round my next crop of corn though.

Micro Kickboard Original and other imperfect means of travel

When I went back to the UK at Easter, I was determined to get myself an A-bike (normally I would link to the site of the product itself, but unbelievably, it's down for 'site maintenance'. How pathetic). The idea was to use the A-bike for trips to the pub in the evening to see my friends when I'm in the UK, and take it back to Japan on the plane. Here I would use it to ride to the station, fold it up on the train, and ride it in town on whatever errands I might have (mostly drinking). I contacted sales at A-bike and they 'thought' the new version of the A-bike 'might' be out by April 1st. It's now July, and their website has disappeared.

So as an alternative, I looked at scooters, otherwise known as 'kickboards'. I'm always tempted by unorthodox kit of any sort, and so I was immediately drawn to the Micro Kickboard Original, with its groovy 3 wheels and knobstick. I own an Outback mountainboard which has a similar front end and which carves in a blissfully loopy fashion. I figured that the Micro Original might do something similar in a smaller, portable package. Well I got one, and it doesn't.

I ordered it before I left Japan, took delivery in London, and brought it back on the plane. I'd hoped to have it as hand luggage, but no such luck.

Micro Kickboard Original review

Having tried the Micro Kickboard Original in all sorts of places and conditions, I can safely say that the Original has the following fatal problems;

• It doesn't turn properly. It just topples over at the slightest angle. This is because the front wheels are too close together and the axles interfere with the natural balance that centrifugal force would otherwise provide.
  
• It goes into wobbles at very low speeds.
• The wheels don't return to a neutral position on their own. You have to sort of squish the front to get it back into alignment.
• The springs squeak all the time. It sounds like standing on a cat.
• The rubber grip is too small and too soft. It's also the wrong shape.
• It's too heavy for use as a casual commuting vehicle, or for taking on a plane, or indeed for just bunging in a cupboard.

With slight pressure on the left side, the right wheel rises up.
(It's hard to see in this pic, but there is a gap.)

On the move, this means you simply fall off.

I've tried the springs on a range of settings and it makes no difference to any of the problems above. Applications of grease don't stop it sounding like an outraged cat either. I'm sick of the dogs in the neighbourhood barking at me.

It's supposed to return itself to upright - but doesn't

I recently tried a Razor scooter and it was just so much better than the Original. Faster, lighter, quieter, more stable, and really fun. And it's much, much cheaper than the Original. I was frankly shocked how bad the Original is in comparison even to a cheap Razor.

I have seen a couple of videos of the Original here and here. It's quite obvious from these videos that the Original can't make tight turns. In the first video, you can see how it nearly falls over, and you can see how the children have to clutch at the insufficient knob with both hands to keep their balance. Oh, and here's a good video of somebody losing it, as you do.



In short, this product is not suitable either for children's or adult's fun, and it isn't suitable for commuting either.

This is all a rather sorry state of affairs. With the worldwide energy situation entering a crisis, any fun, cheap, portable, readily available source of transport would seem to be highly desirable. And yet companies like the A-bike and Micro are pitching their products at non-serious people in a thoroughly unbusinesslike way.

Kneehabilitation

On the New Year holidays before we moved into this house, we visited my mother-in-law and I climbed the mountain behind her house. I used to climb it often before our son was born 10 years ago, and it felt good to be doing it again, especially in the ankle-deep snow. That is, until I stood up after my lunch and found that my knees were very painful. Still, I pushed on up to the top whereupon I realized that the descent was going to be a bit of a killer.

But I'd had trouble with my knees climbing mountains before, and I figured it would pass as it always did. Well, that was when I was ten years younger, and I had no such luck this time. The right knee got better, but the left has ached and twinged ever since. It effectively put a stop to my habit of running up hill and down dale in the dark after work for 30 minutes.

I had it X-rayed - nothing to see. I tried acupuncture. That felt OK, but it was expensive, and it didn't really do anything. Then I tried Kinesio taping but this also was very expensive. And the 'doctor' had a little handheld jack-hammer thing which he discharged without warning into the part of my knee that I had indicated was tender. Had I been warned, I probably wouldn't have screamed in pain. But then I would also have declined that particular treatment. This is what I believe is known as 'informed consent'. You can see why people value it when they go for medical treatment. Anyway, the taping didn't work, although the 'doctor' kept saying "That feels better now, right?"

