- This heat is getting to people. Tempers are getting short. We stopped off at the bank again on the way out because it’s a handy location and saves making a special trip. While I was inside there was an angry car horn – I looked out to see a car pulling out of the sideroad that ours was partially blocking. This guy had smashed our door mirror and snatched the ignition key. Found the key on the pavement but T was a bit upset as you can imagine. No, she shouldn’t have parked like that, and if the radio had been turned down a bit she’d have heard the horn, but still… It was a middle-aged guy apparently, not the young idiot you’d imagine. Maybe that bank just has bad karma, for our mirror anyway.
- It’s starting to look like Autumn. The angle of the sun is getting longer, and the insect chorus is getting more and more colourful. Different crickets and grasshoppers join in as the day moves from afternoon to evening. There’s a bit of a breeze sometimes, and at night it was almost cool. That doesn’t stop the daytime from being swelteringly hot though.
- Drove back on Monday on a beautiful late Summer afternoon, with hordes of little red dragonflies flying over the ricefields where the harvest is just starting to be taken in.
- min temp 19°C max 32°C
Farmlog 29th August 2010 31 August, 2010
Farmlog 20th June ~ 23rd August 2010 27 August, 2010
Whew – a monster update to try and get back in line with the real date, so I can post other stuff without feeling guilty about not doing the farm stuff. Just for the record anyway:
20th June
- HUMIDITY is the theme now. Dark clouds hang overhead and water just seems to exude from the air in big drops every so often. In fact when it’s like this a bit of rain can be quite a relief.
- It’s the Longest Day and even in Japan, with no Summer Time, the evening is light till after 7:00. I wonder when they’ll get it about the electricity savings, to name just one thing…
- There’s a Toyota subcontractor’s factory we drive past, and usually even though it’s Sunday a bunch of guys are gathered round the forklifts having some kind of Important Meeting. Meaningless ritual, unpaid overtime, or an important social bonding?
- No police at their favourite speed trap when the weather’s as bad as this.
- Planted out the last of the chilli seedlings – some habaneros. Too late really, but we’ll see how they get on in the Summer. Habaneros like heat…
- Weeds just grow and grow, and managed to get in a bit of cutting, sweat filling my eyes, before heading back to Nagoya to meet a friend at a favourite izakaya.
- Min temp 15°C max 29°C
27th June
- This is the kind of day that gives the Rainy Season a bad name. Even just after taking a shower your eyelids are stuck together with sweat. A bit of rain would be nice…
- Stopped off in Kimble on the way out. A fascinating place with second-hand goods, factory surplus stock and the like where you can pick up a china candlestick or Christmas tree decorations for 10 yen… Sometimes they have imported Korean beer-surrogate at 70yen a can which isn’t too bad.
- The house out in Gifu was still quite cool inside as the hot sticky air hadn’t yet got in. Opening a cupboard door was like opening the fridge!
- Monday was even hotter, with some big drops of rain for 10 min or so.
- The first dragonflies showed up – several different kinds. Maybe we’ll see some fireflies next week?
- Min temp 12°C max 28°C
4th July
- Funny weather. Half-cloudy, slightly less humid at first, slightly cool breeze, scorching hot sun later…
- Swollen rivers from the recent rain.
- The lady at the ￥100 stand heard monkeys nearby, and said the fruit harvest wasn’t looking good this year.
- Stars and a few fireflies.
- Unexpected blue skies on Monday.
- Mostly weed-cutting. Who was it that said about sculpture the secret was to remove the undesirable part, and leave the desirable part? That’s my weeding policy. If you just cut down everything it’ll all just grow back, so I try to leave some plants that I think are preferable in the hope that they’ll prosper and suppress the baddies. Well it sort of works to some limited extent. There are so many kinds of grass growing out here, including “susuki” the pampas grass that people grow in parks and gardens in Europe. Here it’s a virulent weed – a member of the bamboo family so it’s really tough.
- Min temp 18°C max 31°C
12th July
- Drizzley start to the day, torrential rain later.
- Tiny field mice are trying to take over the house.
- No fireflies… 😦
- Min temp 18°C max 29°C
18th July
The Rainy Season is officially over!
- Beautiful cotton-wool summer clouds.
- When we opened the door there was a pool of water in the entrance. Not a roof leak, but condensation! The floor surface is kept cold by groundwater a couple of metres below.
- A nice cool Sunday evening – Monday was hot though with an occasional cool breeze.
- We drove back to Nagoya in the golden light of a late summer afternoon. There were anglers in the river – after ayu maybe.
