Just testing out a new (known about) area today. It used to be where the school kids practiced skiing before the new ski hill with the fancy lift was built. Back then, everyone hiked up to ski down. Now it it is unheard of in this area.
Unfortunately, this year the snow is like spring snow - late spring snow… and it is not even February yet.
Every week brings its own stresses. This week we were trying to write all the new-year cards to friends, family, and past customers. A few days ago we went to the local paper maker and made our own postcards. While most of them are nothing one would ever pay for, it was a lot of fun. The hard part is writing them and addressing the envelopes - something I have never had a habit to do, but figure that it is something we should start now that our “past customer” base is growing.
The photos are of us making paper. Since we had rented the place out for a half-day anyway, we invited a friend / neighbor to join in the fun and share the costs.
The paper here is famous because of the quality of the water, and bleaching effects of the snow. The water is one of the “100 cleanest” in Japan, which apparently makes it ideal for making high quality paper. The snow in this area is ideal for bleaching the bark that will eventually become pulp. snow reflects certain rays from the sun which can turn a brown bark into a white bark in just as few days. Japanese also use the snow to bleach silk and other woods and materials.
In other news, The challenge has begun. For the next five months or so I will have to find new and exciting ways to photograph snow and not have all my photos turn out just like last years.
There was about 40 cm (16 inches) already on the ground after one day, and it was supposed to snow for the next week. Unfortunately, sunny weather today left us with less than a foot still on the ground. I guess this is good as Tomoe and I will be away for a week, and if it really snowed that whole time we wound not even be able to find our house when we got back.
I had an opportunity to head up to Akiyamago again yeasterday, taking a potetial business partner to show him all the glory of our area. Its sad that there is no snow except for on top of the mountains, but even without leaves on the trees it was just as awe-inspiring as with.
The monkies were also out in droves. I just kept looking at them and wishing I had my gun, as you are paid $200 for a dead monkey. (just kidding, of course. I don’t have a gun, but there is a $200 bounty on monkies. I could have made a few thousand dollars yesterday!)
Oh how easy Tomoe is pleased. Just look at that face as she prepares to use the new pasta maker. I am generally pretty stingy when it comes to buying new gadgets for things that can be done by hand, but this one is pretty nice - and it uses no electricity or gas. The thing that one me over is how easily I can roll out my bread now to various thicknesses. No more hurting my hands with that rolling pin again.
It also works great for making soba or udon, so we will be able to use up all that soba we will harvest next fall.
For those of you on the edge of your seat as to what is happening with my strep throat, I’m feeling much better after a shot or two of gin (I had no antibiotics to sooth my throat so I opted for the alcohol cleanse). Of course, that means no cutting wood with sharp tools today. Oh well, there is a lot of cleaning and storing to do for the winter (snow starts Thursday!).
This photo is of the carrots that Tomoe mabikied the other day. Mabiki literally means “middle pull” - or, to take the weaker sprouts from in-between the stronger ones to prevent the weaker ones from stealing all the nutrients and light from the stronger ones. In English I guess you would say “weed out”, but they are not really weeds. They were delicious.
Next to her you see the kaki persimmons I am drying.
Drying kaki is one way to remove the astringents that make some varieties too bitter to eat fresh. This area is extremely humid at this time of year, so it is hard to dry them well. We hope the fire stove will help us, but just in case, we are planning to remove the astringents with booze this year. Another way is to put them in a plastic bag and let them suffocate. It helps to add an apple or banana, as both fruits release a chemical into the are which promotes ripening.
If we left these kaki on the tree long enough, they
We also hope to have a lot of persimmon vinegar in a few months. Making vinegar with them is the easiest, as all you have to do is wash them and thrown them into a bucket to ferment - no peeling or other processing needed.
Yesterday we got a call from the local dairy farmer saying that a calf was about to be born. I have been waiting for an opportunity to observe this, but for the past few months it seemed to happen when I was unavailable. Tonight lucky for us, for the dairy farmer, and (maybe) for the calf.