A doctor at a local clinic mentioned steroid injections, and recommended I not do it for reasons that are unclear. Then I suggested I was bored with having a duff knee and asked him what the 'aggressive' treatment might be in this case. "A steroid injection" was the reply. So I had one, and it didn't work.

Next I tried massage at two different local clinics. It actually seemed to make a difference for a while, and I even started running again, albeit for only 10 minutes on a flat course. But in the end, it didn't seem to work.

Other minor treatments that haven't worked include the application of electricity, ultrasound, infrared, and magic. I didn't really want the lady in question to try the magic, but I was too polite to refuse.

The next recommendation was either a course of hyaluronic acid injections or an MRI scan, followed by surgery. I've pretty much decided to try the hyaluronan treatment, but this Friday at lunchtime I saw a program about a newish sports treatment called "kaatsu training", or I suppose, "applied pressure training" in English. This involves constricting the blood vessels of the arms and legs before doing light exercise. This works the muscles harder and when the constriction is removed, the blood vessels increase in size, and beneficial hormones are sent to the tissues of the limbs. It seems to have a sound scientific basis, and it is also supposed to have helped bed-ridden old people get up and walk again. Apparently it's also used on racehorses. (But then arsenic used to be used on racehorses too, with famously unfortunate effects.)

Anyway, I found a place in Ehime that does kaatsu training, and went on Saturday morning. The youngish man who conducted it on a one-on-one session inspired confidence. He made no fantastic claims, and was pleasant and gentle. Having one's legs constricted actually felt good, and the exercise wasn't at all challenging. He said I had strong legs. But lifting a small dumbbell with my arms constricted ... hurt. Not too badly, but he suggested I try to put up with it since it was normal, so I did and it was OK. He said he thought I had weak arms.

Then he asked if I knew what chiropractic was. Rather insensitively, I said, "That's the therapy that people say has no scientific basis, isn't it?" He mildly assented that that was indeed said of chiropractic, but that he believed it was effective. I had images of violent, dangerous spine manipulations and was getting suspicious.

He asked if he might check out my alignment, and when I agreed, he stood me in front of a mirror and felt lightly up and down from my shoulders to my ankles. It struck me that no other practitioner had done this, and it seemed like a very obvious and necessary first step. Then he offered a further check lying down. After manipulating my ankles, he suggested I had twisted my left ankle badly at some point. Indeed, when I was about 16 I had jumped over a wall, caught my heel on top of it, and been immobilised for about a week. I immediately conceived considerable respect for this style of treatment. I asked him more about his chiropractic and he told me that he too distrusted the 'crick' methods, believing that they do incremental and permanent damage. He favoured careful stretching under the patient's own power.

I don't know yet whether the kaatsu training is going to work, but at least I'm confident that I've found a specialist worth his salt. Nothing he said or did put me off him, a first.

Now you may very well be wondering what this has to do with sustainability, the general topic of this blog. Well, if something goes wrong with your health, you can no longer sustain some of the activities that you did hitherto, and your general health begins to suffer. By not running, I lost a method of relieving stress and I gained weight. And in an effort to regain your health, you travel around more than you otherwise would, you use energy in various forms, whether electric or magical, and you consume a variety of medical products whose production methods you may not be overly pleased to learn about. And so finding the best method of treating your health issues has implications for sustainability, both of one's own lifestyle and the wider world. If kaatsu training and a little chiropractic turn out to work, I'll be very pleased as they're about as close as you can get to self-regenerative medicine.

First summer produce

So far this year we've had rain at least once a week, often more, interspersed with sunny days. This has been most beneficial for growing.

Today I was in charge of my own lunch, so I took my little basket into the garden and picked myself a 'sallet'. I had 'asparagus lettuce' which is a fantastically productive cut-and-come-again variety. I planted three, and we've eaten vast bowl-fulls of it for weeks now. I also cut some peppery nasturtium leaves (which the rest of my family refuse to eat for their own irrational reasons), and some Italian parsley. The first tomatoes had ripened and not split open in the rain, so I got a few of those. I had already plucked my first couple of cucumbers and they were in the fridge. I chopped one of the onions that had failed to grow into a proper one. These are often the object of unkind comments when first brought in from the garden, but for adding a certain je ne sais quoi to a salad, they have their uses. I must say I felt a little bit twee photographing my wicker basket while thinking hey-nonny-nonny things about 'sallets', but the first pickings of summer are very satisfying nonetheless.