- min temp 18°C max 30°C
25th July
- ATSU~I! must be the first word foreign summer visitors to Japan learn. It means hot. Sometimes being outside in the sun feels just like standing a few centimetres away from one of those heat lamps.
- The mint growing outside always seems to get a kind of disease in the summer – the leaves turn black and wither away. It recovers in the autumn fortunately, and meanwhile we can use the stuff growing on the veranda in Nagoya, which is OK for some reason.
- A cool evening – almost cold in fact! Nearly full moon.
- A clear Monday morning: the kind of day which gets hot later, and this one did.
- The 15th July is a special day on the old calendar (doyou no ushi) when you’re supposed to eat eel to maintain your strength to cope with the heat. Maybe it would work… grilled eel tastes good anyway, a bit rich perhaps.
- min temp 20°C max 33°C
1st August
- Hot and humid again. 😐
- This hot weather has been hitting the vegetables, especially leafy things like lettuce and cabbage which have been going up in the supermarkets. At the 100 yen stand too there aren’t the huge piles of cucumbers and eggplants we usually find at this time of year. What there is, though, is good. Tomatoes, chillies, eggplants, cucumber and the mysterious myoga have been soaking up all this sun and have a wonderful Summer fragrance!
- An amazing bumper crop of mini tomatoes. They’re really easy to grow – just put a couple of plants in the ground and they’ll spread out all over the place. The skin can be a little tough, but they taste good – the crows and various small rodents enjoy them too, but so far don’t seem to have found these, maybe because they’re almost hidden among the weeds.
- Some beautiful big black butterflies visiting the nozenkazura flowers.
- I’ve learnt the purpose of eyebrows. They’re to keep the sweat from dripping down into your eyes. Not quite up to the sort of sweat generated by this heat though…
- min temp 20°C max 32°C
8th August
This was just a quick drop in with our friends visiting from the Netherlands, before going on to Shirakawa village.
The plants seem to be doing OK, but I forgot to check the temperature. Sorry.
15th August
- Drove out in the continuing intolerable sticky heat past an undertakers advertising discounts for advance bookings…
- There’s something wrong with the Pacific high pressure area this year. Usually it sits right on top of the country and brings a month or so of hot, but clear and somewhat less humid weather. This year it’s more off to the east, and moist, no wet air is coming round the edge from the south. Something to do with a La Niña effect in Peru apparently, but the humidity is extreme – the floors are wet with condensation, we get attacked by leeches each week…
- This week some small animal found the mini tomatoes and ate the red ones. Just made a hole in the side and ate the contents, so it was quite a small animal.
- A bumper crop of myoga this year – maybe it likes the rain.
- min temp 22°C max 30°C
22nd August
- Yes, more heat and humidity, even at this altitude of some 430m.
- Sato imo (taro) plants growing everywhere on the way here, looking well in spite of the heat. I wonder why they’re so expensive in the shops?
- Maybe we can live on myoga instead?
A mysterious hole just in front of the house, started a couple of centimetres across but seems to have got bigger this year. I wonder what lives there?- First red chillies of the season!
- min temp 20°C max 33°C
The first red chillies of the season.
It’s started 7 August, 2010
Along with the cicadas, baseball from a radio somewhere is one of the sounds of Summer here; it started today and there’s nothing else on the TV or radio all afternoon, for the next couple of weeks. I really don’t remember anyone paying the slightest attention to a rugby or cricket match between a couple of schools back in the UK (maybe you could compare the University Boat Race?) but here it’s a big event with elimination rounds all round the country and everyone avidly follows the later matches and gets quite emotional. The losing team (and sometimes the winners too) usually burst into tears at the end. T loves it.
Bulbuls 22 July, 2010
Yesterday was a big day in our Nagoya garden, excited bulbuls flying around chirping, or screeching, at some bemused chicks. Yes, it was Nest Leaving Day. I think they’re bulbuls of some kind – a kind of scraggly-looking bird that reminds me of the starlings that used to hang around our garden in England, with a long tail and sort of curved beak, and a somewhat untuneful call. T says they’re called “hiyodori” which translates as “Brown-eared Bulbul”.
The garden in front of Raffles isn’t that big, but there’s a tree just in front of our second-floor living room window that’s grown almost as high as the house. A couple of years ago the same – well, maybe not the exact same birds, but the same kind of birds – did it the honour of building a nest just outside our window where we had a view of the construction process. They made good use of locally-available materials: twigs, leaves, discarded plastic twine, shopping bags… laid some eggs but maybe they finally decided the position was just too overlooked or something and abandoned the nest. Later that Autumn it fell out of the tree with three eggs still inside.
