Blog Archives - Dream Seed Farms

Dream Seed Farms

Ecovillage Design Education - EDE - Week 1

2/23/2013

A nice Frenchman at the bus stop took this picture of me and Mount Fuji!

I arrived at Konohana Family one week ago to begin my Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) course. There are fourteen of us students from all over Japan, and we are immersed in the daily life of 85 Konohana Family members. It is a wonderful, supportive, encouraging and nurturing community. We have had classes all day, everyday since we began, with almost no time to anything else. Today was our day off as will be the coming Saturdays. So, I had a tiny bit of free time to post some pictures from the past week.

Even though we EDE students will have Saturdays off, our hosts keep on working everyday without a day off. I asked why they don’t take any time off from working so hard, and it was explained to me that “a dog doesn’t take a day off from being a dog and a bee doesn’t ever stop being a bee.” So, the Konohana Family members live the life they live everyday.

They do have special celebrations and festivals, but they put in an honest day’s work first. We are actually holding a big birthday party tonight for several KF members. Many groups are performing different forms of entertainment. We EDE students are presenting a demonstration on life and death and all the problems that arise in between. If we can change our way of thinking and move towards a new model of interconnectedness, we can link together and help each other through anything. After that we are going to do a series of dances that where we start out alone and then slowly pair up and then join progressively larger groups until everyone on the dance floor is in one writhing mass of humanity!

I will post pictures of the festivities next week end. Until then enjoy these snapshots:

We took a tour in the rain on our first day of all the fields and green houses.

There are so many sweet and energetic kids here. Not like anywhere else in Japan I have seen.

We have had many visioning and design sessions for what we would like to see in our own ecovillages.

On this day we watched the sunrise then wrote poems about it, and drew pictures and sang original songs too.

We will get Saturday off from studying. Today some of us went to a nearby shrine...

...and we did some spelunking in a cave too!

Ajishima Clean Up - Thank You!

2/14/2013

『おかげ様で1ヶ月間の網地島清掃を終えました。何よりも、皆様のおかげで目標金額に達することが出来ました！これから1ヶ月間は、木の花ファミリーで学びを深め、いざ網地島復興とみんなの幸せに向かって進んで行きます！
重ねて、皆様に心より感謝致します。本当にありがとうございました！！！』

また、寄付をして下さった、瀬◯光◯様にお願いがあります。連絡先が分かりませんでしたので、ご一報頂けますでしょうか。よろしくお願い致します。
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Ajishima Clean Up - Day 30 - 1 Month - Rainy Snow Day Edition!

2/12/2013

It seems that the universe is conspiring in my favor to see that it either rains or snows every 5-7 days on the island. This means that I get a much needed day to rest from gathering up garbage, and I get to post about some past projects where we were able to repurpose tsunami and dump debris.

Today I give you the Driftwood Hidenka Reizouko 非電化冷蔵庫, or
Non-Electric Refrigerator:

Driftwood, wooden box, styrofoam box tops, insulation and recycled water bottles

Oh! And, some pallets for spare parts, like legs.

Closed-cell foam and plywood panel for the sidewall insulation

More pallet scraps for the bottom door

An old sidewall of a dresser became the lid for our fridge

Four hinges, some nails and some screws, from the 100 yen shop

Next came 25 2-liter bottles of thermal mass (i.e. water)

Which we dropped in...

Styrofoam box top insulates the top

Picture it. The year was 2007 and I was minding my own business in the public library in Mizusawa City. After exhausting all my options at finding any English language materials in a Japanese library that did not include a 1978 World Atlas, a Beta tape copy of the Karate Kid or a 1981 Passenger Car and Light Duty Truck Service Manual Supplement (GM-Canada), I was delighted to stumble upon the periodicals, amongst which there were many, vaguely, English-titled selections...

Something generically camping-related caught my eye, and I took the current copy and all those tucked away behind it to a nice little table for further perusing. Beyond the magazine's Roman alphabet title there was little of interest or anything intelligible to my non-kanji comprehending brain. The pictures were nice, though! And that is what brought me to flip through a stack of magazines in a matter of mere minutes, only to pause for the flashy color spreads. Some dutch oven advocate here, some car campers there, but in the midst of so much mediocrity something did catch my eye: a man pulling a seemingly cold, deliciously perspiring bottle of beer out of a shiny box on a hot sunny day. There was no ice, there was no cord. From the complex drawings annotated in an even more complex language, I deduced that the sun somehow cooled that delicious bottle of beer.

While that assumption proved false upon having my trusty translator (Michie!) exercise her kanji-skills, it was revealed that the box was in fact a non-electric refrigerator. The key points turned out to be insulation, thermal mass and radiative cooling (English), (Japanese).

So, four years ago, we photocopied that article and filed it away for future reference. Behold the future: when we first arrived in Japan, late February 2011, we tooled around Tokyo for a couple days, and the first thing we did after that was to head directly to see the Japanese man who had invented the non-electric fridge. The guy turned out to be a bonafide inventor, with all kinds of non-electric gadgets and gizmos all over his studio. The showcase version of the fridge (seen in the link above) was made from customized stainless steel parts and cost hundreds of thousands of Yen (thousands of dollars) to build. Thankfully, this guy was as practical as he was creative and he put together several more cost effective models that he said he had built from off-the-shelf materials from the local hardware store, and all that for under 10,000 yen or about a hundred dollars, give or take.

