A dialogue between two of the world's 2 leading Permaculture experts.

Through http://www.permaculturenews.org/ I came across these two videos today.

Well worth a little of your time if you are interested in genuine health & nutrition for your family through eating the best foods.

Vandana Shiva Invites Us to Act For Seed Freedom:



Vandana Shiva and Geoff Lawton Talk Together About Freeing the Seed:

Our first attempt at growing truly organic herbs & vegetables.

Over the last year or so, I've read books about permaculture, joined the mailing list for the permaculture research institute and watched a few videos.

I had very little idea of what most plants we intended to grow would look like, or how large they might grow, so I set out to plant food with the little knowledge I had gained with the expectation I'd learn as I went along.



Part of my lunch yesterday

It's now mid August and we've enjoyed both an abundant harvest of food whilst learning lots and also missed out on some where we made mistakes. But through mistakes is how we learn & this gain I hope to apply next year in our continuing path of discovery.

It's been fun to give friends and neighbours generous amounts of vegetables & herbs, by just going outside and picking them fresh, as well as eating them ourselves.
Salads have never tasted better than being freshly picked and eaten. My wife especially liked beetroot, which isn't usually available in Japan.



The foods & herbs we've been successful with have been:
Beans, beetroot, tomatoes, lettuce, green peppers, cucumbers, (malabar)-spinach, paprika peppers, chilli peppers, burdock root (Gobo), Italian parsley, basil, rosemary, sweet potato, Okra (Lady's fingers) and carrots. In addition we've had some success with strawberries and raspberries so far and our blueberry bushes have given some sweet results too, albeit small in volume.

Our Asparagus (perennial) is growing, so perhaps next year we'll harvest some.



I hadn't realised that perenneal malabar spinach was a vine! It's taken over a patch of the garden beside the house and entwined itself in a rich green tangle of leaves and red stalks. Next year I'll grow it on a trellis which will make a beautiful wall. As it doesn't need direct sunlight, it'll do well I think. Over winter I'll see how it copes with snow & frost too.

What I'd thought would be easiest were potatoes - but we lost our entire crop to rot from the soil being too wet in late spring. We also didn't do well with onions, which was a little disappointing. Our Okra weren't picked early enough and so had a lot of fiber in them, which gets stuck in our teeth and makes for a lot of chewing, so next year we'll pick them earlier!

Not using any pesticides or herbicides at all, our broccoli crop was soon eaten away and small cabbages have also fared similar fates so far. Although we got some pumpkins, they've never turned deep green in colour, so next year we'll have to try and stop the pumpkin plants getting too big and perhaps start them a little earlier too. We only got one small water melon, probably for the same reason of letting the plants grow too large and not concentrating nutrition on the fruits.



Our beans & cucumpers were grown using netting, but it was too small, so next year we'll use a larger type, but all in all, it's been more successful than I'd envisaged and I feel better prepared to tackle our next planting, for winter crops now and have a much better idea of how to grow food for next year's seasons, although I realise we've still got so much to learn. That's part of the fun.

For those of you interested, here's a video of the author of "The One Straw Revolution", Masanobu Fukuoka who is widely considered to be one of the great pioneers of permaculture.

Homing in on Progress.

With a full-time young family occupying the house, progress hasn't been as rampant inside the house as before we moved.

Here we see the beautiful & strong doors that Arnie made for us, with the trim in the entrance now also all finished & fitted (Except for skirting boards - one of the jobs I need to finish sometime soonish).



I've 85% finished the room upstairs which is intended to become my day office / guest room.
Arnie got us a large donation of used but good condition carpet tiles which were a perfect solution for the office floor & also the engawa walkways around the perimeter of half the house!

The doors Arnie made have been also been fitted. You'll notice the English style wrought iron latches. Not very in keeping with Japanese tradition, but they're something I always liked about old English houses. Besides, there are beautiful things from all over the world to be enjoyed so where there's a better solution whether aesthetic, functional, or both that works in harmony with what we envisage - we may as well chose that which seemingly suits us best for the long term.







Still want to fit the wardrobe with a mid level slatted shelf and have invested in a self-draining dehumidifier to install inside for warmer stickier summer months. This would also take humidity from the air within the room since there's the grille above the shoji doors but also ensure that futons and out of season clothing stored in the wardrobe won't begun to mould. A much better solution than the weak wooden slats they sell in home centres along with silica gel containers.

