bastish.net

Mona’s first time to be expelled – from pre-school.

Second tuesday of every month is open school day so parents can go with the kids, and bring non-student kids to play. I took Mona there this morning and after her eyes light up seeing all the kids, she is in the door before the teacher can come over and say “Oh, today is cancelled because we had a school opening ceremony last week and things are still ‘batta batta’ (in chaos)”. I have to drag Mona out who runs from the room crying and whaling because she wants to play with the kids.

There is one babysitter there with five children today. Mona was supposed to join them for three hours. I was going to be there with her, playing together with her and the other children. There is no extra work for the babysitter who, from past experience I have observed as simply sitting there and watching the children play, but not interacting. Yet, couldn’t just let us stay in the room. Instead we went out to the playground for a bit where Mona dug holes in the sand alone, within earshot of the kids laughing inside.

Two big things almost off the spring to-do list. Sunday was the local street-cleaning work day and all the neighborhood men-folk get together to clear debris from the mountain road and make sure the water is flowing clog free. For many of the men though, it is just a chance to chill, chat and stand around. If you don’t drive a big truck or back-hoe, or own a he-man-sized chain-saw there is not really much work.

For me this is the day that all my neighbors get together and help me get fire wood. Especially this year, after the big snow, there were a lot of big trees that needed to be cut and cleared. No one uses the wood for anything, so it is all mine for the taking. Tomorrow I drive up and collect all logs which they so nicely cut to lengths that would fit in my car.

I would have gone to get them today, but it was a beautiful day for spreading compost into the rice field. It is not such a difficult job, but it takes all day simply because our field is so long and there is only one place the manure delivery-man can make the dump. The wheelbarrow can’t hold very much so I end up walking back and forth one-hundred times. We then have to spread each load out as evenly as possible.

I tried to cut down on the number of back-and-forth trips by using the rear-car I found in the garbage dump a few years ago. Using this and buckets I can carry about four times the compost each trip. Unfortunately, I found that the tires were flat after the winter, and I don’t know when the next time I will be in town to get new tubes or tires, so I had the brilliant idea of filling them with rice husks. It worked well for about ten trips before I gave up and started using the wheelbarrow. While it takes longer, I found that the lighter load allowed me to take in the amazing view from our field as I walked. Its good to be reminded that more efficient is not always better.

Mona and Tomoe joined me for part of the day and Mona was all too happy to torture frogs and this, the larve of a stag beetle -something else that, if we were to put effort into it, could be a business in itself as the adult beetles are quite expensive in Tokyo pet-stores. I already have a bucket full of thirty or so of these guys in my front entrance that the neighbor’s grandson gave me, and there were a hundred or so in the back-yard from last year that have or will hatch if I have not killed them.

Took our first trip this year up to some of the back mountain fields where the best sansai grow. We weren’t disappointed – except that we had not brought enough bags. The fukinoto were unbelievablly big and soft and they stretched for as far as the eye could see. We will have to make another trip tomorrow as the conditions change very quickly. A field full of perfect buds one day may all be opened and past their prime the next.

Since Tomoe is using them for baking, however, and not tempura, we have the luxury of being able to use fully opened flowers as well.

Seeing all these wild vegetables makes me wonder why I even bother with the bike trips or other work, and why people complain that there is no work for young people in the countryside. If we set the goal, and dedicated spring for picking and processing wild veggies only, no other distractions, we could make enough to coast through the rest of the year, and we are seriously tempted to do that next year, so if you are looking for a bike trip, better sign up this year.

Grown up versions of the gyoja ninnikiu sprouts I posted the other day.

Rainy days are welcome because they make us feel OK to stay inside and do the work that pays for the sunny days when we play in the field. Looking at my bank account makes me pray for rain.

Still, rain or shine, Mona needs her “outside!” time.

The other day she was asleep upstairs while I was enjoying the newly cleared office space in a back room with a big window opening up to the outside and cheerful lighting. It is at the end of the hall from the stairs and front door, and the office door was open and no other sounds in the house. I came out to grab something and noticed the front door open and her boots gone. Now, usually she wakes up and either stands at the top of the stairs crying for us to come get her, or she comes down and cries for bread and jam. This is the first time she has ever sneaked down and out.

