The obligatory annual snow pics

Its that time of the year again...... its been snowing off and on for a couple of weeks, though it tends to melt during the day....

For the new year most of the local graves have had fresh flowers...

My hamlet.

Snow on bamboo always makes for a good shot.

The neighboring valley of Tanijyugo where I was heading for Tondo matsuri...

Giant Japanese Toad

I nearly trod on this when I went out to check some seedlings a few weeks ago.
It made no attempt to flee so I went inside to get my camera....

It was huge, half a kilo I would guess. I am almost certain it is a female Western Japanese Common Toad, Nihon Hiki Gaeru, Bufo Japonicus Japonicus.

Yoko reckoned it was an Ushi Gaeru, a Cow Frog, but that is the name of the American Bullfrog that was introduced into Japan in the early Twentieth Century as a source of protein.

A photo of one of those can be seen here

Monkey Watch

I heard the calls of the monkeys in the forest outside my house so I watched out the window for a minute or two until I saw an adult jump down from the fence and head past my house.

I snuck outside with my camera and caught this guy gleaning my compost pile.

Probably a male.

Sitting on the fence watching was another adult, female I think.

It was not the whole troop, which numbers 20-30, but a family. There were 2 adults, 2 juveniles, and 2 babies.

The mom stood guard while the kids scavenged around.

Ive been fortunate to have lived places where encountering wild animals is the norm.

I spent a good 30 minutes watching the family. One of these days Im going to set up a hide with my camera on a tripod and take some better shots.....

2010 garden report

Garden

I was more conscientious with my gardening this year. I'm usually quite a lazy gardener.I spent a lot more time with preparation and weeding. I might as well have spent my time playing pachinko. Unseasonable weather and hungry critters really took their toll. Yields of most crops were down to 10% at times.

Millet did OK, but the grains were much smaller than last year.

Hung the black beans up to dry last week. Late as usual.

Went out about an hour later and there was a bloody great monkey helping himself.

An hour later he returned with some of his buddies but by then I was stripping the pods from the plants and bringing them indoors to dry. The wild boar have been much more troublesome this year too. They took some of my taro and sweet potatoes, so I dug them up early, but the boars still came back most nights and rooted around in the gardens causing damage. The sweet potato crop was good again this year though, and its nice to pop a couple in the dutch oven on the woodstove each evening for a late night snack.

Flood update.

3pm and the river has come up over the bank and is inching its way towards my millet, chingensai, carrots, tomatoes, corn (what was looking to be my best ever harvest), butternut squash, sweet potatoes, black beans, taro, and peppers....

5pm and the river has claimed my garden.

7pm and I am now an aquaculturist as my garden is covered with a meter of water that is flowing faster and faster. Bits of garden sheds from gardens upriver speed by on their way to the sea.

The village paddies behind the levee are getting deeper and deeper, though I am assured that the rice will survive and be fine. It continues to rain a little, but the rain here is not the problem. Hiroshima is getting heavier rains and half the watershed of the river is in Hiroshima, so it depends on releases from the dam upstream whether the river rises anymore. Tomorrow I will find out what, if anything, in my river garden has survived. My village garden is above the flooding so really its only half my garden that has been damaged, and once the river recedes it will leave behind a layer of rich silt for next years planting :)

Flood!

Flood

It's been raining heavily for a couple of days, and yesterday I noticed the river was high, so last night as it continued to pour down all night I worried about my riverside garden flooding, like it did 4 years ago.

As soon as I got up I checked the small stream that runs through the hamlet. Normally this is virtually dry, but when it rains it runs quite heavily. This morning it didn't look bad. I've seen it a meter and a half deeper.

Down in the paddies, the lowest of them were flooded. Underneath the water is my neighbors rice.

Down at the riverside my garden is safe. The river was up to the edge of the bank, so my corn, millet, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and black beans were about a meter above the water.