I also want to make some well finished shelves to go along the wall opposite the entrance doorway. This will house a flatscreen TV and media, decent speakers connected to our centralised component sound system and provide plenty of space to continue building a library. Need to make some perspex frames & windows to seal the gaps between the beams which overlook the central lounge too.
As all the new sugi ceilings are insulated from above - In winter these windows would be opened when we want to heat the office (Since hot air travels upwards). In summer they might be opened too for added ventilation. Still not decided if we'll fit air conditioning here. I'd rather not, but it remains to be seen how hot the office can become in the summer.

Right now it's June and the whole house is comfortable in terms of temps & humidity, so it seems the well insulated roof and overhangs may keep this house cool naturally over the summer. Time can tell us.

Once the weather had warmed up I removed the temporary plastic partitions, cleaned the original wooden slats first with engine cleaner acid, then soapy water before rinsing and drying. A few of the small wooden pieces had fallen out, but are safely stored to be glued back into place sometime. This now allows air flow between the 2nd lounge & our bedroom.



We're hoping that by the autumn we'll have our wood burning stove in the 1st lounge, so we'll be able to enjoy some of the radiant heat in our bedroom too, through this grille. If not, then we might have to think about fitting a smaller wood burning stove in our bedroom, instead of the (cheap Ikea) book cases that occupy the space right now.



So I still have many changes I want to make to many of the rooms, especially with regard to doubling the size of our old bathroom & utilities area (Which are a poorly made extension that's gone to come down!) plus making the kitchen a better & easier place for my wife to spend much of her time each day. But with these things some jobs take priority over others for available means. A view to the finished vision gets ever closer but seemingly never arrives, much like false plateaus when climbing mountains.

This here's the pantry door.



I've now finished plastering the walls and fitting skirting in the pantry too. Just need to deal with some minor cosmetic finishing, then I can get to work on putting it sturdy shelves so at last my wife will have space to store foods, both preserved and fresh fruit & veg from the garden - in cool, dry & dark conditions. Might be hard to show in pictures, but this is the pantry as it is now. I'll be changing the lighting and it'll look quite different lined with shelves of stored food, cooking tools, etc.



You'll notice the house doesn't have many pictures on the walls yet.
We feel we really want to get each room finished before deciding where to put up pictures & paintings.
One picture I really do want to hang is of Arnie & Shinobu to make the mark & show the two people who put in so much work to make our home what it's become.

Here's a peek at the window he's made... It's a copy (With improvements!) of something I saw 5 years ago at a Kyoto temple. Love it! - Another Arnie masterpiece!



I'm hoping to be able to have Arnie rebuild the corrugated steel roof using the tiles we collected from Shodoshima, as a first stage towards building a new bathroom & utilities room, but there's no mad rush at the present. Maybe after September or October once the weather begins to cool after the expected long hot summer.

Arnie makes a Japanese Circular Shoji Window.

I saw this window in a temple in Kyoto years ago. I liked it so much, I took a picture as an example of a simple but beautiful solution to create a hole for a view.

Between our main lounge and what's intended as the children's room we currently have an old double quilt as a wall.
The room doesn't get a lot of daylight, so we wanted to make a window where it would be possible for the children to look out to the front garden in the future. In the lounge we also plan to put a large wood burning stove in, so having a window that's penetrable by heat is desirable.



Making two large wooden round pieces from planks is an engineering challenge which Arnie had never tackled before.
He says his dreams at night often give him the solutions he prays for.
The flat pine planks were carefully chosen for their beauty of grain and lack of knots before being carefully sawn in accurately shaped pieces to make a well joined ring.



In all there are 12 flat pieces bonded together with two hardwood biscuits between each section, which makes a very strong & permanent join.



Each ring is 2 pieces as there's an inner & outer piec, so that's something like 48 pieces cut, shaped & joined together with accuracy - from basic planks - with no nails at all!



Arnie then used a jigsaw to cut a basic circular shape.





Using a router he milled the wood till it was all perfectly circular.




