Monday, February 25, 2019

Meanwhile, at the forest...

I got tired of the flattening. Not physically but it is now clear to me that I have too much bamboo on my hands. Even if I cover the ground twice over, there will be more. And I cannot really walk on top of them as I imagined, even if they are laid neatly in parallel.
So, I took a break and ordered a wood chipper. It should arrive early March. In the meantime, it is getting warmer and we are getting less and less frost so I took an hour to prepare the soil where I borrowed some land.
I dug a couple of straight lines, raised a bit of dirt and put up some old tunnel frames. Just that one long bed is so big I think I will not need more land unless I have a tractor or lots more to plant.
I will make one more row next to this one and plant potatoes. And Just in case I will make one more row next to that with tunnel.
I don't think I will be able to keep up with more than 2-3 long rows like that but one never knows. It is my first time and I have no idea what kind of effort is needed, so I am improvising.
I did this manually with a hoe... so
Just to show how big the land I am borrowing is, here is the land with my newly made row at the far end. Actually I couldn't get the whole land inside the frame so it is bigger.
Yep it's big
The soil is the best quality I have seen so far though, nice and soft and full of life.
  

Hoarders Story

Spring is here and I am happy to find an egg or two every day in the nest. Then one day I could not even find a single egg...
It was a nice and sunny day
Not a cold and dark day where one would expect the hens to go on strike or anything like that.. but still. The hens seemed happy and healthy.
But the nest was empty, except for some poop
I sensed something was fishy but didn't care to investigate further... until I opened the coop to clean up the poop from inside.
Still nothing strange. Just poop on the poop board
Until I leaned in more to move the poop board, and found hidden away treasure!!!
Must be a week's worth
Somehow the hens had decided that the nest was not the best place to lay their eggs, and together decided the coop corner to be optimum.
Two dozen eggs to be exact
I cleaned up the poop, the coop and took the eggs, as well as tidied up the nest boxes. After that, the hens returned to their old habit of laying properly in the nests. Now I find 3-4 eggs every day in the boxes where they should be.
The fruits of today. Poop and eggs
And that is the story of my hoarder hens.
The eggs were all still good and yummy
 

Monday, February 18, 2019

Dull saw, or just weak?

Gradually the bamboo flattening is progressing but I am too eager to wait till it is finished properly before trying my hands on a sugi tree...
So I geared up with my chainsaw again (it was a while ago I brought it along since the flattening and de-branching can be done with just a tiny handsaw) and headed to the plot.
My gear when going to the forest... until I get my car
Did a of the usual branch cutting first and when I got bored of that, I decided to challenge the smallest of the sugi trees, as a way of measuring my and my tool's strength.
The first to fall. Doesn't look very challenging does it?
Here is the same tree, close up. I have started wearing special gloves because after all the rain and snow the bamboo are all wet and slippery, plus I don't want to cut my fingers again. These are not dish washer gloves even though they look like it. They are much thicker and have real good grip. Underneath I wear a pair of normal gardening gloves.
Feel the force. May the power of our lord cut you down.
I hit the trunk with the full force of the fully loaded chainsaw, and went at it for a good 5 minutes until it felt like the saw was not going any deeper. Here is the result of that effort.
Not impressive
Even the tiny green bug that was resting on the tree did not think it was worth moving for. It just sat there and watched while I gave it another try, but it got no better.
Tough bugger
OK, tree. You win this round. But I'll be back. I don't know yet how but I will be back even if I have to cut you down with an axe. I am guessing either the chainsaw teeth have gone dull, or that the engine is too weak, even if it was enough for cutting thick bamboos, and that a real man's gasoline engine chainsaw is needed. I will think about it and try again.
In the meantime, I sulked and went back to my flattening. I even spread some leaves on the path I made next to the plot to make its tracks more presentable. I am pretty happy with that.
Looking north from the south west corner
Looking east from the same corner, with the path visible
The sun reaches the plot nicely now... and so does the rain and the wind. Just need to get rid of those sugis... 

Monday, February 11, 2019

Shaping the plot

Well now that we have the corners more or less pinned, agreed upon and signed, I can connect the dots and make the defining shape of the plot. I began doing this by laying some of the bamboo along the path to the south. At least I laid them where I thought it was supposed to be, between two big trees, on the edge of the path where the small cars use.
Until Mr. O came by and saw what I was doing, and urged me to lay the bamboo more inside the path. "The actual path is further south. People have just been using this flat bit because it is more convenient, but actually half the flat bit where people pass is part of your plot." He said.
So I started invading the current "path" with my line of bamboos in order to define the actual path. Of course doing this made the path look much narrower because the other side of the path (where the actual path is supposed to be) is overgrown and also gradually goes up into a hill... Ah heck, here, let me draw it:
Cross section of the path. My plot to the left (north)

