Taking Care of Business

Well, about five months ago the wife told me: If you spent half as much time working on the yard as blogging it would look a lot better. Now she was angry about some other things at the time, but there is a kernel of truth. I took a good hard look at the yard. It wasn't pretty. So I took a blogging vacation to clean it up, and let's face it, to passive-agressively react to her comment by cutting back on my third favorite thing, after family and beer.
But then I figure- hey- she never reads this anyway....

A reciprocal roof built in the sandbox with some bamboo (the  plastic livestock and funky  boots are the youngest's)

"Daddy, make a bridge and tunnel for my dump truck!" so I did.... I don't know what to call this type of birdge- any help?

Nectarines in bloom in early April

The expanded paddy. 100 square meters this year!

Will it keep boars out? Only time will tell. (but it worked last year)

Indian Blood Peach blossoms in Mid April.

Strawberries are blooming. I would feel safer if I could see bees....

Fun with prunings

Like an upside down basket

I have a lot of fruit trees for someone who is not a commercial orchardist. So I have lots of nice, flexible water sprouts or suckers every year. Sometimes I make arrows, sometimes I make bentwood sculptures. This year, I made a little play hut for the kids. It wasn't only water sprouts, but also fallen Japanese cedar boughs and lots and lots of split kudzu and wisteria vines.
The cedar boughs form the basic skeleton of the hut. I stabbed them into the ground just a few centimeters in a rough circle. The tips all meet at the top. Then I lashed them together with some kudzu vine that I split into fourths. I took a small cedar bough to make the arch for the door.
Splitting kudzu is easy to do. Just find a nice long piece, and smash the end with a rock until it is frayed. You can then pick it apart and split it in half. I grasp each split half between my thumb and forefinger, and move my hands like I am opening a book. As it splits, sometimes one side gets thinner than the other. Then just pull harder on the fat side, and the split will come back to center.
I lashed a few more cedar boughs around the structure's middle, and then wove kudzu randomly all in and out of the structural members and kudzu. Finally, I took a bunch of water sprouts I pruned from my trees and wove them in and out around the structure. All told, it took about an hour, including gathering the materials. Of course, I spread that hour over 2 weeks.

And as I final touch, I planted pea seeds all around it. In a few weeks they should climb up and cover it. That's the plan anyway.

Not big enough for camping, but plenty big for fun!

Kabosu and Sudachi and Uses

A mikan (satsuma) as big as a large orange...

I love citrus. Maybe more than the average person. I have 14 satsuma trees, a yuzu, a kabosu, a sudachi, and three kumquats. I just can't get enough! Of course, the satsuma are all pretty young, and have yet to come into bearing. There was one on the tree this year. I watched as the solitary fruit got bigger and bigger- it was the size of a navel orange! Then the goats escaped.... Papa was not happy that day....

But where was I? Oh yeah, my kabosu and sudachi trees were planted a year earlier than the satsumas, so they have come into bearing. And boy, did they ever!

Sudachi

Sudachi closeup

My sudachi was covered in fruit. I have been picking and using it since September, and there are still fruits on it. Most of the use is pretty simple- making sudachi-ade, squeezing it into soda water, or making margaritas. We used some on some fish too. Wonderful stuff, this sudachi. Usually they are used when still green, but the cooler fall weather turned them orange. Still taste the same.

Kabosu

The other tree that is bearing as well is the kabosu. A kabosu is larger than a sudachi, and tastes more like a lemon I think. It has a nice, thick peel that you can use for zest, or you can boil it down with some sugar to make candied kabosu. That was so good. My simple take on the recipe? Quarter the fruit, peel and all. Cut 5mm slices. Weigh it. Add that weight of sugar and the fruit into a pot with 100ml of water. Boil it down until it is ambrosia.

Kabosu also work well in soda water or any cocktail that would use a lemon or lime. Like the sudachi, they are traditionally used green.

What do you think? Any ideas on how to use up this bounty?

Tree Frog

I went out to check on my satsuma mikan trees today, and there was this little buddy sitting on a leaf catching some rays. It is a Japanese tree frog (Hyla japonica). Keep up the good work little buddy, the aphids are on the march!

Japanese tree frog (Hyla japonica)

Popcorn Disease 2011

My mulberry tree is not doing so well this year.

Black Mulberry with popcorn disease

As you may recall, last year I had quite a few fruits with popcorn disease. I cut them and let them fall to the ground. This was a big, big mistake. This year I estimate over half the fruit is infected. The tarp below the tree did not work in preventing the spores from wafting up to infect the fruit. I am hoping that it will work in collecting the infected fruit from reaching the ground and letting the fungus into the soil. If I can break the cycle, I hope to get it under control without using any sprays.

Like a Hot Knife Through Butter...

