Faggot fence

I have long wished to make a fence of bamboo faggots, and since our bamboo fence is showing signs of its age and lets in animals freely, I decided to tie bundles of bamboo twigs to it. What I didn't know when I started is how many twigs are actually required to make a worthwhile barrier. The answer is: several million. Indeed, planning a bamboo twig fence only seems worth it if you have a number of slaves at your disposal, which I don't.

Going to the bamboo groves and cutting the twigs is not itself unpleasant, but they often have leaves attached, and waiting for them to fall off is time-consuming. Baling six or seven twigs into a faggot with two bands of galvanized wire is also quite satisfying. However, attaching them to the fence would be easier with three arms instead of two, and there's a lot of "Gosh! Another millimetre and that twig would have stabbed me right in the eye" moments. The final effect is really quite attractive -- in Japanese we say "soboku" -- rustic and unsophisticated. But generally only achievable with slave labour.

Last year, two birds persistently ate the blueberries, and this year they've come back with their offspring. By planting this bristly fence in front of the blueberries, I'm hoping that the birds will find other gustatory options more tempting. However, it will be interesting to see what effect adjusting the microclimate in this way will have on the blueberries' health.

To dog, or not to dog

Today I got in considerable trouble for transporting rice husks and bamboo twigs in our car. Apparently they leave a residue which sticks to female clothing. It was suggested, with some ferocity, that I vacuum up the residue in all haste. When I went out compliantly with the vacuum cleaner, there was a little dog of the shiba variety standing on the corner.

I squatted down in the regulation 'Approach, Dog!' position, and the woolly little critter ambled up with a very matey look on its face -- up to within just out of reach. After a long period of negotiation, he came up to fingertip range, and started doing 'Paw! Paw!' For a dog, this is getting things in the wrong procedural order, because a bit of stroking definitely comes before 'Paw!', but it was extremely fetching behaviour for all its wrongness, or perhaps because of it.

Clearly, this was once somebody's pet, and obviously it could very quickly become somebody else's pet. I'm quite partial to dogs myself, although there are things about them that are inconvenient. I quickly canvassed opinion on the matter indoors. The missus (who is not partial to dogs in the least) said "We don't need a dog", and then relented saying, "You can keep the dog if you don't want to go back to England in the summer", while the young master noted that the said dog, who was often seen at his school, was renowned for being stupid.

A dog guarding the door looks surprisingly good

Actually, as soon as the dog came within inspection range, I couldn't help noticing that he had a largish tick embedded just under his ear. I hate to be regarded as calculating, but when Jack (as I came to think of him) was taking a familial interest in my vacuuming, I did wonder how much vets charge to remove ticks, and how much a month of dog food costs.

Jack makes himself at home, temporarily unfortunately

Country of the gods, innit

Not so long ago, the hapless ex-Prime Minister of Japan Mori Yoshiro declared "Japan is a country of gods with the Emperor at its center". He took a lot of stick for saying this. I don't think he was really right about the latter part, but as to the former, who can say the old duffer was far wrong?

If you look carefully, you can see some yellow and pink gods in this scene (Hint: they're hiding among the green gods.)

These ghastly scenes of witchcraft and superstition are to be found in the bamboo grove where I cut my culms. The one below is a well, while the one above is a..., is a... umm, I'll be damned if I know really.

If I had a productive well on my property, I think I'd want to celebrate it somehow too.

Botanical imperialism

My recent experiences with "Lady Banks' Rose" and "the Duke of Argyll's tea tree" got me thinking about the horrid parochiality of these names. I'm not especially keen on political correctness, but as a republican, I don't like to recognize the Nobs, especially when they're linked almost inextricably to the names of Asian plants. Until very recently, I didn't have a clear idea who "Lady Banks" was, but I felt it strange that a Chinese rose that I know of as 'mokkobara' (scented tree rose) should go by the Latin name of an 18th Century Englishwoman. Since the rose and the berry in my acquaintance have long Asian histories, it seems wrong that they should have British names, especially when these are codified as taxonomic names. Rather coincidentally I became aquainted with the Banks' in a book my parents sent me, The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. As someone who danced naked with Tahitians, Mrs Bank's husband Joseph was a thoroughly cosmopolitan man, and so one doesn't want to be too hard. But the Latin name of the mokkobara still rankles. I was very surprised though to find a footnote in The Age of Wonder that almost perfectly expressed my feelings on the matter.