This year’s bulbuls had a bigger tree to work on though, and the nest they built was above the window, not below, and things seemed to go better. We tried not to be too obtrusive and the birds ( did they take turns? ) spent several weeks incubating the eggs till an excited mother bird told us they’d hatched a week or two ago. Then the hardest part must have been scouring the neighbourhood for insects to keep them fed, but suddenly yesterday the nest was empty, and the birds were being really noisy.
I wondered if they’d been got by a crow, but that night when I collected the blackboard from outside Raffles to close up, there was a dazed-looking chick clinging to it! Not knowing what to do I just left it at the bottom of the tree, but the next morning it had made its way out to the road. This was no good, so using a plastic bowl a stick and some sticky tape I made a sort of scoop and managed to drop it off back in the nest from our 2nd floor window. No, in an hour or so it was gone again, and the parent birds were flying around this creature on the ground below, trying to persuade it to fly. Didn’t seem to be working, but today that chick is gone. The bulbuls still come back to the garden, and the parents are still feeding insects to the other two, bigger, chicks, but I don’t know what happened to the little one. Hope the cats didn’t get it…
Farmlog 13th June 2010 10 July, 2010
A grey day this time – the weather people announced that “it appears that” we have “entered” the Rainy Season. They used to make official announcements of the beginning of Japan’s monsoon, and when it had “opened” again, till one year it just went on raining all Summer and they were forced to take it back and say there had been no “opening” after all. Since then all you get is “it looks as if…” or “it might be said that…”.
A grey heron in a rice field by the road to match the clouds, but no police at their speed trap – they prefer nice weather. The drizzle started at 2:45, more or less as predicted. To be fair, the weather people usually get it something like right these days. Coming up to the house we ran into Shinobu, Yamada san’s cousin. Almost ran into him, that is – he fell off a mountain just in front of our car; a few seconds later and it might not have been funny.
That evening we drank that “taruzake” at Yamada san’s place, but that’s another story…
Min temp 11°C, max 29°C
Farmlog 6th June 2010
Another of those beautiful soft Spring days, and the police were out enjoying it in their usual spot on the road out of town. There’s a section of straight dual-carriageway that just invites you to put your foot down a bit and there’s usually some poor soul who’s just been caught in a speed trap.
This week it was warm enough, with a bit of a fire, to eat outside under the stars. This is a real treat and almost enough in itself to justify the effort of driving out. That evening there was a strange “chirping” noise – some kind of bird I suppose, though loud enough to echo through our little valley.
Monday was a work day – late with the chillies, but I managed to plant out the first batch: “Malay” chillies from seeds I bought in Malaysia – big red ones with a medium hotness, good for salads and stir-fries. That afternoon Yamada san dropped in on his way back from a bit of forestry work – the first time we’d seen him for a while. He lives in the next valley, was a friend of the previous occupants of our house and one of the first people we got to know round these parts. His cousin plays bass guitar and we had a band going for a couple of years, till the drummer moved away. Anyway, remembering the “taruzake” we’d been given at T’s nephews wedding we agreed to take it over to Yamada san’s place the next week, as there was too much for the two of us to drink alone and it wouldn’t keep that long. (read on…)
It’s been nice and dry lately, but the Rainy Season will be here soon enough…
Min temp 7°C, max 26°C
Farmlog 10th May 2010
Sunday was one of those soft hazy Spring days as we set off out of town, stopping off at the bank to make sure there was enough in the account to pay next week’s bills. Just as I came out, there was a loud bang and something flew over our car onto the pavement. There are people who just throw empty coffee cans, or lit cigarettes, out of their car windows, but when I had a better look it turned out to be our offside door mirror! A passing car had ripped it right off. I had no time to see which car it was, let alone get the number, and T hardly knew what had happened. Sitting in the driving seat it must have been quite a noise, and we can only be thankful she didn’t have her elbow out of the window at the time…
A detour to the nearest police station to report the incident; there’s no hope of catching the idiots who did it and making them pay for a new mirror – $500!. On our way a good hour late. What a relief to enter the parallel universe in the hills and check out this week’s bird sounds. Every week there seem to be a couple of new ones. There had been a bit of rain and more bamboo shoots coming up – I wonder what the wild boar have been up to this year? They don’t seem to have been round our way at all, or there’d be a mess of ripped-up bamboo everywhere. They love that stuff, but so do we, and we’ve done OK for bamboo shoot this year.
That evening it was still to cold to eat outside, so we had sansai tempura in the kotatsu. Dinner under the stars is a treat yet to come, but soon! The insects aren’t in biting mood just yet, but I saw the first leech! Ugh.
