June 14th (Sat.)

One of the big weaknesses in our living style I feel so far at the smallholding is we just can’t make it through the weekend without a trip to the shops. Either to give us a bit of a break or because I need more supplies for the job I’m doing we always seem to end up taking a trip to the shopping centre.
Hardly a model of self sufficiency !
So this weekend I made a big effort to get all the provisions and hardware I needed for the fencing for the ongoing fence building on Friday night and settled in for the weekend.

And as the title relates…I actually got something done ! Namely we now officially have , at least in theory, a deer proof field ! But about 100metres of fencing doesn’t go up easy single handed and I had my work cut out.
Last week I had put in all the posts and did one 20m side of fencing as a tester so it was just a hard slog of lacing on the netting to the wire and then tensioning it up with my home made tensioners every
2 spans of 5 metres. Production line stuff. I’ll run you through the process in my usual ‘how-to’ style features.

Putting in anti-vermin netting to the fence posts

1) I used electricians’ plastic coated staples knocked in to the back of the corner posts to make a firm point for the wire to be hitched onto.
2) The wire is then threaded onto that and folded over to make a loop, then the wire is carefully taken off the coil to the length required and snipped there.(NOTE: be careful not to let the wire come free from your hand since once it springs free from being coiled it will be come a time wasting tangle). I was putting in tensioners every 10 metre which I found to be enough because a greater length would become to difficult to pull through the netting easily.
3) The wire can then be laced on to the netting in a over and through fashion for strength using pliers to pull it when the going gets tough. IMPORTANT NOTE* For the last 50cm before you put the tensioner on don’t lace the netting on to the wire, the reason will become apparent later.

4) The wire currently looped around the staple on the corner post can now be properly secured. I used U clamps which are about 40 yen each, although the smallest available they still proved to be too small to be gripped by the U clamp. This problem can be easily solved by snipping 2 short lengths of wire to put under the U clamp with the real wire, increasing diameter and get a bite from the clamp.
5) So now you can put in the wire tensioner, but first let’s talk about the fabrication of it:

A wire tensioner in place on one of the electric wires

I found it really difficult to source a wire tensioner and prohibitively expensive to import so made this simply design. The body of the tensioner is (I think) a wood beam brace, the strip of metal that is hammered into place to connect to wood elements in the frame of a house. Japan being a country of wood houses these are easily found and retail for about 250 yen for 5 pairs including the nails which we won’t need for the design.
The metal strip has 4 holes of which we will be using 3. These 3 are enlarged simply with a drill to accept a nut and bolt of 4mm diameter. That’s it actually! For now 2 strips are paired together and the 2 holes you enlarged at one end are threaded up with nuts and bolts loosely, allowing room for the wire to be put in in between the strips.

Another nut and bolt will be threaded through the hole drilled in the body to secure the wire once it has been wound up and tensioned.

6) The wire is simply looped around one of the nuts in the tensioner twice to secure it, the act of tensioning the wire will secure it and doing anything more fancy to secure the wire may stop it from laying flat.
(*NOTE* The same tensioner will be used for the electric wires but the method of connection will be different).

Subsequent spans of 10metres of wire are laced on to the netting as previously described either terminating in another wire tensioner or the corner post connection when you reach it. NOTE* just be sure to leave the 50cm next to the wire tensioner unlaced onto the netting.

The fence constructed up to 4 wires (3 remaining still to put in)

7)Once you have completed one side of the fencing corner post to corner post it’s time to tighten the whole thing up. This is done by simply twisting the twin body of the tensioner around causing the wire to wrap around the bolts and then when the desired tension is acquired the bolt is put in at the far end of the body to secure it, job done.

The bottom of the fence is dealt with in the same way, threading wire through it and putting in tensioners. Every metre a u peg is looped over the wire and hammered into the ground to stop monkeys, tanuki and boar from getting under. This may well be enhanced by a stand off electric wire 30cm from the ground when we get into putting in the electrics in.