I checked our garden where she might go looking for Tomoe or me. Not there. Checked the garage where her friend the stray cat sleeps sometimes. Not there. Checked by the neighbor’s garage where they keep the kids garden toys. Not there. Checked by the neighbor’s outside sink where she likes to play with water. Not there. Checked inside the neighbors’ front doors because she sometimes likes to go in looking for “kids!”. Not there.

I started checking down the street and found her walking hand in hand with an old lady from down the road. Apparently she had gone inside their house and was playing in their front entrance. They only increased the possibility that it will happen again by giving her cookies. Now every time we walk by that house Mona happily tells me that she ate the obachan’s cookies.

If I was in the city I wonder if I would have thought someone had come into the house, snuck upstairs and stole her? Should I feel bad that through it all I was more worried about what the neighbors would think than I was worried that she was kidnapped? I was worried a bit about the biggest road, but she is surprisingly aware and afraid of cars – to the point that it gets annoying that every time a car passes, we have to stop walking as she cowers on the side of the road clutching my leg.

The river is certainly another worry, but she has never ever gone anyplace where she could fall directly in (these photos by the river are quite far from the house, and we have to prod and plead with her to get her to walk up that direction), and is generally afraid of high places unless I am standing below to catch her. Maybe I should have been more worried. Maybe I am a bad parent. Maybe this is why all of our chickens were eaten by wild animals and our precious cockatiels were eaten by the cat that now lives in our basement.

Anyway, I have moved back to my tiny dark depressing little work table in the living room so she cant sneak by until we get a lock on the front door that she can’t open.

One of the spring cash-crops in this area is Gyoja Ninniku, or Alpine Leek. While it grows wild, and is considered a wild mountain vegetable, most of what you will find here and in the stores are cultivated. We have some in one of our fields that were growing long before we moved here, but even if we didn’t there is no shortage left growing in abandoned fields up the valley.

It tastes like garlic, hence the ninniku (garlic) in the name. The first part of the name refers to the fact that it was either eaten by, or forbidden to be eaten by devotees of Shugendo, a religion where followers would practice by meditation and training in the mountains.

The two stories I have heard are that they would eat it when weak or lost and it would give them the strength to move on. And the other one is that they were forbidden to eat it because it would make them too genki or healthy and they would not be able to properly train.

Anyway, this is another one of the wonders of spring here, and the non-greenhoused crops are just starting to come out. The bulbs are edible, but we usually just eat the leaves, and once ours are full sized, Tomoe will most likely be making them into some great soy-cheese spreads for sale at Warashibe, or even gyoja-ninniku Jam.

It has been a long, uphill struggle to get Tomoe to do more self-promoting, or rather promoting herself in order to promote her breads and Warashibe Kitchen goods. She wouldn’t even put her own waffles onto her facebook page so I have been gently pointing out the benefits that could come from sharing a bit more about herself, her products and her lifestyle with her network of young, smart, socially conscious, burdened-with-disposable-income friends who, do or have, at some point in their lives, dreamt of “giving it all up” to move to the country side.

Suddenly, seemingly completely unrelated to any of the wisdom I have ever shared with her about how social media might be used, she has caught the Facebook bug. Those of you who are friends with her can take a look at her timeline to see when it happened.

So now she has turned the Internet plan back on for her smart-phone. yes, we were using dumb-phones – smart-phone hardware without any internet connection. The hardware was cheap, but the plan was not, and to tell you the truth, I have not missed or needed it. Tomoe, on the other hand, is having a good time sharing the joys of spring, and she almost stops to take as many photos as I do, making it much easier for me to take my time as well. I am liking this new development.

The photos are of her photographing some fresh young fuki leaves. This is a different part of the plant from the buds in previous photos, and comes out later. These are also edible and the tender young ones that she is holding are especially good.

