Greetings all An apology: my involvement with the list has been kind of sporadic for the last few weeks, and also my apologies to members who've written to me offlist and haven't had a reply. Quite a few of you... I'm way behind on correspondence. I'll get there, promise. Way behind on a lot of things - everything, basically, except our local on-the-ground projects here, which take priority. My news-handling operation is weeks behind, website maintenance worse than that, let alone very much needed website upgrades and additions. :-(
Oh well. I knew this would happen when we came here. And it's still COLD!!! Early May and the temp's 6 deg C, unreasonable. But at least it's not minus 10 like the night we arrived at this old wood-and-paper farmhouse in January, that nearly killed us. Things are getting better, slowly. More or less derelict house, and a more or less derelict farm too, and after three months' hard work there's still always a lot to be done before you can get anything done. At least all this foundation stuff only needs doing once. There was a story about us three days ago in the Kobe Shimbun newspaper - Handmade biodiesel, photo of me and Midori brewing fuel in our shed, stirred up a lot of interest. Well, we could have done without the interest, there's enough of that already for now - six local organic farmers (this is a designated "organic village") are running their tractors on our biodiesel, more in the queue, and some of them want to learn how to make it themselves. We took photographs of them using the tractors and produced leaflets on biodiesel and its benefits that they can give to their teikei customers (Japanese CSAs) when they deliver the crops. We've been holding biodiesel seminars for local groups, and not-so-local groups, and we'll start a series of hands-on workshops soon, since folks keep asking. Our Town-Ace has been running B100 for about six weeks, from when we started regular production here. WVO comes from several local sources - not restaurants, one step back in the chain: a food company that does lunch boxes for offices and so on, the local school lunch centre that produces daily lunches for 1,200 kids at five local schools; there are other sources, a women's group that collects used oil at household level and makes soap but they have more oil than they can use and want to give it to us. And so on - as much oil as we want. It's nice stuff too, from the first two especially - soy and canola, also sunflower, titrates between 0.2 and 1.0 ml, no water. What a dream, after the totally foul 10.4 ml stuff we had to work with in Tokyo! (Good for your learning curve though...) Meanwhile we got the ploughing done in time, between all the heavy showers - it's WET here! - but at least it's not snowing anymore. I sowed my rice nursery a few days ago, just in time, kind of extremely important - the field isn't prepared yet, but there's still about a week to do it in. Only a small field, but I'm not interested in growing tons of rice, I'm after proving something, and it's big enough for that. We're producing about a ton of compost a month, and we'll harness the constant free heat supply for hot water, to heat a biogas unit and for process heat for biodiesel. Midori's been making permanent raised beds and composting them and so on, planting seedlings, very nice. She'll make some square foot beds in the next few days - the answer to what Kirk was telling Curtis about growing food in 20 sq ft (less actually). More here: http://journeytoforever.org/garden.html Organic gardening: Journey to Forever organic garden - square foot gardening, container gardening, how to grow healthy food anywhere http://journeytoforever.org/garden_sqft.html Building a square foot garden Local farmer friends gave us some chickens that were "too old to lay" - we ate some and kept three, which happily lay an egg a day each now they're being treated properly. Two of the ones we ate were at a dinner we had for local friends, 12 of them, villagers and farmers, a great success, good evening. They couldn't believe they were eating their chickens - these old birds are *tough*, how did you get them so tender? LOL! We were also given three "useless" ducks (aigamo cross-bred ducks, kept for weeding rice paddies, bought in fresh each year and these are last year's residue) - same thing, each lays an egg a day and one went broody, so we should soon have some ducklings, nice meat they'll be. The birds are looking good now - we saw the two ducks we weren't given the other day, quite a contrast, poor things. Now we need a rooster and some non-hybrid chickens that know from going broody... Still looking for Muscovies, and still can't find any... we heard of some feral ones on a river in a town not too far away, probably we'll end up trying to catch them. Cage and bait or a net?? Hm... I'd better get my sense of humour tuned up - in the past Muscovies haven't had much difficulty outsmarting me. :-( The birds are a great hit with the village kids - we're the ONLY ones in the village who keep chickens! Things ain't wot they were... The neighbours' kids (or grandkids rather) are here nearly every day, hand-feeding the birds and so on after Midori showed them how. So they bring their friends, and some of the friends are now so far removed from it all that they're *frightened* of the birds, they shriek and run away. Sad. We're starting to have predator problems now it's warming up a bit, or rather unchilling a bit, won't go so far as to say it's warm. Midori found a big cobra under the Town-Ace yesterday, and we'll have a plague of bamboo rats any time now, coming down from the mountains as fast as we can catch them or faster. I caught a crow stealing eggs from right under the broody duck, which won't happen again, and that evening a racoon strolled past us, nodded cordially and set about digging under the fence to get at the birds. It seemed surprised that we didn't approve. It wasn't scared of us at all, sort of shrugged and mooched off. Nice animal, never seen a racoon before. "Kill it and we'll eat it," said Midori, ever the pragmatist. But I don't want to kill it, I like it. I like the birds too though. We have to build them a proper shelter, rather than the big cubic-metre boxes we're using now, which we found in the shed, all we've had time for. Container pallets and edge planks from logs from the local woodcutters, free... but no time to do it yet. :-( A friend, a local carpenter who builds traditional houses, a real craftsman (I mentioned him before), has been holding courses on using forest resources, and we haven't had time for that either, which I'll always regret, he's really good. Damn. And so on. So, workworkwork, all a bit much, but at least we're getting somewhere, and it's starting to show results now, bearing fruit. Pretty nice really. Meanwhile I've got the flu, yuk, the world appears to be made of a bewildering sort of thin greenish-hued soup through which one is somehow propelled in a queasily yawing fashion. Urk... Hence this letter - it yaws less if you sit down... Best Keith ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Rent DVDs Online - Over 14,500 titles. No Late Fees & Free Shipping. Try Netflix for FREE! http://us.click.yahoo.com/YoVfrB/XP.FAA/uetFAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