Other good things include a pumpkin, an aubergine, and some peppers. These formed the basis of a nice early summer curry this evening. Either the pumpkin isn't a very flavoursome variety, or I just failed to feed it the right things, but it was little on the bland side. I'm hoping that my American heirloom sugar pumpkin will be more tasty. It's coming along a storm. And this year, I'm doing a better job of controlling the weeds (nothing clever, just more time spent picking them), so I'm definitely expecting good things.

One of several firsts this year was garlic. My friend assured me, "Even an idiot can grow garlic", and he was right. Each little clove miraculously turned into a bulb, without much more than mulch and a bit of weeding. The 'farmer's shelter' thoughtfully by our builder Hidaka-san really comes into its own for curing garlic.

The rice paddies are now mostly flooded and the rice seedling have been planted. The frogs are making an absolutely stunning racket, especially at night. Sunsets in the spring are not generally very photogenic, but the hotter weather is bringing something a bit more interesting to look at.

I heard today that Kadota-san of Khome's, who we asked to make a plan for our house, has died in a car accident. This is very sad news. Kadota-san was a talented architect, and a charming person. He will be missed by many people.

Can-O-Worms canned

Kitchen scraps gathered in an enamel dish

About four years ago I bought a Can-O-Worms which I had sent from Australia where they're made. I seem to remember it cost about 16,000 yen. I also bought a big bag of worms from somewhere in Gifu for about 5,000 yen. The bag contained about 1,500 worms.

Can-O-Worms on the left with yellow bucket

At that time we had an underground concrete garage with a metal shutter and I kept it in there. The garage stayed at a fairly even temperature and because it was kept closed most of the time, it was almost free of flies. Since it didn't get very hot, the kitchen scraps didn't smell, unless you took the lid off and put your face inside, whereupon you could detect the smell of decay. But since flies rely on their sense of smell for their livelihood, they can detect that smell even if you can't, so chances are that if you've got your face in the bin checking the smell, a fly that has been waiting patiently nearby has also slipped in and laid some invisible eggs. These will hatch and then you'll have maggots in the bin.

With the Can-O-Worms in the garage, I usually had vinegar fly maggots and soldier fly maggots most of the time. Vinegar flies have a life-cycle of about one week, so there are always adults to fly up in your face to greet you, and always maggots on the go. Soldier flies are admirable creatures in many ways. The adults are quite handsome flies, they don't sting or do any harm, and the larvae are voracious eaters. But when you're trying to keep worms, having a bin full of large white maggots can seem a bit disappointing. Worm casts are supposed to have almost magical properties in terms of growing vegetables, but I've never heard anything to that effect about maggot poo. But because soldier flies have a long life cycle, they're not a constant airborne nuisance like the other flies.

The situation in the last house was tolerable. There were not enough flies around to bother anybody else in the garage, and there was no noticeable smell. I had a very small garden, so whenever one tray from the Can was full, it actually contributed a significant portion of additional soil. And this soil was quite a nice black, soft, inoffensive substance. The liquid 'tea' that dripped slowly from the tap also seemed to do the plants good. So for the couple of years that it was in the garage it was fine. During that time I tried a number of things to defeat the flies completely such as using shredded newspaper, sheets of newspaper, scattering rice husks on the surface, occasionally adding garden lime and so on. None of it worked, and the paper was just a big hassle.

Under the balcony

In the new house, the Can-O-Worms went outside under the balcony. Things started going wrong very quickly. In the cold season from October to April, the worms hardly ate anything at all. In the hot season, they ate, but the scraps were quite noticeably smelly, and there were lots of flies. The soldier flies found a way of laying eggs by scraping their little bottoms along the joins between the trays, and when the little maggots hatched, they were able to squeeze through, which they did in vast numbers. There was always a crust of yellow eggs between the trays. The 'soil' produced was not nice. It was a sloppy, fudgy mess with a generally decayed smell. And one tray doesn't go very far when you have some twenty plants as well as tens of metres of hedges.

