Working Weather

Though it is still winter, we are experiencing a few lovely sunshiney days that have us out working in the fields for a change. What a wonderful feeling! Yesterday we got some mundane but necessary picking up done; clearing around the compost pile in preparation for building a new little compost complex, picking up generally around the place to atone for the scattering of bits of plastic done by winter winds and turning sticks and bamboo into firewood. We also, at long last, finished planting the tulips and daffodills we bought last fall. Today, another sunshiney (though yet COLD) morning, we are sitting with our coffee (confirmed addicts that we are) listing out all the fields we rent and borrow (there are 18 in total - my oh my!), adding up the area and making plans for the coming year. Shuzo is counting as a type, so I'll get back to you with the estimated area. Once our coffee is finishes, we will get a few minor housekeeping/bakerykeeping tasks out of the way (laundry, moving some furniture) and then we shall don our logger personnas and attack the hillside next to the bakery with an eye to next year's firewood and preventing the overhanding trees from being transformed into trees that have attacked our roof by the next large typhoon. The wonderful next door neighbor stopped by for a chat yesterday evening so we were finally able to establish which Yokoyama-san owns the hillside (literally half of the neighborhood is named Yokoyama-san) and were gracefully granted permission for the project. Big plans we have!

The numbers are in - we are cultivating approximately 6 tan, or nearly 15 acres. Wow!! I had no idea. That is pretty farmer like, especially here. Granted, not all of it is under active cultivation - several of the fields are new to us, and the goat yard has little but a few apple trees and indigo bushes for the bees, but others are pretty intensively farmed. Well, I guess we had best get to work.

to market, to market, to sell some fat greens

Happy 2009!

Winter has taken firm hold of our little spot in the (ahem *many*) days since I last posted. We have had a few little snow squalls, amounting to a grand total of about 3mm of snow sticking, and many more clear cooooold nights. Minus 7 degrees celcius this morning! Happily, these big ovens of mine keep the bakery warm. The house, however...we're working on. The beautiful green house that Shuzo caused to be constructed in front of the house is a lovely place, full of happy greens (so long as one remembers to water them), a happy dog who now declines to sleep in the house and a funky green cushioned bench given to us by a neighbor when we moved in (great place to nap, now, but previously a giant piece of furniture always in the way). The happy greens are the subject of the title, here, as we are now selling them at the same little natural food market as where we sell the bread. Until now, our veggies have fed us, gone into bread and been sold to bakery customers, but I do think that selling at a store is a nice step up the ladder of farmer-ness. Yay!

Outside of the bakery and the greenhouse, we have been keeping busy getting to know and preparing for the arrival of our two-year old daughter to be, who will be moving in over the next few weeks. We are doing our best to prepare the house - strategically placing heaters, looking for a new place to store the knives and furnishing the play room. A few of the many unfinished projects may finally be completed over the next few weeks (about time, granted, as we have lived here nearly four years).

Apart from these happenings, things progress predictably. I rise at 4 and bake, bake, bake. Every now and again Shuzo gets on his tractor and does farmerly things. We have more fields this year, and have planted wheat in two of them, as well as patches here and there of winter veggies. The daikon radishes have not come along as well as hoped for, but the cabbages and hakusai (napa cabbage?) more than make up for it, being both beautiful and delicious. Such plain-sounding veggies, I admit, but fresh and homegrown - so good!

And now, the dog is barking for his walk, so I must go. Keep warm!

first batch of rice is up!

We planted five varieties of rice this year, which may well mean five separate harvest days. With a little luck we may be able to combine the akamai (red rice) and kaorimai (fragrant rice), to have but four harvest days, but either way it looks to be an ongoing event. Last wednesday we (and by we, sadly, I do mostly mean shuzo) harvested the kuromai (black rice). It is the wildest looking of the varieties we planted, quite wide leafed and shorter than the others. We harvest with a binder now-a-days (the first year we did it by hand, but the kindly next door neighbor dug out his not-used-in-ten-years binder for us the second year. such a very very kind man.) that cuts the rice and neatly binds it in to bundles. Then, we go around and pick up the bundles (I did help with this part!) and put them on poles to begin drying. Like this: 

Next week, or when we get around to it, we will run the bundles through a harvester (also a very old machine, on, as my mom says, 99 year loan from another kind farmer) that strips the grain from the straw. Yay! The first two years we did this manually as well, with an ashi-bumi-dakokuki, a foot powered threshing thing-a-ma-bob, basically a spinning barrel with lots of horse-shoe nails that pull the grains off. This is a fun

 job, but it is a lot of work. 

