Easy bamboo biochar

The other day, my internet friend Patrick popped up on Skype to tell me about a simple method of making biochar. He'd been to a talk in Tokyo, and he knew from my blog that I'd be interested. How did we used to manage without the interweb, and how impoverished would we be if it was taken away?

The trouble with this method is, most metal cans are of standard sizes, and they haven't been designed with charcoal making in mind. However, being one who takes a keen interest in places where rubbish accumulates, I managed to find an eccentrically-sized can that just fits through the hole in the top of my incinerator.

Cutting the bamboo to the right size took much longer than I had bargained for. A frog in the bushes got rather excited by the sawing noise and felt stimulated to compete. Consequently, there was a general cacophony this morning in the garden. Fitting the slivers tightly in the can also took a while and involved some hammering.

It seemed a shame to waste the space between the bamboo, so I pressed some spare rice husks into service as filler. (Is there any purpose to which rice husk is not ideally suited?)

I put part of a thick rice bag over the top of the can to get it into the incinerator without all the bamboo and rice husk falling out.

There seemed to be a lot of scrap wood and bamboo around the garden to use for fuel, but I made two trips to the bamboo grove anyway, to scavenge dead culms. In the end, I used a lot of fuel.

Ignition! Off to a good start...

Oh shit! I hadn't expected quite such intense calorific output...

Fortunately, I'd prepared two buckets of water and a watering can too. The heat was phenomenal, and when embers spilled out from the holes in the bottom, the already dry grass around caught fire very easily. I had to resort to the watering can a number of times, and if I hadn't been paying attention, the fire brigade would have been out.

The instructions say that you can easily tell when the pyrolysis gas catches fire, but perhaps because I had such a jolly old conflagration going, I had no idea. Not that I wasn't paying close attention either -- I was most anxious not to burn everything on our property to charcoal.

The seemingly vast quantity of fuel burned down to very little ash

After more than an hour of cooling, the inner can was still very hot, but not so hot as to reignite.

Since I hadn't observed pyrolysis, I was concerned that I might still have a lot of brown bamboo. But all of it was gratifyingly black, except for the tips of a few bits in the middle. The quality of the charcoal seemed to be very high -- clean, glassy and brittle. I expect it will be very easy to crush and mix into soil.

Judging by the way the bamboo was all bent and twisted, I suppose it must have got rather hot in the little can.

In general, this seems to be a good way of making charcoal, but next time I'll use much less fuel. Bamboo burns very hot and fast, so I believe the same result can probably be achieved without the 4 ft flame.

Biodiversity

When I was a kid, I used to go to Bristol City Museum and see their displays of grotesquely large insects from exotic countries. I always thought, Ye gods!, what must it be like to live in a place where these things exist?

Now I know.


This thing is actually about as long as my index finger, held up for the sake of scale. However, to show the scale properly, I would have had to put my finger closer to this monster, and NO WAY did I want what it has on those hairs to get onto my skin. I already have enough grief at this time of year from the poison of the moth called the 'chadokuga' which leaves fantastically itchy blotches all over the parts of my body covered by clothing. Weird. Horrible and weird. And the chadokuga is just a small thing.

Garlic

Last year, I was careless with the garlic I grew, leaving it lying around in the garden for a long time, then hanging up in the eaves of the pergola. Consequently, some of the bulbs were eaten by maggoty things and became unsightly. I think one reason for my carelessness was that I couldn't imagine needing so much garlic anyway.

However, as it turns out, the amount I made last year was just enough to see us through a whole year, and now as the last lot is coming to an end, the new lot is ready. This year I produced a bit more than last year, and I intend to be more careful with it, so there may be enough to bottle in miso as a tasty, breath-enhancing complement to fried rice and other dishes.

If you eat garlic and fancy trying your hand at producing veg, garlic is a good thing to start with. Just plant bulbs a few inches apart around October, mulch the ground very heavily, and forget about them until May. That's it.

Goats

Recently the missus has been claiming to hear sheep or goats. I pooh-poohed this idea because I get about the neighbourhood a fair bit and have not seen any cattle other than the black cows at the university farm over the way. I figured she was probably hearing one of the three bullfrogs that lives in our pond. The little teeny-weeny bullfrog has quite a squeaky voice that might be mistaken for a goat (if one was, say, of the frail sex).