The psychology of collecting, ordering and naming specimens could be seen as a form of mental colonising and empire-building. 'Taxonomy, after all, is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval surveys were flooding London with specimens to be classified, inserting them in their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy, had undeniable political overtones. Take a bird or a lizard or a flower from Patagonia or the South Seas, perhaps one that had a local name for centuries, rechristen it with a Latin binomial, and presto! It had become a tiny British colony'. Anne Fadiman, 'Collecting Nature', in At Large and at Small.

My yellow and white Rosa banksiae are presently very small. Indeed the white one is almost invisibly small (did I actually pay for these two leaves and bit of stalk?).

White rose: Left drainpipe

Yellow rose: Right drainpipe

However, given a few years, they should look like this:

(Well, I hope it won't look like a really crap 5 min Photoshop job, but I think I saw a house in Bristol last time I was there with roses up it, and it looked cool and wonderful.)

Grow baby, grow!

Since saplings are priced to give you pause before buying them, I decided it was time to delve into the business of cuttings and propagation. My first thought was to try pulling a twig off each of these peach trees that grow by the road near our house.

One has light pink and the other has dark pink flowers, and they're just about ready to put on a fantastic display. They're also still covered in peach seeds and what must be old, decayed peach, so I assume they're productive, although whether or not the peaches taste good I don't know. Nor care, particularly. If they don't taste that good, I'm resolved to try making peach alcohol with them.

But a little digging on the Web suggested that peach cuttings don't root at all from cuttings, unless you use root hormone. The twig I stuck in a pot of compost without root powder still seems to be about to flower, but I bought some hormone anyway, as I have some other things I want to try too.

I took cuttings of blackberry, wolfberry, boxwood, and peach. The instructions that come with the root powder are rather alarming; Ensure you have no cuts on your hands (I always have cuts on my hands, I'm a gardener), wash your hands four times after using the powder and gargle four times. Jesus Christ, will I grow roots if I inhale some of this stuff?

The blackberry and wolfberry didn't respond well to being cut, and their leaves wilted almost immediately. However, I dipped them in the root powder, potted them up, and I'm hoping for the best. I also gargled a few times and hoped for the best, but I'm willing to bet few gardeners take this step. And when you wash your little ceramic hormone dipping pot and the powder goes off into the water supply who gets to gargle that?

Well, enough hormonal speculation. The almond I planted last year is in full blossom. It had better watch out, because I'll be pulling twigs off it as soon as it grows a few more. These are some of the biggest, most robust flowers I've ever seen on a little tree, and they evoke the frank amazement all our visitors. If it grows into a full-sized tree, it should present rather a dramatic sight.

I also recently planted a Rosa Banksiae at each south-facing corner of the house, one yellow and one white, and I'm hoping to train them up the brickwork by sticking hooks in the grouting. Failing that, they'll have to climb up the drainpipe like a burglar.

Here are the peaches in blossom.

I am now a person who can produce a mortised hinge. Let there be no doubt on this point. I have produced three of the things, and they work perfectly.

I had my doubts I could do it, but I watched this nice American gent explain it, and then had a go. He no doubt enjoys the advantages of squareness and perpendicularity in everything he does, and these characteristics are nowhere present in my shed. But I actually improvised a plumb line to make sure the hinges were all in alignment, then got to work with my chisels.

Fortunately it was a hot, windless weekend, otherwise the ad hoc scaffolding I used for supporting the door would have collapsed at the first blast of wind. In fact, a little zephyr chanced by at one point, and the door, which was only hinged at the top at that point, showed its eagerness to swing, reminding me just what a precarious operation it was.

My little pink and green screwdriver, inherited from my female predecessor at an English school, was invaluable for getting the screws in snugly. Thanks Kelly!

I managed to get all three hinges completed before the scaffolding collapsed in a heap.

Three latches complete the door. Nothing can describe my feelings of satisfaction in having accomplished this very commonplace task.

