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.