Sometime in the next week or so the egoma harvest will begin (incidentally - I think someone was asking about the egoma association in the comments and I don't remember if I managed to reply - I will check that shortly, but in the meantime, here is the egoma association address: www.egoma.jp). We have a nice new and incredibly large (30 meters long!) greenhouse under which we will be able to dry the egoma, the sesam

e seeds and, in a few more weeks, the soybeans. No more rushing out with tarps every time we see a threatening sky. 

In other major-purchases news, we have...a new car! or a new-to-us-car, at any rate. one of the neighbors has a small used car sales business, and while out hunting for cars he came across a very lightly used delivery truck for a very light price and picked it up, figuring that we could use it, and if not, that he could find a way to use it. it was to

o good a deal to pass up, so we are now a two person, three car household. and a two person, three car household that cannot see any way to reduce the number of cars. we still need the regular truck for agricultural purposes, and the wagon-r (a very, very small family car) is the only car that seats more than two. the lovely new delivery truck is truly lovely - it made the (miserably rainy) morning market last weekend so easy, so now we just have to decide what to do with it. set up more deliveries? do some fancy carpenting and fit it out to be a mobile market? hmmmm....

new car near: 

new car afar: 

More pictures stolen as blog crime-wave continues

I am clearly a cheater at heart. Shuzo has lots of lovely pictures up on his blog, and I want them for my own. So, for your viewing pleasure, I have stolen them and put them on display here.

Look - rice! We planted (mostly, Shuzo planted, but I did help, a bit) black rice, red rice, green rice, aromatic rice and an old local favorite called asahi rice. The red rice and aromatic rice (aka-mai and kaori-mai) are becoming quite nice to look at. See?

red rice:


rice, bakery and house:


the view from the bakery and house:




Now, to take advantage of this, we are holding a Kodaimai Matsuri, an ancient rice festival. Grand words to say that for the next three weeks we will be selling ohagi (sticky rice balls with sweet bean paste, roasted soybean powder and ground sesame) made from our rice, which people may eat while watching the grass grow, or rather, I mean to say, while looking at the rice. On Saturdays they will be able to make their own ohagi. Or possibly just play with the grainmill and grind up some roasted soybeans, because on reflection we have come to see that with the outside sink not in working order, allowing people to play with food might not be the best course. As of this morning, Shuzo and I have both made ohagi. Shuzo planned and advertised the event without ever having made ohagi before, but I am happy to report that so far, all is well.

hey look, bread!

Although the march of the seasons is somewhat muted for me, now that the bulk of my days are spent inside this lovely little log house bakery, they (the seasons) do progress, and it is quickly turning in to fall. I do no think it was only in my imagination that summer ended early this year - we made it through without wishing for an air conditioner in the house, and I had to get the blankets back out before the end of August (I had just finally packed them away in July!). Most peculiar. But, since it gets fairly toasty in the bakery, what with two and sometimes three ovens blasting away, you will not find me complaining. Plus, during the hot weather, few people wanted bread, and few people wanted to leave their homes to come here and buy it, so August was a slow month for sales, making slaving away over hot ovens seem an endeavor of questionable worth. Now that September is here, we are expanding the bread offerings to include a nice honey-oat sandwich loaf, bialys, calzones (which Shuzo wants me to pronounce in a resounding fake Italian accent) a few whole wheat breads that will use whole wheat flour from a friends farm, located about five kilometers from here and we are re-including a few breads we dropped over the summer - rye fruit and walnut, pumpernickel, country white (a white sourdough with about 5% each whole wheat and whole rye) and baguettes. Ah, I see that it is 5:00, so the honey-oat loaves need some shaping. Excuse me a moment, won't you?

Alright, the dough is divided, and now has about 15 minutes of resting to do, so while it does that, I think I will steal some pictures from Shuzo's blog and put them here. Look - bread!

Country white:





Inaka Pan - a sourdough with a higher percentage of whole grain, this one with cashew nuts and green raisins inside:



And ciabatta, an Italian bread made from a very wet dough with olive oil in it:



And now, to put the honey-oat bread in to loaf pans.

Ta ta.