I had the most wonderful brush cutting experience yesterday. Unbelievably smooth. It actually made me heat up a butter knife in a cup of warm water and try to cut the butter with it, just so I could have a comparison.

If you are looking for a brushcutter/ weed-eater blade, look no further than the Tsumura Golden Saws 255mm, 1.25mm thick, 30 tooth, Sasa bamboo grass disk. And at 1280 yen (about $15), it is a bargain. With proper sharpening it will last for years, as opposed to the chipsaw type, which are usually only good for a month or so.

I experienced absolutely no resistance for the first hour of use. The relatively woody stemmed weeds just fell like I was waving a light saber at them. It was truly a revelation!

Golden Saws 30 Tooth Brushcutter blade

Mister Kuroba 8 blade and Golden Saws 30 blade

 After using the Golden Saws for an hour or so, I swapped disks to the "Mr. Kuroba" 8 blade disk. While not as cathartic as using the GS, it was still orders of magnitude better than nylon strings or the standard chipsaw blades. If you are going to cut weeds and brush with a weed-eater, you deserve one of these blades.

Look at that thing. It is actually sexy!

It took less time to do a neater job in the Satsuma grove! Thank you Tsumura!

April Showers Bring Orchard Flowers

I thought I would do a post about my orchard and what is flowering. Mmmmmm.... I sure hope that we get a good harvest this year!

A yellow cultivar of Rubus crataegifolius a wild raspberry of Japan

It is hard to see, but hidden in the garlic is a Actinidia arguta (hardy Kiwi)

My water supply. I stuck a hose in a small pool on  the creek, and let it siphon down. When I am not using it, it drains into the same creek.

A loquat Eriobotrya japonica, Cultivar "Tanaka"

My quince Cydonia oblonga is about to flower.

Asian Pear Pyrus pyrifolia Cultivar "Hosui"

Indian Blood Peach Prunus persica

Santa Rosa Plum Prunus salicina

Nectarine Prunus persica

More Momiji Syrup

Well, I have been busy boiling down the sap from the Japanese Maple tree, and I now have almost 50ml of syrup. It is really, really tasty. Not much like the maple syrup back home, but more like a hazelnut syrup.

And I played a good joke on my friend Ken. Every morning, we meet up for the carpool. I took the jar and a spoon, and when I saw him, I said "Hey Ken, what do you think?" and gave him a small taste from the spoon. When he tasted it, I said "So, do you think that means I have diabetes?" (In Japanese, the word for diabetes is "To-nyo-byo" or literally "Sweet urine disease")

You should have seen the look on his face- priceless.

Japanese Maple Syrup

I love maple syrup. But the price of it gives me some serious sticker shock. We could buy artificial flavor, indeed, we have in the past. But I just feel safer with something natural.
When I was a boy, my Grandfather tapped some local sugar maple trees one year and made some syrup. I wished that I had planted some sugar maples years ago, and went on wishing for syrup.
Then it struck me- my house is surrounded by Momiji- Japanese maples. Some of them two feet in diameter... So I decided to give it a try this year. I cut some bamboo pipes, cut a small flap in the top of a large plastic soda bottle, and bored a hole near the base of a momiji. Sure enough, out came a steady drip drip drip of sap. I tapped in the pipe, fastened a screw above the hole to hold the bottle on, and let it flow. In about 2 hours, it had about 400ml of sap! How about that!?! It was clear as water, and smelled a bit like watermelons. I brought it back to the house, put it in a pot on the stove, and boiled it down. I ended up with about 10ml of momiji syrup. It was fantastic! Sweet, and nutty- kind of tasted like hazelnuts.
Then I took the baby upstairs to put him to bed. While I was upstairs, MY WIFE THREW OUT THE SYRUP IN THE MEASURING CUP!!!!!
To be fair, it didn't look like much, and she didn't know it was syrup. Was still a heck of a shock though.

Mikan Grove

I did it. I splurged and bought 9 new satsuma  (Or as we call them here, Mikan) trees. These will complement the five I have already growing. Are 14 mikan trees too many? A mature tree can easily have 100 fruits on it.... So no, not too many! Then of course there are the lemon, yuzu, sudachi, kabosu, and the two kumquats. Oh, I love the kumquats!

I made sure to get a variety of cultivars. Now I should have mikan from late September into February. Can't beat that!

I do love being in a climate where I can grow citrus interspersed with apples and cherries.

In other news, the wolfberry finally bore fruit! Not too many, but it bears a promise for next year! I am already looking forward to the harvest.

Drying Persimmons at Home

Today I want to talk about persimmons again. When we bought our place, there were two persimmon trees on it. Which is great, because I love dried persimmons- the topic of this post.

So- in order to make dried persimmons, or as we call them over here- Hoshi-Gaki, you will need persimmons! Surprise! There are two types of persimmons- the astringent (usually acorn shaped) and the non astringent (usually square). You want an astringent cultivar like "Hachiya."