So after I had made the path look narrow by laying all my bamboo at the edge of my plot, I thought to myself that the poor cars who want to pass need to have a chance at least. Therefore, I took a hoe and dug the "dirt gathered from above", and made clear and flat the "actual path". I even measured it to be wider than the convenient path was, at over 2,2 meters.
Here is the result. I am pretty happy with it, and even Mr. O who saw it later said it was well done.
It took a whole morning, but now I have 20 meters of path
Then another day I was flattening the bamboo, cutting branches etc. When I realized right at that spot where I was cutting, there were too many bamboos, and it was big and thick bamboo that was in my way and I had nowhere to put it. So I started hauling it over to the newly defined path, and continued the path all the way to the east corner, where we recently had remeasured with Mr. K
Time to put those extra meters to use I thought and started laying the big bamboos along the corner and the edge,clearly shaping the plot. And then I continued the flattening at the east end.
This is what it looked like after I was done that day.
The east side, seen from south
Yeah, it snowed again.
I have almost 1/3 left to "flatten" and then I can start felling the sugi trees. Here is a picture taken from east side, to compare with the ones before I started felling bamboos...
Mr. K's plot is in the foreground, nice and flat.
Not much else going on... except I met a lady who lives up the hill at the south side. She is a very nice lady with a maki stove, and was looking for wood to burn, so I gave her all the wood I had put to dry in the car-port. Win-win. I showed her my "garden", with the chickens who have now started laying every day again (hooray), and she showed me her big garden with lots of fruit trees but she said the fruit doesn't come out so well. She is not a pro, and doesn't put in any chemicals or natural nutrition in the soil so I guess that is the reason.
She was very sympathetic though. Good to know what people live around the plot.

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Spring is coming, Jon Snow

Either that, or one of my chickens is confused.
This morning I found this unusually elongated and symmetrical egg in their nest. Days are getting longer so I suppose the cold doesn't matter.
I missed fresh eggs. Looking forward to eat this one


Monday, February 4, 2019

Winter's coming, Jon Snow

And then suddenly one morning everything was covered in white again...
The tunnels are weighed down by the heavy snow
And so is the chicken run roof, again.
I was too busy/lazy to open up the tiny holes in the net above the chicken run, so that the snow can fall through... and as result the snow accumulated above and turned into ice in the morning. Heavy heavy.
All the snow melted away in a couple of days though and the tunnels and the nets went back to their original positions.
The morning of snow was nice and sunny so I took a trip to the forest plot to see what it looked like.
Covered with snow as expected
Some of the bamboo in the neighboring plots were leaning over my plot because of the snow/ice making their tops heavy.
I did continue in the following days to flatten the plot. But kept being interrupted by Mr. O who also likes to cut trees in his plot next to mine, and we stand around and chat more than we work it turns out. So I go there in the morning, work an hour if I'm lucky and then he comes and we talk an hour, and then I work another hour and then have to go home to eat and do other things.
One morning I was chopping and hacking away at the branches, and missed and hit my own finger. I was very lucky that the same blow that cuts off centimeter-thick bamboo branches didn't chop off my finger top. I would have to hang it around my neck like Davos Seaworth. Instead lots of blood kept flowing out onto the ground and I had to call it a day, put pressure on the finger and go home to patch it up.
The scar looks like "tear along the dotted line"
After that day the progress of the plot cleanup was thus much:
Still, the difference is visible
After my finger felt better I came back equipped with a thicker glove and went at it for a couple more days. I also made a clear path along my plot. The thing is, there is a path next to my plot, which gradually tends to be pushed into my plot because my plot is flat and clean, and the land on the other side of the path is not. So cars tend to keep to my side, and their tracks kind of have defined a path which is halfway into my land.
What I did was I cleared out weeds and bushes from what seems to be the plot on the other side but in fact is the path itself, and I also leveled the far edge of the path so it looks less like it is forest.
So now cars can keep away without feeling like they are running in a jungle.
At the same time, I put bamboo alongside my plot's edge to define the actual path's edge, making passing cars create a new correct path with their tire tracks.
When I say cars, I mean Mr. K's because no other car passes there as far as I know.
The narrow road. Mr. O said it is the correct path
The line I made with bamboo actually runs between two big trees so it is correct. Mr. O also seems to think so because he urged my to lay more bamboos into what I thought was the road, and kept saying that the actual road is halfway in the jungle, and that the jungle needs to be cleaned by the owner so it doesn't invade the road like it has.
Anyway, after my week's work, this is what the land looks like:
Just a week or 2 more...
And I also ordered a new truck, finally.
It's a Subaru Samba kei truck, and the closest color I could get to red was orange... lots of haggling and I think I made a bargain, because comparing with other makers' dealers it is way cheaper, for practically the exact same hardware. About 20% cheaper, and the other ones claimed to give me their best deal with rebates. When checking their details it seems the biggest difference is not the car price itself, but the costs around it, lots of imaginary services and high handling fees which are completely different for different seller. And when added up they cost maybe 1/3 of the price of the car.
The Subaru guy cut off 10% from the car's price, and the more I negotiated the more he removed handling fees and agent fees etc, and finally it seemed like more human prices.
It's a tiny car for tiny jobs
The truck will arrive beginning of April, but could be earlier too. Then I can use it to contribute to defining the new path, every time I go to the plot.
The color I picked