The farmer called me earlier in the day to alert me, but I was taking a customer to the top of a mountain so could not rush over to the dairy farm. As it turned out, the cow did not give birth as early as they expected and we got another call around 8pm. We hopped on our bikes and sped to the dairy farm with camera in hand. Once we arrived we waited and waited and chatted with the farmer and his seven year old daughter for over an hour before the dairy farmer’s father came in to check on why the cow had not given birth yet. He just walked in, rolled up his sleeve, and plunged his hand into the cow up to his armpit. Within seconds he announced that it was a male calf - not what the farmer wanted to hear because this was a high-producing cow and they had paid more to have high quality bull sperm in the hopes of making another milk machine.
He announced that they would have to help the delivery as the calf was turned in the wrong direction. Now the younger farmer grabbed a belt and reached in to attach it to the calf’s legs. He pulled as his father attached the other end of the belt to a winch and they proceeded to winch the calf out. There were several minutes where only the feet were showing, then suddenly the entire calf literally popped out and was laying on the floor before I even know what was going on. The placenta was still wrapped around the calf, which means that had the cow given birth later in the night, when the farmer was not there, there is a good chance that the calf would have suffocated. The farmer and his daughter (seven years old, remember) jumped into action and began wiping the calf clean - something that the mother usually does by licking it. In this case, they were more worried about the mother getting enough calcium, as with hard labors like this the mother often gets too week to stand and can die as well.
Apparently, we saved the calf’s life. Had we not been there to watch, the farmer and his wife would have left when it appeared that the cow would not give birth - expecting it to give birth in the middle of the night.
So, I have a lot I want to comment on about that last post and other people’s responses, but I have been busy with my parents who were visiting for a week to check out our new life. In some ways they were our “easiest” customers, and in others, the hardest.
They were our easiest because they didn’t need much help to entertain them. Their motto was “just do what you do every day so we can see you do what you do every day”. I think they got more than they were looking for when Tomoe and I had our tri-daily fight.
They were the hardest customers in that… well, no I guess they were not that hard.
Although I told them to bring a book because this is not Tokyo and there is not as much to do (depending on the person), their days were filled with helping us harvest soy beans and sorghum, gather mukago, separate the shaft and the seed from our bird-seed harvest, shuck walnuts, and even using our new antique pedal powered dakkoki to take the sorghum seeds off of the stalk.
When they were not working, dad was helping me to build a little storage shed for our rice-straw in the winter, and our bikes in the summer. We did have enough time to take a few drives and bike rides through the surrounding areas, and I recommend that anyone in Japan get to the Shiga Heights this week. The colors are at their peak and I am worried for next weeks fall color bike trip. The Akiyama Valley is not quite at the peak, but by the time the bike trip arrives, it should be brilliant.
I have more photos, but these are the only ones ready to post now as we have to get to work preparing for the one-week trip that starts in 1.4 days. Here you can see mom and dad spending their nights looking at the Internet, and their days working in the field.
The rice is harvested. Well, almost all of the rice… We still have a section we gave up on because it is too filled with hie millet and other weeds. We expect to get almost twice what we will be able to eat ourselves this year, so if anyone is interested in buying some pretty much chem free genmai (brown rice), just email me. It is certainly not certified organic, as the fields around us use a remote control helicopter to spray their fields for bugs, weeds ,and other diseases. Also, the water coming into our field has run-off from all the fields above us, so anything they put in their filed will inevitably end up in ours to some degree. That said, we did not spray or add any chemical fertilizers to our fields, as is evident by the green undergrowth after we harvested our rice, compared to the barren brown mud after other people harvested theirs. It is also evident by the fact that we expect to harvest only about 40% of what our neighbors would harvest on the same size land using chemical aids.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, we were advised to learn how to use the “traditional” gas powered hand-harvester, but after an afternoon with a local old-lady, we realized we can have more fun and easily complete the harvest by hand. It took us four days, but we did it, and hung all of the rice up to dry on the racks you see in the photo. Our neighbors advice is now to borrow her machine to strip the rice grains from the straw, but I am very interested to use the traditional no-oil method. I guess it is up to Tomoe to decide…
One of the highlights of the harvest was having a short break with some of the neighbors and their granddaughter. They were out harvesting their rice as well. They used a hand-pushed harvester, much like a lawn-mower, to do their fields and it appears that they did it only about twice as fast as us. It still took them two days (with four people) compared to our four days with two people. I am wondering if it is really that much more efficient. Sure, it is obviously faster. They can finish cutting a field in the time it takes us to do a half of ours, but efficiency-wise, they paid for a huge machine and also the gs to make it run, while we enjoyed to benefits of a good workout and fresh air as we worked.