However, I myself distinctly heard a goat while we were having our Pilates lesson, and snatching up the binoculars that sit in the living room, I espied two white spots on the grassy bank near the golf driving range. Come the weekend, I went over to have a closer look and found a mummy goat with a little frisky boy goat. She was on a rope, but he was running about all over the place freely, jumping straight up in the air at times like a mad thing. The bank is bordered on both sides by a lake and a drainage ditch, and at either end of the bank there are scaffolding fences with netting fitted.

At last, somebody has taken a sensible approach to mowing grass. While pleasantly bucolic in general, this area is blighted by the frequent noise of two-stroke weedwhackers. These are horrible things for both the user, who has to put up with the smell of the exhaust and engine-benumbed hands, and for anybody within several kilometers who has to hear the awful noise.

But the occasional bleating of goats is a very pleasant sound, and there are beneficial side products, like goat's milk cheese and ice cream. I'm hoping to see more initiatives of this sort in the neighbourhood.

Car

We got the Honda Fit Highway Version. Not that we go on the highway much at all, but the package was going cheap for some reason. For those who take an interest in these things, it's a 1.3 l, front-wheel drive, small compact car. It comes with ETC built in, but no navi. It has steel wheels, but I got the dealer to agree to put second-hand aluminium wheels on when he gets hold of a set. It has UV-cut glass and diffusion headlights. It cost 1.5 million yen.

The brochures claim it gets 27 kilos to the litre but this isn't true. It gets at best 16.4 kilos, according to the fuel economy gauge that features prominently on the dashboard.

After having done some fairly exhaustive checks of specs and prices, we concluded that the Honda Fit was the closest we could get to an 'eco-car' for a family that only fills up the tank once a month, if that.

I'd still prefer an electric car...

G-g-golden Week!

Lest my dear readers think that I spend all my time toiling on my plot to grow fruit and vegetables, I present this little photo report of our Golden Week visit to the mother-in-law's. Belying its name, "Golden Week" is possibly one of the stupidest national vacations imaginable since it includes two business and school days, rendering it useless for serious vacationing. However, we make the most of the hand dealt us, and try not to fume too much when the man on NHK news declares that we are entering the 'Ogata Renkyu' -- the Big Collection of Days Off, Interspersed For No Good Reason with Days On.

Anyways, we got in our old car and drove to Matsuno on the border with Kochi Prefecture. There isn't much in Matsuno except rice fields, running water, dogs, monkeys, an onsen, a sake brewery, an aquarium featuring river fish, a farmer's market, and a very useful service whereby loudspeakers play a tape of 'physical jerks' at 6:00 am. Yes, that's really 6:00 am, when one generally hopes to be asleep. However, with help from the products of the sake brewery, one usually manages to sleep right through the physical jerks by the second morning.

The highlight of my trip this time was a visit to Nametoko Gorge, about 20 minutes by car from Matsuno. I went by myself this time, because apparently, on previous occasions, I’d made myself obnoxious saying things like, "Do you think we could make it to the next bend in the river before turning back?", and "One day, I'd really like to go right to the top", and "Oh, for Christ's sake, stop moaning everyone!"

Nametoko was a riot of colour. Mostly greens and browns in fact, but with some interesting, unseasonal red.

Some effort had been made to Shinto-ize the absolutely enormous rocks, but this petered out the further the pathway traveled from the carpark.

Where the Shinto stopped, the informal stupas started.

The fairly small river that runs through the gorge has cut some fantastic shapes out of the rocks. This little cove is often full of little children swimming in the summer, but it was too cold for that in May.


I was fascinated by the weathering on these rocks, but I'll understand if you're not particularly impressed. Being there and seeing how the hollow of leaves had left their stain on the rock told a compelling story of the Passage of Time.


I took a side route marked "Bad Path" that went straight up the side of the gorge to a waterfall that we've never visited before. Other than being steep and giving no indication really of where it was going, the path was superior in many ways to some that I've followed in life.

The trees along the way were certainly spectacular. This variety stood out in the sunlight like a streak of lightning.

The waterfall that the Bad Path led to was this huge wall of stone that the water ran down every which way. Somehow, most of it managed to pool at the bottom again to continue on its way.





The meandering path taken by the waters creates environments that appeal to certain forms of life that we don't generally run into in the normal course of things.


I was taken aback to hear what I thought was the distant barking of dogs. For a moment, I thought I might find myself in the middle of a boar hunt. But when I focused my ears, I realized that the sounds were much closer, and the whole bank of rock I found myself in was populated with no see 'um frogs hiding in the dripping wet cracks. My mobile phone video doesn't really do them justice.