The weeping plumb is now at the peak of its blossoming. Here are just a few of the many, many pictures I took. And to think that I used to laugh at old men who earnestly take pictures of blossoming trees.

The birds have been thrusting their beaks into each flower in turn, so hopefully there should be a crop of plums for making the plum drink that warms my winter evenings.

Shed project 3

As I mentioned before, there are no right angles in my shed, and likewise there are no level surfaces around it. Therefore setting up a ladder and shinning up it requires a certain degree of fatalism.

The ladder did once take a plunge into the orchard next door, lying with its feet up in the air, but fortunately I didn't go with it. There but for the grace of God...

The 2 be 4 method of construction is a real wonder. As soon as you nail the boards on, a horribly rickety structure is instantly transformed into something remarkably solid. The tasteful arched windows came off a bookshelf that I had retained in the face of opposition for lo, these many years. After I painted the frames the same colour as the rest of the shed, for some reason the phrase "Taj Mahal" kept ringing in my head.

Here is my shed, roofed and painted, with another local shed in the background. The older shed has a larger quotient of 'wabi-sabi' than mine. I did think about tiling it in the traditional style, but I have even less of a clue about that than about 90 degree angles.

Today I spent a few happy hours constructing a door that wouldn't be out of place on a barn, or maybe a castle. Indeed, I can hardly lift the thing. I bought a couple of hinges, then took them back and got some bigger ones which also look inadequate for the job. The question of right angles impinges especially heavily on the issue of hinging heavy doors, and I confess it puts me in a bit of a funk. There's also the matter of attaching a gutter and drainpipe which also strike me as highly technical procedures.

Shed project 2

This weekend was supposed to be unbelievably snowy.
It did snow a bit.

Then the weather went really nice, and my thoughts turned again to shed building. Here are the foundations that I finished last weekend. Note the homemade 'spirit level'. Very effective.

Making a straightforward wooden frame is more difficult than I thought. Simple as right angles are in concept, in execution they are tricky things. I made some very basic errors in calculation, and spent an inordinate amount of time unscrewing screws. It's fortunate that I've largely conquered Time, otherwise I'd have been very unhappy.

Just as I had raised the left and right frames into place and was standing with arms outstretched wondering how on earth I was going to join them together without them falling on top of me, the young master came tumbling out of the house to announce his willingness to help. We had a good 'ole time hitting our thumbs with hammers, and after a longish interval, we had the quite convincing makings of a shed.

Next weekend: Boarding up, painting, floor, door and windows. Insh'allah. (Or maybe that should be roof first. I can't quite make up my mind...)

Shed project 1

I've finally decided to use up the lumber remaining from building the house for building a little shed. I need somewhere out of the rain to store my tools, and I need another roof in the garden for gathering rain in a new butt. A small shed should serve both purposes.

This is the first semi-permanent structure that I've ever built, so it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. Dry, solid, functional, and picturesque are some words that spring to mind in terms of hopes.

Here are the foundations going in.

It looks dark because it was. I decided around 5 pm that I would build a shed, and the sun was going down. I hastened to the bamboo grove to cut a culm as a frame for some stones and broken roof tiles which will form the foundations. The winter wind was sighing and soughing through the bamboo, and I rather hoped to see a wraith, but none appeared. The darkness forced me to halt operations even though I was all hot to finish the thing in one go.

More another time I guess.

When camouflage fails

Insect camouflage is truly a wonderful achievement of evolution. But however wintry it may be outside, pretending to be a hibernating twig on a white painted interior simply does not cut it.


I awarded 40 points for effort and transferred the little creature to one of my old business cards. He maintained his façade, or maybe the charade, on the edge of the business card. I tore off the piece that he was clinging to, and tossed it into the bushes on the other side of the hedge. He was still maintaining his carefully calibrated angle and his stiffness has he hurtled and twisted through the air.

Pressure cooking with my own produce

Happy New Year! Let's hope peace breaks out around the world this year, and the dire economic situation is taken as an opportunity to build a more humane and sustainable economy.

Recently I've been left on my own due to various piano events involving the missus and young master, and so I've been experimenting with making dinner with home-dried ingredients that the missus seems to baulk at using. The results have been most satisfactory to my mind.