Mid morning the workman came to sort out the water in the utility room that supplies the washing machine and also a tap at the back of the property that could be used for plant irrigation. We’ve never had any water out of it and the labyrinthine archaic plumbing system is a mystery to me, him to actually when he made a presumptuary look the other week.
Those of you who remember the ‘recycle shop man from hell’ who sold us the piano will understand when I say this guy made the former look like everybodies favourite affable uncle. He’d come with 2 cronies in 2 vans which instantly set alarm bells ringing. ‘You did talk about the price of all these last time he came didn’t you?’
I asked my wife. I was heading in his direction just as soon as the word ‘no’ had escaped my wife’s lips.

‘Good morning’ I said to them, no answer the discussion as to the possible location of the pipe continued among them. ‘Right, how much is this going to cost?’ still no answer…..’Right, STOP !’ oh that got a result and everyone looked my way. ‘How much is this going to cost, just the ascertaining what needs to be done?’
‘Oh we don’t know, we don’t know what’s wrong yet’ came the reply.
You can see this was going to get ugly. After some backward toing and froing it did come out that they’d charge 2000 yen (10pounds) for assessing the job.
‘Very well, proceed’ backing off grudgingly. I’d have preferred to have here’d the words ‘ A quote is free ‘ but I could concede 2000yen.

As it turned out the problem wasn’t a problem as such at all. We knew we had a well on the property but the previous owner had sworn blind that the well water assisted the mains water in the seperate cottage that faces garden. Mind you this is the same owner that didn’t know where the front door key was.
The well apparently used to supply all the water for the main house while now it’s duties have diminished to the previously stated untility room water and tap for agricultural use. So by simply plugging in the big electric pump that sits over the well and turning the tap on we got well water! Nice to have.

Yasumi spent the afternoon on some laundry bonanza, washing everything in sight…which disappointingly came out less than white, a kind of yucky brown. ‘I expect it’s because the water hasn’t been used for a long time’ I reasoned, since then I’ve been receiving nice white shirts so I guess the waters running clear now. (you can tell from my vagueness here that by mutual consent I leave the laundry to Yasumi).

June 7th (Sat.)
This weekend it was all steam ahead with the fencing, it had to be ! The fear is that now that deer has found the field he’ll be back and until the permanent fencing is built up to about 1.5 metres my crops are in danger each night of being annhilated.
I also had to get Haine’s new home finished. So I was up at 6 making concrete to set the wire stakes in.

Haine posing nicely for the camera in his new run. The cherry tree can be seen in it’s enclosure behind.

It came as no surprise that the cherry tree I’d planted up there for Yasumi’s birthday had been well nibbled by Bambi and co. I’d ment to put fencing around it but just hadn’t found the time during the week. Well, with fencing installed around it now I think it’ll survive. Those 2 jobs completed and having breakfast with the family we both agreed it’s a shame are view from the lounge window now includes the fencing enclosure around the tree but we just have to think of the future when it’s established and a riot of cherry blossoms in spring (hopefully).

The rest of the day was spent on the fencing, setting the corner posts into concrete around the perimeter.

As I sat up my ladder I heard the familiar high bleat (more of a squeal really) of a doe deer close at hand. Rare in the daytime. I had my dog whistle in my pocket and struck on the idea that my whistle may sound like another deer. Indeed it had an uncanny likeness and the doe seemed to be replying in turn. I then spotted the tell tale white tail, pardon the pun, moving through the scrub a little way up the mountain in a ridge where the trees look to have been felled a few years ago.
It’s the enemy but what a noble animal. So nice to see a real wild deer like that.
That wasn’t to be the only deer sighting I had either. A little later I took Haine for a walk up the track into the forest that comes down steeply to the river. Just into the forest there was a sudden violent rustle of foliage and I thought ‘oh oh here we go ! a wild boar’ but no a buck deer, probably a 2 year old came charging through the trees and leaped up over the path and made off. He must have been down at the river drinking and we startled him. Haine was completely unimpresed and carried on scratching his ass, while my heart was beating like crazy.
A little further on I came across this strange abandoned stone structure in the trees.