The trees were in a magnificent state of confusion. Many seemed to be refusing to die in spite of calamities like being knocked over at 90 degree angles, finding themselves atop huge rocks without any soil for yards around, being crushed under fallen boulders and logs that actually succumbed, or being split and twisted by some unrecorded event in the 70s.

River of moss and stones

This tree, somebody had painted with great care.

If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you

Nietzsche might have said, "If you gaze into a giant rock, about 25 meters across and maybe more, the giant rock also gazes into you". The phrase doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but the effect of the gazing is, I think, much the same.

Rooting success, actually

Not so long ago, I declared that my attempt at propagation had ended in failure. Not so fast! Although the leaves fell off everything and the twigs looked thoroughly dead, there was in fact life on the inside. (Well, in some of the twigs anyway.)

Four out of six of the wolfberries rooted, and one out of three blackberries survived. The boxwood and peach cuttings all died. Now I'm going to have to think carefully where to plant these little babies. Things are getting a bit crowded around here.

Flowers and fruits in season

The almond that was seen flowering robustly in March has now produced a little crop of fruit, at least a couple of which look promisingly large, even allowing for a certain amount of skin on the outside. This is a self-fertile variety, and it gets good sun for most of the day. Since the missus has developed a penchant for baking with almond powder recently, I can't help thinking that we're pretty much all set.

The big one

The 'Handkerchief Tree' has not been idle either. I was worried for the whole winter that it might be dead, in spite of my careful attention every night of the summer with the watering can. But after putting forth leaves, it promptly flowered, with the exactly four of the rather ridiculous-looking blossoms from which it takes its name.

I put the heads of last year's poppies in the compost which I then spread here and there in the garden and veg plot. Obviously my compost didn't get hot enough to kill seeds, because here are the poppies again this year, everywhere that I put down compost -- including in close embrace with one of the citrus trees which is also flowering.

These are a variety known as 'peony poppies', for a rather obvious reason. The whole business of flowering appears to happen in time lapse with these plants. Magnificent, they are. I'm tempted to use some of the seeds to make these tasty-looking Central European pastries, although the quantities of the seeds available may not be quite be sufficient.

Neem oil

Neem seedlings appeared in garden shops a few years back, advertised as having remarkable insect repellent properties when mashed up and used as a spray. I can't remember the details of the process, but I had my doubts that I'd ever be bothered to try it. However, I bought a couple of seedlings out of curiosity, and both died with the autumn cold.

Recently however, I read that neem oil 'may be' effective in treating powdery mildew on wolfberry plants. My wolfberries put out some very pretty green leaves this spring, many of which were promptly affected by this dusty mildew which makes the leaves shrivel and fall off. I also noticed legions of sex-crazed leaf-beetles copulating all over the shrubs, which means their horrible turd-coated offspring will soon be eating what leaves the mildew spares. I wondered if neem spray would solve both problems.

Powdery mildew on wolfberry leaves

So I found a place that sells sprays, Ide Shokai, and bought three bottles of spray. They recommend spraying every 3-4 days. I tried spraying the tops of the broad beans that were invisible for green fly, and the spray made them drop off with almost comical alacrity. Then I sprayed four wolfberry bushes, focusing especially on the mildewed parts.

Greenfly on broad beans

But I realized that already, one of the three bottles was half empty. At a rate of every 3-4 days, this method is not going to be economically (or environmentally) sustainable, however well it may work. As a slight application of scepticism, I tried spraying greenfly with plain water, and lo! they dropped off with exactly the same alacrity. It remains to be seen if the neem will actually suppress the mildew. I have tried milk and water spray in a 3-7 mix which is supposed to work, but my testing wasn't rigorous enough to tell. I could try some slightly scientific tests to see what actually works. The milk option would surely be cheaper if it actually has any effect.

Another very tempting option is just to do nothing and see if everything is still tolerably productive...

More car talk

Today we went looking for cars again, and this time we test-drove a Subaru Impreza, a Toyota Prius, and the Honda Fit again. It looks like we're going to have a Fit (ha ha).

The Subaru Impreza is quite nice to drive, but we weren't very imprezzed by its declared fuel economy, nor by its price (about 1.9 mil. yen). The new tax breaks for 'eco cars' apply to the Impreza, but they don't result in spectacular savings. The Impreza shown in this rather pointless snap also had the new car smell at a level that most normal people would find alarming, and which caused the young master to hold his breath (and mysteriously expostulate on the chemical stink at the same time).