As for the methodology of the harvest, basically, I took a small hand-held kama blade and cut each bunch one by one. Collected them into piles of 10 - 20, and left them laying on the ground for Tomoe to come by later and tie into bundles using old rice-straw, freshly cut hie millet, or sometimes a couple strands of the rice itself. Once they were tied into bundles, I hung them on the racks made with three-legged iron tripods supporting either bamboo or sugi poles. These drying racks were all borrowed from neighbors who had extra.
The photos are from our last day of harvesting, so don’t worry, you can look forward to less rice-related photos from now on.
It has been pouring off and on for the past few days. Not so good for drying rice or anything else, and not so good for the hiking which Tomoe and I had hoped to do for a couple days this week.
I’m a bit worried about leaving the house when there is a chance of rain though. A week ago or so there was a big rain and, as often happens the pipe channeling water into our pond got clogged with leaves and debris. Usually this does not cause any kind of problem, but now we are keeping trout. The trout need constantly moving water or they tend to die. I did not notice that the pipe was clogged until it was too late and I found a dinner’s worth of fish floating on the top of the pond. Luckily, I we started with several hundred fish just in case they are eaten by birds or racoons. I was happy to find that some of them had gotten quite a bit biger than I expected. They all used to be slightly smaller than the little one in my hand, and now quite a few of them have reached the size of that big guy there. Almost ready to eat on purpose.
Just in time for the first snow of the season, we got our wood stove up and burning.
Of course, we still have lots of f wood to cut and split, and I realize that one point of view might see the fact that if we would have worked as many hours as we have spent cutting wood for this season, we would have been able to buy enough pre-cut wood for several years, but it sure would not have been as fun.
The only “not-so-fun” part was when I ruined our new (used) chainsaw after only three days. I asked the nice man at the hardware shop where the 2-cycle oil was (which needs to be mixed 25:1 with gasoline for use in the chainsaw), and he pointed me to a canister that, in big letters, said “2-cycle 25:1″. I Guess I should have read the fine print, because it was actually already mixed with gasoline. So, when I mixed it again, it made the mix ratio about 500:1 and I ended up burning my chainsaw engine. Nothing is more annoying than realizing that you basically spent $100 a day to use a chainsaw.
My neighbor must trust me more than I trust myself, because after that fiasco, he lent me his chainsaw to finish all the wood. Of course, he *is* careful to lend me gasoline that he has pre-mixed himself.
The wood is all from an old house that was demolished this spring. Its not the best wood for burning, because it burns so quickly and is quiet dirty (lots of soot in the chimney), but it was free and close and we felt it would be a waste to just let it rot or be thrown into the dump. It also saved the owner of the house the cost of disposing of it, so we consider it a type of neighborly favor.
The photos show our neighbor helping us with the chimney, while other neighbors gather around to watch the first smoke from our famous (in the village) fire stove. They all came over to our living room door to check it out and give their advice about how to best use it. There is also a photo of us peeling persimmons. While we had decided to make mostly vinegar this year, the persimmons I dried the other day turned out quite nicely, with less mold than last year, so we are tempted to try more. It is the one thing that we can give to our neighbors that may have some value.
There is still a lot of work to make the stove situation “perfect”. More wood to cut, and we have to make a drying rack to hang above it so that we can utilize the heat for drying fruits, veggies, and socks and underwear over the long humid winter.