I have no idea what it may be. The cedar tree growing in it’s centre would probably have self-planted after the war so the structure is at least pre-war. It looks like a Scottish broch ! Circular structures are really quite rare in Japanese architecture, either military or civilian. I’ll have to ask around.

Later Yasumi and I took turns to ascend the ladder and knock the posts in on the perimeter fence, the last stretch. We finished the day with all posts in place.

Satisfying but another night with the crops under protective fleece and domes because the fence was still not in operation. How I’d love to spend the night with a gun outdoors waiting for the deer to appear.

June 8th (Sun.)
Another day of furious fence building, off to the home centre to buy more wire and metalwork to put in the bottom metre of netting.
The strength of the fence is to be in the tension of the wires which means the corner posts have to be strong in the direction of pull to take the strain of the wire. So my first job was to rig up diagonal anchor trusses connecting half way up the corner posts. I chainsawed a notch in the corner post and hammered them into the earth then connectected the new diagonal truss to the corner post with long nails going through both members. This is not enough of course so I’ve strained that cross member down with a wire going from a side bolt in the corner post around the truss which I put a notch in with the chainsaw and tensioned with a tension adjuster. In the direction of strain this appeared pretty strong.

The items that make up the corner truss assembly

June 6th (Fri.)
This year has been a real stinker of a rainy season. I’ve been unable to find such a chart to back this up but Yasumi said on the news they showed a chart depicting rainfall year by year and this year is already exceptionally high.
The furrows in the field have been regularly under about 5cm of water and Thursday night was no exception.
Friday once again brought rain. I didn’t think the rain had been so bad but travelling home beside the river, it’s water right up to the tree line I realised the rainfall had been severe and we may be in trouble again. Sure enough the water in the field was the highest yet with the water level with the tops of the raised beds in places and if the rain continued with ferocity it threatened to drown some crops.
A nervous night ensued as I sat eating dinner with the rain hard at the window.
By morning however the skies had cleared. I got up earlier than normal (5:45) and donning wellies went out to inspect the field. Luckily the water had already rescinded and the crops looked in fair condition. Then I spotted a few leaves missing on one green pepper. That’s strange damage for the leaf to blow off at that point I thought then slowly I saw more damage and deer tracks. Yes a single deer had got over my temporary 1 metre fence and nibbled in total:

2 peppers,
3 aubergines,
2 tomato,
1 cucumber.

The worst damaged had been reduced to almost just a bare stem, unlikely to survive.
While a few plants can be replaced the other damage was that the deer had hopped along the plastic covered raised beds punching a path of holes in it here and there. No easy fix for that and a great place for weeds to get established until less I plant in some herbs or something in the holes it’s made.

On returning from work I worked in the dark until 9pm putting every plant under plastic cloches, or hoop and fleece tunnels to protect for one night till I could do more to protect the crops.

It occurred to me while I worked by the dim light of a torch a light system in the field would be an excellent little luxury. That way I could work in the evening after work easily and also if the light was on a sensor it would scare the deer away.

June 2nd (Mon.)
Yasumi made a call to the local governmental food bureau to ask them what the situation is with
citizens rearing pigs. That probably made the guys day, I can’t see the phones buzzing all day with enquiries along those lines in Japan.
He basically said it was possible, they’d need to know about the livestocks’ location, and have written confirmation that the meat was for home use then at the slaughterhouse an inspection of the meat’s condition would be conducted as you’d expect. The stinger was that they thought it would cost between 10,000yen to 20,000 yen to process one animal (about 50 to 100 pounds), that’s a hefty bill on top of rearing cost. They are independent of the slaughterhouse however and just their guesstimate so we’d need to phone the slaughterhouses directly for their system and pricing.
As far as I’m aware a slaughterhouse’s costs very greatly in relation to how much butchering they do of the carcass and this wasn’t discussed. Obviously a carcass all nicely made into chops and roasting butts is going to be quite a different cost from one simply cleaved in two with trotters and head removed. If going for the latter option makes the cost of home -rearing much more viable then I’ll be taking a trip to the shops to get a cleaver and saw. The cuts may not be so pretty but in anycase I feel being able to butcher the meat we rear would be much more favourable.