A crust of soldier fly eggs

Legions of 'toilet flies'

Then at the end of last year, the bin became infested with little moth-like flies. Normally this kind of fly likes to sit alone on the damp towel hanging in the toilet of snack bars. But this time it came in Pharonic numbers. Every time I lifted the lid to put in fresh scraps, they swarmed out, flying up my nose, sitting on my eyelids, and churning dumbly about the concrete floor. I finally decided to try putting a piece of hessian sacking on top of the scraps, which all sources assure one is a great way for suppressing flies. Not only did it not have the least effect on the flies, it became infested with a very merry motley of moulds which degraded it into an annoying mess within about a month.

In your face

The procedure for swapping trays is not all plain sailing either. In theory, the worms are supposed to make their way up to the top tray in an orderly fashion. Well they don't. In fact, they rather like to hang about in the bottom tray of casts which are supposed to be mildly poisonous to them (just as we like to wallow about in bars which are mildly poisonous to us). So the bottom tray has to be placed on the top and the casts removed carefully with a trowel, as you coax the little worms down through the holes to the tray below with the 'fresh' food in it.

Managing the trays (awkwardly)

The trays, being full of a damp soil mixture, are heavy, and you have to lift two of them at a time to get the bottom one out. This is not very good for either the knees or back, whichever part you decide to sacrifice at the time.

Adult worms, baby worms, toilet flies, avocado seeds, eggshells, and sloppy casts

Well today, after much internal debate, I decided to can the Can-O-Worms. I just emptied out the contents of each tray into my two-bay compost heap. I was surprised to find that, after 16 months outside, there were in fact not very many worms in there at all. I think they must have been out-competed by the various fly larvae.

The compost heap however is full of worms anyway. And not just the red composting worms of the type that live in the Can-O-Worms, but the big snakey earthworms too. These attain spectacularly large sizes, so I assume they must eat a lot.

The fresher half of the two-bay compost has a preponderance of the red worms, while the more mature half has lots of the earthworms. This biodiverse situation seems more satisfactory than the monotype that the Can-O-Worms aims for but general fails to achieve.

So to sum up, claims that the Can-O-Worms of worms is fly-proof and easy to manage really are bunk. The suggestions presented for dealing with the problems that inevitably occur also did not work in my experience. However, with a small garden and somewhere enclosed to keep the bin, it may be worth having a Can-O-Worms. But whatever your situation, the same benefits can be achieved by composting and mulching, so I can only conclude that a worm bin is little more than a time-consuming curiosity.

Umeshu jam

Every spring when green plums become available, I make umeshu (plum liquor) by steeping whole plums in 30 degree spirit alcohol with sugar. I normally use the sugar from the sachets that you get with yoghurt. This year, I started using Okinawan cane sugar (kokuto) for extra flavour, and it's very good. This means that the following spring, I have a glass jar with very little umeshu in it, but a lot of alcohol soaked plums. Deciding what to do with them is almost as big a headache as you get from drinking one sip too many of umeshu.

In previous years I've put the old plums in with the new ones, but that just results in a build up of plums and less umeshu to drink. I've also tried eating the plums, but they're offensively alcoholic tasting. One year I put a load of plums in the compost and that seemed to work, although I'm sure it must have killed a few alcohol intolerant critters in the compost.

So this year, I looked around on the Japanese Web under "umeshu jam pressure cooker" and found some very simple recipes for umeshu jam.

The procedure is simple. Put the whole plums in a pressure cooker and add a little water. The picture below shows water up to the level of the plums. The missus suggested this was too much, so I poured half of it away, and it was still too much.

We have a super high-performance pressure cooker, so only one minute of bubbling on the hob was required.

After the pressure dropped, I opened the cooker and found that the fruit of the plums was much loosened from the pits. Squeezing the plums between big cooking chopsticks, I got most of the fruit off, and took out the pits (which will go into the compost). Then I simmered the remaining sauce/jam to thicken it, while stirring with a wooden spoon. Even after pressure cooking, it gave off a very strong boozy smell. Opinion was sharply divided along gender lines as to whether or not this was a good smell.