The Toyota Prius we drove was the highest grade of the current version, and it's a very nice car in many ways. The quote for the soon-to-be announced EX version was 2 mil. yen as near as dammit, although sundry desirable maintenance offerings would push up the price a bit more. Also the missus wants to dazzle other drivers with diffusion headlights, and the pleasant but slightly robotic Toyota salesman didn't recommend installing a non-Toyota brand kit.

But we're not big drivers, and since the Fit is significantly cheaper, we figured we'd need to drive the Prius for ten years before it paid off the difference in price from savings in petrol. The 'Highway' version of the Fit is on offer for 1.5 mil. yen, and it comes with diffusion bling lights, a built-in ETC highway card system, and rain dissipating windows and mirrors. Also, it has the jolly, dodgem-car like handling typical of a kei-car which I really like. The new tax regime favours it almost as generously as a hybrid, making it something of a no-brainer. (Once one has become acquainted with the very unexceptional Fit body, one can't help noticing that there are an awful lot of other people with no brain too. They're all over the roads and supermarket carparks.)

It feels disappointing to be buying yet another petrol vehicle, particularly at this juncture when EVs are finally supposed to making a reappearance after an interval of about a century. But they're going to cost 4 mil. yen, and be largely unavailable anyway. While hybrids are attractive in many ways, they seem like technical overkill for limited driving. However, we take some solace from the fact that the new wheels should get about twice the mileage of the current set.

We also test drove a pair of Harleys* with extra small fuel tanks and little pig figurines on the disk brakes, but they had nowhere to put shopping and rice husks.


* This is not actually true.

Goya sun curtain

In the summer, my north-facing office window gets blasted by the westering sun from 4 o'clock until sunset. And pretty though it may be, it makes the room very hot. Having whittered on at length about the merits of passive solar architecture, when it came time to build our house we couldn't resist putting most of our windows on the north where the spectacular views are, so now we get the full effects of north winds in winter, and afternoon sun in summer.

This year however, I plan to take shelter behind a curtain of green leaves and weird knobbly gourds. Goya, or bitter gourd, grows prodigiously and climbs up anything. The gourds themselves are very good to eat too, principally with tofu. The plant itself does give off a rather pungent smell when agitated, so it will be interesting to see if the breeze wafts the funky scent of jungle weed into my room.

A couple of hooks in the deck and some more on the roof gable with some string between should provide an adequate support for the goya vine. If all goes well, the missus won't have to ask, "Do we have any goya?" She can see the lovely grotesque gourds a-dangling there when she goes out to hang out the washing.

When I was planning the growth pattern of my goya, I couldn't help humming the melody to Making Plans for Nigel. "Nigel's whole future is as good as sealed... di-doo-doo-doo"

I did think about growing another mokkobara (Rosa banksiae) in this spot as a permanent measure to protect from the sun and wind, but they like full sun in summer and winter. This place only gets full light from around now when the sun is high enough in the sky to reach over the house. If you know of a good plant (vine or evergreen tree) that would thrive in this situation, do let me know. Bamboo of some sort?

New green

Now this season is more like it! The garish cherry blossoms have all blown away, and the brilliant new green leaves are bursting out. And it's consistently warm. This morning as I was making the coffee, I glanced out of the window and did a sudden double-take when some bright-green thing in the middle distance caught my eye. It was the new leaves on one of my fig trees, with the early morning sun providing vivid backlighting.

When I go out to get the newspaper on days like this, the song Morning Has Broken always comes to mind, not that we have blackbirds here. We were forced to sing it at primary school and it annoyed me because it was just another part of our wishy-washy Church of England indoctrination ... until I realized that it's a damn good song about the real joys of mornings.




The bay tree in the outsize terracotta pot is also sprouting new leaves. One day soon it might outgrow the clover that quickly invaded.

Bling! Today's new poppy. These are springing up all over the place, and they look a bit goofy with the two halves of their green pods stuck to their petals -- like a bloke whose shirt tail hangs down behind his business jacket.

The pomegranate is bucking the trend by leafing out in red. The cabbagy-looking 'North Korean poppies' beneath it should be flowering soon. In the background, the blueberries are putting out very pale green leaves and purple flowers.

Gosh, the pond looks very murky all of a sudden. What to do with this nasty-looking water? But there are some green shoots appearing in the middle, and there are still fish, frogs, and insect larvae in there. Should I refresh the water maybe, or just leave it?

Praise for the singing, praise for the morning, praise for the breakfast, tra-la-la!