June 1st (Sun.)
Yasumi had her sports day at the school on Saturday so I was alone with sproglet and the dog. It was a challenge to keep both parties happy, playing nicely together, sleeping peacefully et al. Amidst all this I managed to set up the puppies new kennel up on the space we’d made in the sakaki tree plantation.

Eldan helping (?) me put together the new dog kennel the night before
The remains of the treestump proved to be too high even though I’d cut them as low as possible with the result that the dog’s long leash kept getting caught up so he made pretty patterns of tangle like a kid playing ‘cat’s cradle’. Back to the drawing board!
Plan B was to make an overhead running leash system. I plan to put Haine on such a system in the vegetable field later so it would be a good trial run of the system I thought.

An overhead wire carries a pulley wheel which the dog is attached to via a connecting leash. In this way he is free to run along the length of it plus from side to side as much as the leash allows. It all worked fine except even now the strength and energy of a 3 month labrador is too much for the ends of the overhead wire to simply be staked into the ground. Even after a little bit the wire had lost tension. Not to fear I’m confident cementing those stakes into the ground will solve the problem.

For now though it looks like he’ll be in the utility room another week.

May 31st (Sat.)
The puppy is just getting too big and bored in the utility room that’s his home while we are out at work. Well to be my exact his poop and pee is getting too big. Mucking out the utility room is a major job now and while he has absolutely loads of space to play inevitably left alone all day he takes to chewing the corners of the old kitchen sink and tables in their.
Also with the hotter weather coming it will be much more healthy for him to be in the cool air.
So, today I got busy with the chainsaw to clear an area in the top field of the stumpy little ’sakaki trees’ that it is covered with. These sakaki trees leafy branches used to be saleable as they are the offertory foliage at shrines. As such locally it seems to have been the standard answer for a bit of land you have spare and don’t want to do something high maintenance. Now though there is little demand for it. The next door neighbour sells a bit at a kiosk set up in a layby up the road but that’s the extent of it.
I hate to cut trees that have fought storm and drought to grow to the size they are but I fortified
myself that in the future this space will be put to good use, with only about an acre of land we have to !!

With the chainsaw I cleared a sizeable patch in no time. Then I called the troops to help shift the felled trees. Once again Eldan was a great help, he’s quite the farm hand these days.

Once cleared we were both surprised at how much land we have here though, and this extends in a long strip along the whole eastern side of the property. Just what shall we do with it ?

I joked about putting a mini vineyard here to sort out my supply of chardonnay, pleasant dream but coming back down to earth I don’t think either the location or climate in this part of Japan suitable. Then there’s the ever present monkey problem, I’m sure they’d love to sit up there feasting on grapes during the summer.
I mentioned more olive trees and was greeted by a loud “What more ?!!” from the wife.
The actual provisional plan is to maybe raise a pair of pigs here,
IF the slughterhouse can process them for us and
IF the prevailing winds don’t make it too potentially whiffy.
2 pigs shouldn’t make too much off a pong if carefully managed but it deserves a bit more research. This may be an excuse to buy a bit of cheap unused land up the valley to put them on.

You can see there’s quite a bit of space here now and Eldan enjoyed playing in it.

May 28th (Thurs.)

The people who we got the puppy from sent us his pedigree certificate that logs his blood line for a few generations. Lots of strange and interesting names make an appearance on it, my favourites being ‘Mamie vom Kyorakusow’. Wow! What were the owners on.

This morning I discovered the floopy disc I save posts to before uploading to the blog was completely jiggered and so I have lost the best part of a months posts!
I could rewrite them in full but I fear things are moving at such a rapid pace at the moment I risk playing a game of keep up if I were to do that, so I’ll cut my losses and give a brief photo summary of what has transpired:

A few weekends ago, tired of looking at the collection of unused terracotta pots I had bought earlier in spring I bought a load of plants for them, chief of which was a lemon tree. Then in descending order of size, another lavender, 2 rosemary plants, and 2 trailing blue plants (that’s vague).
Eldan was actually quite helpful, and carefully filled the pots with pottting soil. He’s actually getting the hang of it all. He even posed after he’d finished his labours:

The plants need to fill out into the pots of course but I was quite pleased with the effect. We watched Ridley Scott’s ‘ a Good Year’ the other night and I think it’s evidenced by my choice of very provencal blues and the lavender and rosemary.

