Clusterbeets

All the vegetable seeds I planted in the garden have now germinated and tiny leafs are everywhere... In case of daikons, well, I just put a bunch of seeds in the ground every 10-20 cm, and now the leafs popped up in clusters.
I am now pulling out the weakest ones every day until there is only one or two left from each bunch.
I guess I should have planted the seeds 1 by 1 in a row instead.

Bit of waste of good seeds

In the forest front, I keep burning bamboo a couple of time each week... however, I noticed that I have started coughing recently, because my usual mask is apparently not enough to protect me from the smokes. So I will go hunt for a good anti smoke mask, and reduce the burning to once a week tops, and during the burning try to stay away from the barrel.

It's opening up

I am almost done with clearing the plot and stacking bamboos. After that (maybe this weekend) I will go to the owner of the plot to my north and get permission to clear out his plot from bamboos. I could not plant any saplings in my plot as long as those tall things are leaning over it threatening to fall.

I want to tidy up the north plot with stacks of bamboo just like mine 

I hope to be done with that before X-mas, and start to cut down sugis on my own plot. When that is done, I should be able to start digging out bamboo roots in my plot and prepare the soil for planting trees. So there is still a lot left to do.

Exterminate!

The real flattening

In the forest, right now I am picking weeds and moving all the bamboo from the floor over to the north where I stack them neatly and wait for them to dry so I can burn them. The bamboo that cannot be piled up cause they are too small or too old, I just throw in a pile near the center. That pile is where I get the bamboo to burn right now.
Anyway, it took me 3-4 more hours to burn the rest of that pile from last time.

All done. No pile left.

Of course, a new pile had built up almost immediately after I had done more clearing out...

Episode IV: A New Pile

So that's how the burning goes. Every day the clear area around the burn barrel gets wider and wider. And now I arrived at the big heap of branches that I had gathered and put in the middle of the plot. It's almost like a wall, and has to go somewhere else if I am to continue clearing the plot.

The branches

It looks simple enough, but actually it's much bigger than it seems. The weight is pressing the branches down together so they look much smaller and fewer. I started to haul them over to the north, behind the stacks of bamboo. At least for now it is a good place for them to be. Later I will burn them little by little...

3 hours later...

Moving them took much more time than I expected. Maybe cause I was extra careful cause lots of tiny leaf frogs had chosen that heap to hide in cause every time I lifted a bunch a few frogs jumped out and away to hide among the leafs nearby.

This is where I moved them

The north side is covered now with all kind of things, and it is almost impossible to see where my plot begins. First, I chopped all the bamboo in the public land and laid them there, then I put some thick bamboos on my side as posts so they wouldn't roll down. Then I laid a few more bamboos behind the posts on my side as extra support, all that formed a thick strip along the north, made of bamboo, half of which is on my plot. During my weed clearing I just tossed all the weed on top of the strip which dried quickly and has started to decompose. Now the strip looks a lot like just soil, but underneath it is still bamboo. So if someone who doesn't know looks at it, the norther slope which marked the border to my land is now 2-3 meters inside my land. Therefore it is important that all this north strip is just temporary and that I burn it as soon as I can so the original slope can be seen again.
My bamboo stacks are just south of that strip, and I have now filled the tiny gap there was between the strip and the stacks, with branches.

It's a mess

Going back to the wall of branches, one more day and the whole thing was finally moved over to its new home.

No more branch wall

Let the flattening commence. Once the weed and the bamboo on the floor is cleared away, I will spend time burning bamboo mostly. In between burning, I will chop down sugi trees in my plot and also bamboo trees in my north neighbor plot, after I get OK from him.

Spider-man

I took a couple of hours and cleaned out most of the beds in the garden, and put in winter seeds. It's mostly things I don't think thief animals would be interested in... like onions, beans, carrots, daikon and broccoli. But one never knows.
Also to prevent the ever growing bigger passion fruit plants from freezing to death again, I wrapped their stems in bubble wrap (yeah, that's the first thing I found laying around. I'm lazy) and partially covered the lower part of the plants with fine netting. Hope this makes the frost a little milder for them and they don't explode like last year.
Oh, and I took this interesting photo one night when I was tucking the chickens in. They seem to have gotten themselves a house pet.

It's pretending to be a fly on the wall

Second burning

Last Saturday I went to the forest prepared and determined to use a full day and see how much bamboo could be burned. I started around 10:30 in the morning, with a pile of half-soaked wood.
It took me maybe 10 minutes to uncover the barrel and get anything to actually catch fire, but once that was done, the fire was on...

I kind of was expecting this whole pile to burn within a day

I threw in more and more wood whenever I noticed there was space opening up in the barrel, and in between I spent time picking weeds and moving bamboo that is laying around and pile it up along the north wall. I knew around 4 PM the sun starts to go down and it would get dark and scary so I counted a bit backwards and with a bit of margin decided to start putting out the fire at 3 PM.
Based on that I decided to add one last load of bamboo around 2:30 PM, and just let that burn to ashes. Figured half an hour should suffice.

After. Around 2:30. Barrel is still burning though.

So, yeah. I could burn a lot of wood, but not as much as I wished. Burning everything will take a few months if I burn say once or twice a week... I guess I shouldn't wait till all bamboo is burned before starting to cut down sugi trees.