Kazagashira Niwa

An exciting new project! We are going to build a rocket mass heater:  But it is super hard to make the right design since our house is made all of paper and straw and is designed in such a way that there is actually no place for it. After 2 years of thinking about it, I am now exploring the possibilities to build the stove actually outside the mainframe of the house in a cob-build extension, away from anything combustible, and then try to bring some heat back into the house through a small heated platform. Not ideal, but last winter had been the coldest in my life, so the motivation to do something is great.    First: breaking down a rotten shed in the back. Then preparing a concrete base for a storage container. Next deconstruct and reconstruct the storage container on the place of the shed.    Now I have a location for a clay pit    And rubble for the base and old but dry wood for the future stove.

Last year I brought water kefir grains from Belgium. However I failed to make them work properly here in Japan. They became vinegar somehow. Buying new ones didn't work out either. They were sent through mail, but were too bad to use. Still looking for something to give me a source of healthy gut organisms, I am trying Kombucha now. They proof to be a lot more resilient than the water kefir. And also less demanding. Down part are that they are slower  to produce and that they taste (supposed to be) like vinegar. And they look like jellyfish or aliens in a jar with tea. Still I can appreciate them. Then I found milk kefir powder to make yoghurt at home. Since I don't take milk very well, I am trying with soymilk now. It seems to work... but I would really like to find a more tastier kind of milk to make kefir with.

It is not so much yet, and most of the times the vegetables don't look perfect, but at least something edible is coming from our garden every day. And tasty also. These pictures show some of the successful ones. Aubergines are doing great! We eat them almost every day. Okra's every other day. They grow twice the size in half the time, and look a lot healthier where I placed them over the dug in bokashi / EM (effective micro organisms that ferment your kitchen scraps) The carrots didn't do so well. Tomato's still keep coming, not enough though to take the effort to dry them.

Many tomato plants. Because the first batch failed to sprout I mixed the earth with the seeds with the soil for the cucumbers while also seeding another batch. (mistake?) Then they started to sprout suddenly from the soil everywhere. So I potted them and tried to find a good place for each of them. I think sun dried tomatoes might be a possibility later on this Summer.

Normal for many people, weeds even, but for some reason here in Nagasaki I am not able to find them in the wild. Since our daughter really likes to eat this super nutritious food, I went through extended effort to import them. Now that they seemed to have established themselves we can start to think about eating nettle soup once in a while!

First steps in making calendula cream: picking, drying, separating the petals.

Some pretty pictures of plants:

Totally moved the topsoil to the side of the garden and made a huegelbed with it. The reason is that it is infused with many little pieces of blue paint that came down from the roof. Not knowing how poisonous this pollution is I first have tried to take out the most dense polluted soil, but came to the conclusion it is much more mixed than I thought. Impossible to take out. Super annoying. I have added a lot of bokashi (basically pickled kitchen waist) to the huegelbed and hope the micro organisms in the soil will help to break down any dangerous materials. Next I removed all stones from the soil down to 60 cm (I like to grow burdock/gobo ) With the stones I could make the edges of the newly made raised garden beds. Ideal lizard habitat! Lizards will help to eat the bad bugs that damage my vegetables. Then I added more bokashi and compost in the soil and added some composted cow and chicken manure in the end. One bed got carrots, parsley lettuce and marigolds. The others will proba

Bamboo smells great. I hope I will be able to distil essential oils from it, some how. This is a test run with orange peels. Not bad.

After we asked our 82 year old neighbour whether she would know anybody who could allow us to grow vegetables on their land, she went out on a little research and came back the same day with two proposals. First: a little plot filled with bamboo stalks of about 150 square meter. Originally this was a little vegetable field and we can use it without conditions. As a field it is not so interesting but I can now use bamboo freely for trellises and other building projects. Just great! Next: two little patches of good quality field. The owner is getting older and is looking forward to pass me on his knowledge of growing vegetables while he is slowly stepping out of the art. Also great! The first patch is now growing beans, carrots, onion, gobo and radishes The second patch, a little further up the mountain is half potato, and for the other half I am trying out the famous three sisters combination: corn, beans and pumpkin. Marigolds are in preparation and some medicinal plants to be pla

And are growing wheatgrass to be juiced. It is really nice to drink fresh fruit/vegetable/grass juices. My belly receives it so well.

Our neighbours are so friendly to put nicely sorted branches at the garbage. Perfect for making woodchips. I bought a wood chipper so I can make my own wood mulch. The mulch I think will be necessary to keep the soil from drying out in Summer, and also to improve drainage after the heavy rains in this country. My plan is to put many fruit trees on this small plot of land. They require a more wood, and therefore mycelium based soil support.  

The south side vegetable beds slowly got extended a little, and are now filled with lettuce, onion, kabu (turnips) and komatsuna. Komatsuna seems to grow really well here in December. The others are a bit sleepy and don't seem to grow very fast. Since half December the weather went below 15 degrees Celsius most of the time. New grow bed on the slope with the help of some bamboo.  

So with the first outlines of my permaculture design becoming clearer, I could start with the implementation of the food forest. Most of the fruit trees and bushes are in the ground now. On less than 200 M2 we have now: peach, almond, lemons, pawpaws, apricot, ume plums, figs, feijoas, mandarin, juneberry, gumyberries, natsumes, kiwis, chocolate vines, grapes, blueberries, strawberries, gojiberries and raspberries. The climate is rather strong here. Lots of sun, rain and wind. Most trees in the neighbourhood are dwarf varieties. I expect my trees to stay relatively small therefore. And if they'll grow too fast and too big I still have my wood chipper :-) I am really curious how it will work out. But still have to wait like 3 years to know. Wish I could speed up the process.