We had friends over for a BBQ ….again. Japanese BBQ’s are great for the thin sliced cuts of steak grilled for a few minutes and dipped in tangy soy sauce based dips . Really delicious.
The vegetables at a Japanese BBQ are really a let down for me. They are always just sliced and cooked, in the searing heat of the BBQ it’s err..optimistic at best to expect a few pieces of cabbage to not become like burnt paper and pumpkin to be anything but blackened on the outside and still raw inside.
So I’ve been introducing a few ways of doing veg that were hits with our Japanese friends.

Before the veg though I start things off with vongole, or clams. As you can see they are just put in a skillet over the flames with some butter, a few twists of pepper, covered with an upturned heavy frying pan and then finished off with a spash of white wine, boiled down with rough chopped parsley.
It’s really simple and everyone enjoys slowing eating through those, with the butter dripping down their chin to stave off the hunger.

These pumpkin have been cut a few centimetres thick and par boiled in a weak beef stock to soften them up and add another layer of flavour, this way they get soft and flavoursome while they blacken up to an acceptable amount on the grill.

I also like to make an antipasto at the bbq early on in proceedings. I char up the skin of red and green peppers on the BBQ then get an idle guest to rub the skin off in a bowl of water, then at the table cut them into strips,and add rough chopped garlic, italian parsley, some parmesan and a generous coating of extra virgin olive oil all mixed up with my hands. It’s not really BBQ cooking but burning the peppers in the kitchen is hard work where as on the BBQ it’s a cinch and anyway the guests love the show !

The Japanese Eringi (eryngii) is a mushroom with a big thick stem. It has a great meaty woody taste, really a meal in itself. I split them down the middle then marinate them in extra virgin olive oil with rough sea salt and black pepper. On the BBQ to keep all that moisture in and get the thick stem soft but packed with flavour, I cover with a lid until done. I’ve never tried it but doing a little impromptu smoking here by deadening the bbq down with some aromatic wood shavings may reap rich rewards in complexity of flavour to the mushroom.

Aubergine can be similarly treated, sprinkling with salt with kitchen paper to draw out the water, then marinating in olive oil before cooking, this time without the lid. I serve with a big dollop of a simple greek style dip:
yoghurt with thin sliced cucumber mixed in sprinkled with a little paprika.
If you’re serving a spicy chorizo or linguica piccante the aubergine dish makes a great summer cool down to the fiery heat of the sausages.

These linguica can be found in the stores serving the Brazilian communities. My first stop off when doing the BBQ shop !

I set up the trellises for the cucumbers and “Roma” tomatoes. With about 20 metres to put up and another 20 metres to put up on the next row for the San Marziano tomatoes on the next row eventually I wanted to get a quick and solid way of constructing it. So I used simple tie tights instead of fiddling about with a thousand granny knots in garden twine that was my undoing last year (pardon the pun! ). This, so far, has turned out to be a great solution.
I can get a strong dependable joint, retighten it should the tie tights stretch in high winds easily, and at 200 yen (1pound) for the whole length was cost effective. I found the tie tights are actually reuseable, by putting a screwdriver into the catch they can be released for use again although I’ll have to test the strength of them after this.

The strength of the structure was illustrated by the fact that when I shook one end the other end 20metres away wiggled showing the thing was in effect one unit.

The netting was then laced onto the top with a single rope going around the top pole like a main sail laced on to a mast (I think ?) then pegged down every 80cm at the bottom.

After that was all completed I put in the cucumbers and tomato plants. I actually have too many ‘roma’ tomato plants which is a nice situation to be in.

I’ll keep them for the time being in case I have any losses in the tumultuous ‘rainy season’ ahead.