100 meters downstream my neighbors were not so lucky... the gardens were under a meter of water. The community PA announces that the dam 30k upstream is going to release more water, followed by the siren. They expect the river to rise at least one more meter with the extra water. That should just about wash my garden away. The local rail line has closed due to a landslide upstream, and the police told me they are going to close Route 261 upstream aways .

The village is protected from the river flooding by the levee that route 261 travels over. To stop the river backing up through the stream, huge steel floodgates are closed. But, you may ask, what happens to the water coming down the mountains and through the village?

It backs up of course, which is why the paddies are starting to flood and people with low-lying gardens now have ponds.

Japanese White-eye

This little guy flew straight into our window and dropped like a stone. We put him in the shade up high out of reach of the local cats and an hour later it was gone, so I presume it was OK.

In Japanese it is known as mejiro, which means white eye.

It is common throughout Japan and most of East Asia, It was kept as a caged bird because of its song.

Introduced into Hawaii for pest control in the early twentieth century, it is now a dominant species there.

No work in the garden today :)

After an unusually warm and wet February, winter returned the last 2 days with non-stop snow.

The stinkbugs prediction has been somewhat vindicated

Typical Japanese Landscape 27

At this time of the year, and others too, there is not a lot of color.

Grey greens, grey browns, grey blues, etc

One could think that one was in a 3D ink wash painting.....

A visit from our mountain neighbors

All afternoon yesterday the forest behind my house was alive with the calls of our troop of monkeys. My human neighbor was away, so there had been no firecrackers set off to drive the monkeys away.

This troop, with about thirty members, are very shy and skittish which makes it hard to get good photos of them. 100 meters away on the opposite hillside is another troop of mo nkeys that are far more aggressive.

I've been very fortunate in my life to have lived many years surrounded by and among wild critters. It helps me, I think, to maintain a certain perspective on my place in the scheme of things.

The monkeys, wild boars, foxes, badgers, etc etc can at times cause problems, but they are more than offset by what they give, to me at least.

How Japanese tunnels are built

Our new tunnel will shorten our drive down the river to Gotsu by a little more than 200 meters. Being straight the tunnel will also be more fuel efficient to drive. A rough calculation says that with present traffic density the fuel savings will have paid for the tunnel in only a few million years. Incidentally, that is my village to the left of the tunnel.

This is the machine that actually drills its way through the mountain. I was expecting to see a huge machine almost as big as the tunnel.... watched too many movies I guess! These smaller drill splay out at any angle.

The next stage is to put up steel arches and then a series of steel beams are driven into the mountain radiating out from the tunnel. Then the tunnel is coated in a thin layer of concrete.

The purpose of the steel beams is to stop the tunnel collapsing under the weight of the mountain, represented here in this demonstration by steel nuts.

Next a thick, waterproof, plastic membrane covers the inside of the tunnel followed by a frame of reinforcing rebar,

The final stage involves this huge machine on rails which is a movable form. Its used to pour the final inner walls of the tunnel.

Next Years Firewood

One of the smartest things I ever did was put in a woodstove. Combined with the insulation and draughtproofing I've done it has meant that essentially my heating bill for the past 6 winters has been zero.

Even before this winter is over I am stacking the firewood for next winter. So, where do I get all this free wood?

Just had a 2 ton truckload of posts and beams from a house being demolished. The building company have to pay to dump all the wood at a site 10K away, so they are only too happy to give it us for free. It's cedar, which is not the greatest firewood, it burns hot and fast, but sometimes thats useful.

Before they demolished the house we went in and took out some nice double-glazed windows and some double doors which will fit nicely in my house. Some of the 4 by 4's I will denail and trim and use for construction too.

For good firewood you need a nice hardwood, and we are getting that from our local shrine. They have just cut back a lot of the trees on the hill, and as they can't afford to pay to have it taken away they too are happy that we will. There is a lot of Kashi, white oak, which is excellent firewood, and a lot of Tsubaki, Camellia, which I don't know about as firewood, though I've read that it is cut for firewood in some places.