When you find some, make sure they are fully orange, but still apple hard. If you pick your own, you may find some soft and gooey, some medium soft, and others apple hard. All have uses, but for drying, you want them hard.

Note the safety equipment when climbing

A little note about picking them- In Japan, we use a bamboo pole with the tip cut in a duckbill shape and split to the first node. Think of old clothespins.  If you wrap electrical tape around the node, it will help keep the pole from splitting too far. Then you can just slip the twig holding the fruit into the tip, give it a twist, and it will come right off. Persimmon trees are brittle as all get out, so you shouldn't climb them without ropes and a harness. 

What you need to get ready: twine, peeler, and persimmons.

Now that you have the hard persimmons, trim the stem to make a "T" shape, and peel them. Your hands will get all gummy from the tannin. This is natural, don't worry. While you are at it, pop a peel into your mouth for an interesting sensation- The astringency makes the juice feel dry in your mouth. I can't explain it better than that.

Next tie the twine around the top of the peeled persimmon. No need for a fancy knot, just an overhand knot is plenty. Tie them up at 15-20 cm intervals (6-8 inches).

Drying Persimmons in 2010

Now they are ready for hanging. Usually they are hung under an overhanging eave of a house, to keep them from any sudden rain, which will make them moldy and ruin them. But if your weather is fairly stable, you can hang them from a clothesline if you want. Just take them inside if rain threatens. The most important things are sun and circulation. After two weeks, they will be shriveled up and dark orange to brown. You can keep them hanging for longer of course. Often a sugar bloom forms on the outside- this is a good sign.

Photo from itempost.jp

In the end, you should have a wonderful dried fruit that looks and tastes like a date. So pour a cup of green tea, take a seat on the floor near a south facing window, and enjoy contrasting the sweet, sweet persimmon with the bitter green of the tea.

Persimmon Bread

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you replaced the bananas in banana bread with fully ripe persimmon pulp? Ambrosia happens.
Behold with the proper awe and adulation-

 Persimmons turn darker as they cook, so that is why it looks so dark and sumptuous.
Man, this was so good!

I got the recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook.
Basically, just replace the mashed banana with strained persimmon pulp. You have to wait until the persimmons have achieved full ripeness, and are so soft you are afraid to touch them. They should feel like a bag of jelly, and the sepals should come off easily. Then just discard the skins, and mash the fruit with a fork, or take off the skins and take out the seeds and food process them to a pulp.

Quick and easy. And delicious. Let's not forget delicious.
I think I'll have to do a whole post on Persimmons later. They deserve it.

Peachy!

Everything is just peachy here.

This year my Indian Blood Peach tree, which I grew from a seed I got at Bountiful Gardens, grew another 3 feet and gave us about 50 peaches. Man I love peaches! But these are the latest, reddest peaches I have ever seen. Who ever heard of peaches that ripen at the equinox? 

There is very little to compare to wandering out to your garden, picking a peach, and eating it in the sunshine while you smell the soon coming autumn in the breeze.

Well, anyways, the peaches were discovered by wasps last Thursday, so the boy and I picked all of them, and spent a rainy Friday morning cutting them up and freezing the harvest. Twenty peaches, most with at least one wasp hole in them. But we cut around those, and have been drinking sweet peach lassi ever since. Put some frozen peaches, yogurt, and milk in a blender- it isn't rocket science, I don't measure them- and blend it up. Sometimes I put in a dash of vanilla or a spoon of suger. Maybe dust the top with some cinnamon. Bliss!

And, on another note, I saved all the seeds from the fruits we ate, and have been planting them all over the place. So maybe in 5 years or so, we could have a regular peach paradise here.

My Orchard/Vinyard/Berry Patch.

I have a small orchard I started, Dave Wilson style two years ago. All my neighbors laugh at me. They tell me that the trees are too close together, and that I won't get enough fruit. And every one of them gives me advice on how to prune them. If only any two pieces of that advice matched.

I like the Dave Wilson method- it makes sense to me. In a young forest, the trees and shrubs aren't all spaced 12 feet apart, most grow in clumps. And what is my orchard but a young forest? Also the different cultivars of each fruit to give me a longer harvest sounds great. If it works, I should have apples from late August to December!

At any rate, I think I have a nice variety. Now if they ever start fruiting, I will have:
Loquat, Quince, Figs, Asian Pear, Peach, Plum, Prune, Persimmon, Pear, Apple, Cherry, Apricot, Nectarine, Pomegranate, PawPaw, Wolfberry, Raspberry (yellow, red, and black), Blackberry, Boysenberry, Gooseberry, Currants (red, white, and black), Grapes, Hascap, Blueberry, Mulberry, and Jujube. Oh, and my citrus- :) Satsuma, Lemon, Kumquat, Yuzu, Sudachi, Kabosu, and Shiquasa.