I used too much water initially, and since thickening it was becoming a bit of a bore, I decided to bottle the product as sauce rather than jam.

I dunno, this looks kinda yucky

It isn't an attractive product. The missus had her nose turned up throughout the whole procedure, and the young master noted that the finished sauce seemed to be full of plum skins. I intend to reserve judgement, chill it and have it with yoghurt. I think that, made with less water, a thicker jam might make the basis of a good Christmas pudding. At any rate, there's no shortage of umeshu plums to experiment with.

Conclusion:
This jam is disgusting. On its own it tastes of nothing but alcohol. It has a very unappealing mushy texture, like all the inedible bits of fruit. In yoghurt, the alcohol taste vanishes, leaving only the nasty texture to spoil the yoghurt.

This concoction is going to go into the compost after a suitable period of quarantine in an open container mixed with some absorbent organic material.

Lesson learned.

Gift seeds

My American friend and colleague in Suwa sent me some seeds which his mum sent him from the US, and I've been carefully nurturing them in pots. In fact, they came along so well, I gave one of each to another American friend here who provided me with coriander last autumn. This seems like quite a lively international exchange of vegetable matter.

I have sugar pumpkins, red Hmong cucumbers, and Black Seaman Tomatoes. The red Hmong cucumbers are Hmong the best in the world (I keep saying this, and it tickles me every time).

This afternoon as the sun was going down, I planted the pumpkins in mounds of compost. The tomatoes and cucumbers should be ready for transplanting next weekend, Insh'allah.

These triffids are also about to flower. I think I better keep my son indoors when they do.

Bamboo beehive

Following on from my post about bamboo, I decided to try making this simple beehive, described in this PDF (you may need to copy and paste the URL in your browser to view it http://www.echotech.org/mambo/images/DocMan/BeehiveD.PDF)

I used a couple of segments from the base of big Moso culm.

Top bar hives are a kind of hive with bars across a box of some sort. The bars are fitted with either a strip of thin board hanging down, or a wood with a triangular section. This is so the bees can hang off it to start making their comb. With this in mind, I stuffed a bamboo twig in each segment hoping that the little hooked feet of the bees will eagerly cling to them without any special encouragement.

The front door ended up being a bit bigger than expected as the interior segments got damaged when I split the culm. So I shut up the hole a bit with some carefully fitted slats. I think it looks most welcoming - I'm hoping that I've achieved the bee equivalent of a nice carriage light.

The back door is just a ragged gaping hole, but I figure that's good for ventilation. I understand that bees have a gubbins called propolis which they use to fix up parts of their lodgings that aren't quite A1, so I expect to see lashings of propolis around that part soon.

I wired the finished 'hive' into our big tree. I chose wire instead of the rope apparently favoured by the Tanzanians because when it blows up here, everything that isn't fixed down flies about and I rather think that bees prefer things to be in Bristol fashion.



There are plenty of bees around, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before one of them hooks it's little toes over the thoughtfully placed bamboo twigs inside. Realistically though, it seems unlikely that bees will take up residence in a roughly split piece of bamboo, wired into a tree, but if it works in Tanzania, it seems worth trying here. The bamboo 'hive' replaces the bird house we made. No birds ever went near it, but when we took it down, we found a gecko living very comfortably inside it. I wonder what will set up house in our hive...

In the meantime, I'm going to be looking out for a box suitable for a top bar hive, and will go and talk to the bee keepers in the district.

Sea-buckthorn

I found myself reading a blog about cocktails (I have no idea why in retrospect), and it mentioned sea-buckthorn. Since this superfruit also contains protein, it's surely a plant that somebody who plans to keep, but not feed, chickens needs to look at. So without further ado, I found the cheapest vendor of sea-buckthorn on the Japanese net, which happened to be engei.net, as far as I can be bothered to check. This berry has male and female plants and you need at least one of each, so I bought two to be going on with. I figure that if I want more of either later, I'll be able to propagate cuttings.

The sea-buckthorn grows into a big prickly shrub which should be ideal as a hedge for keeping out beagle/terrier mix dogs. With goji and and sea-buckthorn berries, I will surely corner the market in Matsuyama for healthy, organic superberries.