May 27th (Tues)

The gun dog whistle and slip leash I ordered have come. Haine is now regularly being blasted with the single high pitched ‘peep’ on the whistle every time he sits down on command. There is method in the madness:

Training a dog to sit on a whistle command
Having got the verbal ’sit’ command a single blast on the whistle is introduced after the verbal command.
In time the dog SHOULD associate the command to sit with the whistle sound as well and so the 2 will become interchangeable.
The target is for the dog to sit down on the whistle command even if far away from me, in this way the sit command also is a way of halting the dog where ever he is, a very useful trick to have up your sleeve.

The slip leash is also something unique to gun dogs. It acts in the same way as a choker chain but is in woven rope. Since gun dogs often have to forage through undergrowth, where a collar may get caught up,they don’t wear one and when the dog is to be close at heel a slip leash is used that can be quickly removed when the dog is put to work.
Haine thought it was great fun to hold the leash in his teeth as we walked along which I just went with and then praised him when he eventually got bored of the game and dropped it.

May 24th (Sat.)
With Yasumi’s birthday celebrations falling on a real wild and wholly rainy day we were both scratching our heads as to what to do. We ended up going to the ‘Miho Museum’ in Shiga prefecture.

My little boy on arrival at the main building of the museum

I admit to being a devoted fan of this little pearl of a museum and we’ve been a few times now. As much as the exhibits the museum architecture itself is reason enough to make the trip in my book, the designer was the internationally renowned architect I.M.Pei who also designed the Canary Wharf Tower in Londons docklands. This is quite different in scale and sensitivity however.
It’s subtitle is ‘The musuem on the mountain’ which is pretty self explanatory and accurate. A winding switch back road takes you up deep into a mountain top forest of Japanese cedar. The museum experiences starts with a rather unexpected gyratory system laid out in coloured stone around which a low building wraps which is only the ticket kiosk. This building also houses a very popular organic restaurant serving Japanese noodles (soba and udon). Many local people come here at the
weekend just for the food giving the impression that the museum will be much more crowded than it actually is.
Organic food also features in the cafe in the main museum building and I recently learnt that rather than this being some bolt on crowd puller is very central to the museums principles. The founder of the museum, Mihoko Koyana, one of the richest women in Japan, founded the museum to house her stunning collection of ancient Roman, Persian, early Buddhist and Assyrian artifacts. A collection with this focus is unsurprisingly rare in Japan.

One of my favourite exhibits, a roman mosaic of ,I think, around the 3rd century inlaid in the museum floor.

Koyana’s main achievement however was the establishment of a spiritual movement called ‘Shumei’ who’s underlying principles while, in my opinion, are closely related to Buddhist and Taoist thought put a hollistic twist on spiritual development through appreciation of art and natural agriculture.
The Shumei agricultural farm from which the organic food for the museum is supplied can be seen at the bottom of the valley. It appears to heavily use traditional Japanese agricultural techniques.

Eldan enjoying his organic orange juice in the cafe of the museum.

So the journey to the museum starts at this rotary with a little white electric car, which reminded me of Woody Allen’s film ‘The Sleeper’, coming to shuttle you up the long avenue of trees and through a rather 60’s style futuristic tunnel to the main building itself. The preceeding avenue of trees are all cherry trees and are an amazing cascade of powder puff blooms in spring. As you exit the tunnel the land drops away revealing just how high you are and a suspension bridge carries you over to the main museum building that you now see before you. The architect has of course left the best ’till last and on entering the museum a sea of forest clad mountains stretches out before beyond the central windows.

The view from the museum foyer.
This museum journey plays like a story. It’s rather unfashionable these days to design like this but it’s wholely appropriate here I think because it is a language of architecture that the ancient Greeks or Egyptians (whose artifacts the museum holds) would have thoroughly understood.
In fact the story being told through the building is not just metaphorical but actual, it recounts the Chinese ’story of the peach blossom valley’ in which a traveller coming across a valley filled with blossoming peach trees decides to follow the valley up and coming through a tunnel finds himself in the
secret valley of Shangri-la.

So using the narrative language of classical architecture the designer tells a quintessentially Asian story in a museum housing classical artifacts in an Asian location. Clever stuff !