We have a 'super-pressure cooker' (a 'kasturyoku nabe' from Asahi Kasei*) which cooks anything in about 1 minute. The first thing I tried was chicken breast with shiitake and wolfberries.

* The word is out on these things. If you want to buy one now, there's a waiting list of several months.

Recipe:
Fry garlic and ginger, then sauté pieces of chicken breast.
Add equal quantities of vegetable oil, sesame oil and sake/shokoshu mix, with sugar and salt in sensible quantities.
Add shiitake with the stems removed, and a suitable quantity of wolfberries (dried).
Bring to the simmer and pressure cook for 1 minute in a super-pressure cooker.
Open the lid and enjoy the smell of ... ramen!

When my family came home, they said "It smells like ramen!" more times than I could count. I served it on rice with boiled broccoli. It had a hearty, wholesome taste and the wolfberries went very well with rice. But the young master was not keen on them and eventually forked the remainder onto my plate, while approving of the chicken, shiitake, and 'ramen' gravy. The many cookery blogs of English-speaking Asians attest to the common theme that wolfberries are not really a children's favourite. Well, tough, they're good for you.

You may recall that in the summer, I sun-dried my excellent mini-tomatoes. The other day I was on my own for dinner and I made a risotto with sun-dried tomatoes and minced pork.


Recipe:
Simmer sun-dried oil-stored tomatoes in a pan with a little water (as to quantity, your guess is as good as mine).
In the pressure cooker, sauté garlic and onion in the olive oil from the dried tomatoes, then add pork/beef mince and sauté until sealed. Chicken or white fish would probably do too.
Put the tomatoes in the pressure cooker, and in the remaining water, dissolve a bouillon cube.
Add a seemingly sensible quantity of rice to the sautéed mix and ensure that it's well coated in oil. Then pour on the bouillon water, simmer, and pressure cook for 1 minute.
Open the lid with trepidation and excitement, transfer to a bowl and stir in plenty of black pepper and Parmesan. Top with fresh, chopped Italian parsley.

Since the water content was calibrated extremely roughly, the result was something between risotto and congee. However, the rice was pleasantly al dente even if the consistency overall was a little sloppy. The tomatoes had the same characteristics as when they were fresh; sweet, tangy flesh, and rather tough skins. The sweet, tangy taste more than made up for the toughness, and drying them intensified the flavour. The whole mélange was very agreeable, especially with a glass of white wine.

From this I conclude something of interest to the agriculture and food culture of Ehime and to parts of Japan with a similar climate. Both mini tomatoes and wolfberries can be grown without the use of chemical fertilizers, and can be preserved relatively easily by sun-drying. They can also be combined with readily available foodstuffs to make delicious, healthy, and easily prepared dishes. Nota bene as we Latins say.

Wolfberry myths and truths

Now that it's wolfberry season and I have more of the things than I know what to do with, I've been poking about online for ideas. I remember reading that they mustn't be touched, so I checked that out.

If you Google wolfberry oxidize black, you get a whole bunch of sites that say,
"Wolfberries grow in protected valleys of Inner Mongolia and Tibet. The berries are never touched by hand; they will oxidize and turn black if touched while fresh. Harvesters shake the large bushes so that the ripe berries fall onto mats, where they are then dried in the shade."
This contains 4 utter falsehoods. If you have a site that repeats this nonsense, shame on you.

If any wolfberries actually grow in Mongolia or Tibet, they don't grow in sufficient quantities to ship in significant volumes to anywhere else. (Just imagine how expensive they would be, carried from their secluded valleys.) Wolfberries have to be picked by hand since they don't fall off the bushes, which isn't a problem since they don't oxidize when touched, let alone turn black. They have a robust outer skin like that of a tomato. Wolfberries are dried either in the sun, or in enclosed dryers. There's plenty of evidence available online. I've touched my berries extensively, with clean hands and with dirty hands, and they don't turn black, ever. Wolfberries are also not fertilized with unicorn manure in a midnight ceremony involving the sacrifice of a phoenix.

The fresh berry in my hand has been touched repeatedly.
The dried berries from the packet must have been bigger when fresh.