Min temp 6°C, max 21°C
Farmlog 2nd~5th May 2010 (“Golden Week”) 15 June, 2010
Just like UK bank holidays, a few days off come up in the same week and there are 45 Km traffic jams all over the country. The weather’s often beautiful at this time too, though, so we joined the rush to get out to our place in Gifu for a long weekend – everyone else must have been going somewhere else and we got there in the same 2 hours or so as usual. 🙂
- The second day we went for a walk on the narrow road that leads on to a couple of tiny villages above our house. Very nice day out in perfect weather. (More here.)
- For some reason the wild boar don’t seem to have been round this year, and lots of bamboo shoots have been coming up in the woods behind the house. Freshly-dug shoots have a special aroma which you can keep by boiling them as soon as possible after digging them up. I suppose it stops the cells’ conversion of sugars to starch or something. You need a big pot to boil them whole with the skin still on, for about an hour, with some rice bran to take away a certain astringency. A handful of rice will do instead, and some people put in a couple of dried chillies. Then you can cook them with soy sauce and dried fish flakes, or make a nice spicy Thai salad or Indonesian curry…
- Fantastic weather – scorching hot in the daytime, but a cool breeze, and cold evenings so you want to light a fire to eat outside, which we did, listening to music from Cape Verde and some old Laotian pop.
- The wind brought down a snowstorm of cherry blossom from the wild tree behind the house.
- An old guy from the houses down the road passes by in the early evening. He goes for a daily walk to keep fit, and looks as if his health regime is working OK.
- Flowers everywhere!
- Getting the chilli field ready – digging up a row, mixing in some compost and fertilizer then covering it with black plastic mulch to warm up the soil and keep the weeds down a bit. Four rows should do it this year – 16 big red chilli plants from Malaysia, 16 little hot “Ishigaki” chillies from Okinawa (not the usual “island pepper” but something more aromatic that a Thai friend recognized as “prik kariang”), and half a dozen Habaneros, just for yuks…
- The birds and frogs are getting going, but the evenings are still fairly quiet, compared with the insects’ samba orchestra that will keep us entertained through the Summer. Those insects have a dark side though, and we both got mysterious itchy bites that stayed with us for days. Hmm.
- Min temp 2°C, max 27°C
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- A good crop of bamboo shoots.
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- Bamboo shoot that the wild boar didn’t find.
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- “warabi”
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- Wild azaleas.
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- Wild azaleas.
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- Wild cherries appear everywhere in April.
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- “Wasabi”
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- …let a bit of air into the storeroom…
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- Our house almost hidden in the Spring foliage.
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- Our weeping cherry.
Farmlog 26th April 2010 1 June, 2010
- Last week it snowed in Tokyo, but Sunday was hot and sunny here, only to get quite chilly as the sun went behind the mountains at 4:00.
- The white police bikes were out. They like to do their speed-trapping in nice weather – you never see them when it’s raining. I suppose they have a monthly quota of fines to get in.
- Swallows have showed up in the village just down the road, but for some reason they never make it the extra few metres of altitude up to our house. We’ve certainly got enough insects for them to eat, but perhaps they’re not the right kind?
- Bamboo shoots coming up – ¥500 in the supermarkets, but in the ¥100 stand you could buy a big one for, yes, a hundred yen. Freshly dug bamboo shoots are a treat, with a special flavour that is soon lost. The trick is to boil them as soon as possible; I suppose it stops the natural conversion of sugars to starch or something.
- Is this kamemushi year? The smelly insects are turning up everywhere.
- Saw my first snake of the year – sunning itself on a grassy bank. Ten minutes later it was back in the same place, so it must have been a special spot.
- Did a bit of tree pruning and weed slashing. Nothing compared with the work coming up in a month or two.
- Min temp 2°C, max 21°C
Farmlog 19th April 2010
(A major effort here to catch up on a month’s missed posts, while I can still find the envelopes with notes on the back…)
This time of year can be like a corner of paradise outside the city, and Sunday was a perfect sunny day with flowers coming out everywhere. People are getting worried about invasions of alien plant species, but the variety of plant life out in Gifu always surprises me. I’m not a botanist, so I don’t know the names of them all, but keep finding something I haven’t noticed before.
It’s “sansai” time – wild edible shoots and leaves coming up everywhere, and people coming out from the cities to pick them. There doesn’t seem to be much concept of private property among these peole and they quite casually walk into your garden and pick what they can find – sometimes even if you’re sitting outside the house watching! T. can get a bit ratty at this time of year…
On our way back to Nagoya on Monday the frogs’ evening chorus was already starting up in newly-flooded rice paddies by the side of the road.
Min temp 1°C, max 19°C
asazuke 