In the second photo she is sharing the results of her first trip to the village food processing plant, where she tested their industrial-sized ovens to make some fresh bread. She made much more than usual, but unfortunately, Mona and I didn’t get much as most of it went to the neighbors as gifts. I guess the lack of fresh-baked bread is something I will have to get used to as she moves from product development phase to selling phase, and we have to start considering the missed potential income of each loaf of bread we eat at home.

And the right hand photo is her sharing a photo of the barely we planted last fall. (Thanks John for the help tilling the field there!). This was just a test, as everything we read about them was for regions with much less snow than we have, but this variety is developed to be frost resistant, and they seem to have survived the long winter and are on track to grow up big and strong. If this works, we have plenty of other open spaces we can use, and this is a much less labor intensive crop than rice. This will be used in her bread, of course, and the young leaves cooked together with rice introduces an enzyme that changes the complex sugars in the rice to simple sugars, lightly sweetening it, or boiled down into jam.

Below is the fruit of her labor.

These photos are from past years, but all are invited to come join us in Northern Nagano to get you feet muddy in the rice fields. There is a lot of field to be planted, but still time to relax and enjoy the area and a soak in the hot-spring afterwards.

Dates:
May 20-25, June 3-6 (single or multi-day help is appreciated)

Location:
Sakae Mura, Nagano (Google Map)

Accommodations:
Room and futon provided at our home. Short walk from hot-spring bath.

Getting Here:
3 hours from Tokyo via Shinkansen/bus combo
1.75 hours from Nagano by train.
I will send detailed instructions to anyone interested

Contact:
kevin@kevincameron.net

Do to schedule conflicts with some Spring Bike trips I am running, we are only able to accept helpers who will stay at the house between May 20 and May 25, and June 3 – 6. If you or someone you know happens to have free days during the week, we would love a hand.

This year we are planting twice as much area as previous years because neighbors complain if we leave fields unplanted, and we have learned that it is almost just as much work to grow nothing and “harvest” the weeds, as it is to grow rice and harvest that. Growing rice instead of weeds, however, has some obvious side-benefits.

The hard part however, will not be the planting, but the weeding. We have been having enough trouble keeping up with the weeds in the fields we planted in previous years. It will be a huge challenge to do try to manage such a large area without adding weed-killer, so we may end up doing that for some of the fields this year.

Today’s find. I am very tempted to see how they taste because the texture is so inviting, but I wont, because it would be like gulping down cup-fulls of water from the neighbor’s rice paddy.

Hope they hatch soon or they will be dried and tilled into the mud. I suspect they will, if the chorus of frog song we heard on our walk back from the bath tonight is any indication of the change of season.

We spent the day working outside and the neighbor’s grandson begged me to go for a bike ride with him, so I took the camera along and took the opportunity to document various locations for future reference of what it looked like on this, May 5th, 2012.

(Above) From behind the hamlet, one from our field called “asa-batake” because it was once where they grew their hemp (asa), and the other from another angle near the little bridge over Omaki river.

(Above) Shot of what we refer to as “the corner field” because it is tucked into a small corner on a road going up the mountain. The same neighbor who lends us the rice fields offered/asked us to use this one too. It is the most isolated field from all neighbors, so may put some chickens up there sometimes where we don’t have to worry about them eating neighbors tomatoes, but it is also the closest to the mountain and forest so monkeys and other animals wont think twice about coming down to steal a chicken or potato. This means that we can’t grow anything animals will like.

Another problem with this field is that it doesn’t get much sunlight – evident by the pile of snow that still lies in the middle while most of the other snow in the area has melted with the recent sunny days.

(Below) Another shot of our rice fields – this time from “the corner field” and two taken from the ground level right on the aze. While it is difficult to make out, you can see lots of rice-husks spread into the field. This will either be good, or bad. We hear it is good because they take a long time to decompose, so it releases the composty richness over time, and it creates small pockets of air and places for helpful microorganisms to live and propagate in. The negative thing is that as a very carbon rich substance, they will use up all the nitrogen as they decompose. We can only hope the speed of decomposition is slow enough not to create an issue.