The ones I dried weren't any more pleasant in their dessicated state than their fresh state. Their marginal sweetness and strong bitterness were both enhanced, with the bitterness winning out completely. So I decided to try some from China. All I could find was a small packet of S&B dried 'kuko no mi' for 130 yen. Eaten directly from the packet, they're very chewy, slightly sweet, and slightly bitter. Not wonderful at all. After soaking, they're reasonably palatable and might plausibly make a positive addition to food. So the next thing to do is to try following some recipes that feature them.

Washed and touched berries. Still bright red.
Dried berries from China soaking in water.

And also, since they seem so popular in China where they grow, I assume they must have some better varieties so I'm going to try potting the seeds from the dried wolfberries. The soaked berries are larger than my biggest ones, so I hope to grow a plant that produces bigger fruit, assuming it's happy with the conditions in my garden.

Late summer veg and wolfberries

Even after a couple of savage cold snaps, the garden is giving up huge quantities of green peppers. Broccoli has started flowering, and the tomatoes are still hanging on. The wolfberries are now producing abundantly. One thing I hadn't appreciated about wolfberries is how difficult they would be to collect. They're small, soft, and grow on chaotic, prickly vines. Gathering this lot took an astonishingly long time, forcing me to rethink some of my more extravagant plans concerning wolfberries. I'm going to try drying these.

The Black Seaman Tomatoes I got from an American friend were ravaged by slugs and a very large species of caterpillar, so we only got to eat a few tomatoes early in the season. However, after the caterpillars died off, there were a lot of green tomatoes left. Placed on a south-facing window-sill, they've begun to ripen and with their rather salty taste, they make a good addition to a lunch-time salad.

Bamboo dome - "Romanchiku"

This weekend, the weather was superb - warm and sunny. On Saturday and Sunday, I went to Mugen Mura to help build a bamboo dome. There's already a bamboo dome at Mugen Mura that we built last year. It's the yurt-like thing pictured below. Wrapped in several layers of blue tarp and greenhouse plastic, it's warm in winter and provides good shade in summer.

First we cut several large bamboo poles in the forest above the compound. It's always impressive the way that living bamboo can turned into a building material in a matter of a few minutes.



This time, the dome is being built according to a simplified design. On Sunday, Boy Scouts, most of whom were actually Girl Guides to my way of thinking, were to construct the actual dome, using struts prepared in advance on Saturday. Nishizaki-san explains how the thing is to be built, based on blueprints and a pretty model.

Splitting the bamboo is the hardest part, requiring cooperation, coordination, and a high degree of trust in the hammer man. It all went very smoothly.

The joints inside the strips of bamboo have to be knocked off with a bill-hook, and the edges shaved off if possible for safe handling (we couldn't be bothered, and wore gloves instead).


On Sunday, the Scouts/Guides arrived and we started putting the dome together. This always involves a lot of headscratching and bewilderment, and general tying and untying of string. Those who tend to maintain opinions as a matter of course often like to voice them at this point.

When we reckon everything is in place, there's a concerted heave-ho, and the dome is raised into place. A lot of adjustment is then required to get a smooth and nicely rounded frame.

This time, it was a bit of a fiasco really. The new design, while perfectly good in itself, hadn't quite crystallized fully in Nishizaki-san's mind, and so there was uncertainty about how many struts should meet in one place. In making adjustments, the dome became increasingly wonky, and several of the ties in the struts came loose. Eventually we gave up. Since the dome would have been taken down immediately anyway, this didn't seem like a great shame.

With quiet determination, Nishizaki-san held his own 'hansei' (review) session, splitting some of the struts in half and making a 1:10 scale version to test the design. It worked.

On Saturday, as we sat in last year's dome eating delicious ton-jiru and zenzai, one of our number happened to mention that buying a greenhouse of similar size would cost a small fortune. This is surely something to reflect on, and not only for agricultural purposes. For emergency shelter, the full size thing or a 1:10 version would be easy to make, durable, and cheap.

On the way home, I spotted a howaito kyatto on a shurain. I thought it would make a neat photo, but it's just a skinny cat lying about on an undistinguished religious shed.