His next stage was to build small shoji doors in the traditional style (No pictures of these yet, as it's still Arnie's work in progress as I write).
He found some old shoji doors out as rubbish from a neighbour and took one as a sample to study & copy. Again, no screws are likely to be used as would be traditional. Being machine finished they'll be pretty much perfect too.





There will be a total of 4 tall rectangular Japanese paper sliding doors that fit inside the hollow wall and these will open together to slide almost out of sight, or they can be fully closed. The doors will be easily removable so in the event the Shoji paper needs replacing, it'll be easy to do. In the kids side we'll perhaps put up some curtains too, to help shield noise.



Here we see Arnie laquering the finished "Doughnuts" (as he likes to call them).
They'll be waxed and polished to create a simple, but elegant solution.



I don't know how a Japanese temple door that was used in inspiration would have been made traditionally, but the grain isn't usually as well defined so they probably paint before laquering, which will hide imperfections.
In Arnie's case he's made the wooden workmanship easier to see.

In about 1-2 weeks Arnie will bring the wall and windows here. I'll need to eco-wall before the dougnuts are fitted.
Looking forward to seeing how it's going to look!




And here's a nearly finished product ready to have the wall plastered (With Eco Wall - same as the other walls in the house), then the doughnuts glued in (Both sides of course). I'll need to find some nice Shoji door paper and put it on before it's finished. When the doors are all opened, the frames are partly visible. For aesthetics it's nice to have them about half opened, as in the first picture.

Arnie actually made 3 doughnuts.... as his daughter liked the design so much he made the same thing (One sided only) for his daughter's bedroom window too!



Update: After plastering, here's what the finished project looks like.



On the bottom left is a hole for a box which contains integral speaker wires for wall mounted terminals, to avoid having speaker wires around the edge of the room. That's for another project to be completed over this winter to build a music centre concealed behind two sliding doors.

Arnie makes some beautiful doors.

We needed 3 walk through doorways completed. One for the room upstairs, one for the storage beneath the stairs and one for our pantry. Also there was the need for 4 small shoji doors for the storage above our bedroom closet

Arnie measured the sizes he'd need to make, went home and built them in his workshop over around a month's work on and off, since work often needed time for glue to set and laquer & varnish to dry.

He had needed to spend a fair amount of time setting up, but once all done, he made beautifully accurate progress.
The pictures below tell the story from beginning to end.

I'll show these fitted in another post soon.

























This picture shows when Arnie was just waiting on custom cut mirrors for the door which will be in the genkan (entrance).

A little bat that came to visit.

At dawn each day the birds outside make quite unusual if not very loud song. We see little birds that look a bit smaller than chickens searching for food.
Of course there's moths and other insects flying around, sometimes in the house...There's small holes everywhere in an old place like this which will take us some time to get to all of.

One evening I could hear something occasionally hitting the ceiling and wondered what it was.
It turned out to be a baby bat that had probably come in through an open door. When I put the lights on to watch it, the poor little creature gripped onto one of the beams and huddled silently for the rest of the night.

The next day it made it's way into our bedroom. I got a glass and a book to carefully catch it, then my daughter & I studied it before taking it out into the forest to set it free.





I had her lift off the glass, but it wouldn't fly away. Eventually we left, hoping nothing would eat the poor bugger.
He just lay there trembling from the ordeal.

I returned after 15 minutes to find him gone. Now don't eat all our blueberries and raspberries!

A large clearing in the forest - all in a day's work!

This clearing was made in a day using a chainsaw and a fire pit (To burn all the brush).
This is an area of our forest below the main garden area (House is on a large hill).

Our plan is to make a pond down there fed by grey water from the house and rain from the roof, which will go via a small wetland to be naturally purified first. This will provide a home for ducks and some small fish, etc. There will be simple stone steps laid after the work's done, so they won't decay over time as wood would...

As we have a lot of very stout Bamboo forest, we're also thinking of making an arbor and a small guest hut, perhaps, or even just somewhere to sit & relax. Some of the trees are enormously tall so what we wanted to create was a clearing where the surroudings are mostly the tall trees. A lot of our forest needs thinning, but one thing at a time.

This isn't a priority project, as there's still other more pressing changes we want to make. It'll never end!

This is the area before Jun & I cleared it.