Ajishima Park - 網地島公園 Pt. 2

This is our rented wood chipper in action. We have been gathering tree branches and bamboo since September of last year, and even some from around our rice fields cut down over a year and a half ago.

I think the Permaculture principle of "small and slow solutions" definitely applies here! It's taken quite a while to gather the resources (mostly what others consider waste and just throw away in the forest) and the chips themselves are quite small! The machine is large and guzzles gasoline, but I have been developing a plan for a couple years now on how to move forward...

But for now, we had a mountain of chip-able stuff to turn into a pile of chips, and only a couple days for chipping.

Most of our branches were gathered from friends and acquaintances around the island. They cut down entire trees and chop the trunks into firewood and leave the rest behind. We offered to clean up the "waste" as they see it, and in the end they get a tidy plot of land, and we get all the chip-able material we can get without having to cut trees down ourselves (mostly).

This reminds me of another principle, and I'm paraphrasing here: utilize the marginal. We are turning other people's discarded stuff into something useful and beneficial: wood into wood chips for our walking path (with stacked functions of tidying up, fertilizing the area around the path, water retention, microorganism haven, etc, etc), tires into a foundation wall for the compost toilet, fishing buoys washed up on shore turned into water tanks for hand washing and irrigation...the list goes on and on.

I am also reminded of my favorite song about there not really being anything such as waste, or something or other like that. This song is totally my mantra, and it runs through my head whenever I happen upon some junk. I sing the chorus once or twice, and voilà: I get an idea or two on how to repurpose it. To the creator of this song, I thank you, and Ajishima Park thanks you!!!