We studied the fridges intently and snapped as many pictures as possible while there. Little did we know that within three weeks time the whole country would be thrust into a situation where "non-electric" wouldn't just be some tinkerer's dream, but a viable way to comfortably survive.

With all of this in mind, one of the first scraps I snatched up when we landed on Ajishima was that long-narrow, yellowish panel in the picture above. It is actually a thick slab of closed cell foam insulation framed in wood on four sides with a sheet of plywood over one of its faces. The other items include a couple styrofoam box tops, an old fashioned wooden rice bin, a bag of 2-liter water bottles from our first couple weeks on the island with no running water and a few bits of wood.

One afternoon last summer, Michie and I cobbled this little version together. All we needed extra were a few nails and screws, plus four hinges and a piece of screen from the 100 yen shop. Our old friends the handsaw, hammer and cordless drill payed us a visit too. That about wrapped up the project, except for a driftwood wood handle for the top lid, which we found on the beach during a romantic stroll a few days later.

The idea behind this contraption is that at night you open the top lid and let the heat radiate out into space which in effect cools the contents and, most importantly, the water. You close the top lid in the morning and the insulation combined with the relative thermal stability of 50 liters of water keeps everything cool.

We monitored the temperature difference on the hottest days of about 31 degrees Celsius and the internal temp came in between 25-26 all day long. Maybe we could wrap the whole thing in foil or mylar to reflect more of the day's heat as well.

The contents can only ever get as cold as it is at night and they may even freeze in the winter, although despite sustained subzero temperatures just last month, it do not freeze at all.

Aside from the fact that nearly every disparate scrap we salvaged and repurposed matched the exact dimensions of the other components, we had consumed exactly 25 2-liter bottles of water, no more, no less, before the water lines were restored. Those 25 bottles, no more, no less, fit into the box without any gaps

Since we have chosen not to buy a regular fridge, at least we have a place to keep our produce cool, and it will work whether or not we have electricity flowing to our house. Plus, one more great advantage of this fridge is that we have an additional 50 liters of emergency water on hand now, as well. If only it were 50 liters of beer...

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 29

2/12/2013

Rusted out table legs and rotted table top

Pre-bundled sheet metal scraps

Today's finds came from one spot. Actually, this is garbage I noticed the very first day we moved to Ajishima. I am so happy and relieved to finally get rid of this junk, as it was right along side the road to our house.

Sheet metal
Styrofoam box
Rusted metal table legs
Rotted plywood
Plastic rain gutter
Wooden bits
Plastic shopping bags
Plastic food wrappers
Bottles and cans
Etc...

After my twelfth carload, I get one free!!!

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 28 - Week 4

2/11/2013

Sheet metal

More sheet metal

Green plastic tarp, which was hiding...

...hundreds of kilograms of old plastic filament fishing nets

And some random trash to round out the mix!

This is not stubborn snow, but rather...

...huge chunks of salt!

I collected these items from many different places today.

Sheet metal
Green plastic tarp
Bottles and cans
Plastic shopping bags
Plastic food wrappers
Plastic dish washing glove
Small fishing net
Plastic bucket
Salt
Etc...

The green plastic tarp was hiding a massive pile of fishing nets that I was not able to remove. They weeds have put their roots through the nets and I would need a steam shovel to dig it out, and a large truck to haul it away. It is a shame that my day job is focused on demolishing perfectly good houses instead of cleaning up the real garbage on the island!

The salt is an interesting find. It is not the typical garbage I have found; it is not like a big chunk of plastic. With enough rain it will eventually disappear from sight. However, it will basically dissolve and then seep into the earth, and poison and kill everything in that immediate area. After much more rain, that salt will dissolve and be flushed away from the soil, into streams and gutters and then find its way out to the sea.

The salt was spread haphazardly during the snow storms we had last week in order to keep the steepest slopes passable for cars and trucks. Someone doing a halfass job dumped up to 3kg chunks of salt because it would have taken too much extra effort to break the chunks into smaller pieces. More salt was used than necessary and more salt was wasted than necessary because of laziness. This means more salt poisoned our vegetable fields, forests, streams, etc.

Salt is infinitely useful and valuable, but, like other resources used or disposed of improperly, becomes waste when left in the wrong situation. We would never personally buy salt for melting snow, but since we found these chunks we can save it and then use it in emergency situations during future snow storms. Even a small amount used judiciously in the appropriate situation will still impact the environment, but it will be mitigated by the small amount used, the limited application and the ensuing flushing away by subsequent snow melt and rainfall.

If I were sure it were clean and free from chemical additives, we could even use it to make pickles. Yummy!!!

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 27

2/10/2013

Another intersection; two roads crossing means more traffic, more people and more opportunity to throw garbage from the vehicle

Today's haul was once of the most diverse:

Five car tires
Synthetic carpeting
Child's booster seat
Kerosene heater
Electric frying pan
Frying pan
Motorcycle helmet
Plastic shopping bags
Plastic food wrappers
Plastic 35kg fertilizer bags
Styrofoam box
Styrofoam instant ramen bowls
Styrofoam food packaging
Bottles and cans
Fishing buoys
Wire basket
Plastic bucket
Two stacks of manga comic books (paper pages decomposing, but
plastic-wrapped covers still intact)
One big plastic trash bag (full of garbage)
Etc...

Even though I cannot read all of the characters on the bag, the irony is not lost on me!!!

I cannot read the Japanese character in the third spot on the top line, but the rest of it says "海と?をきれいに" or "Keep our Oceans (and ?) Clean." Thank goodness this full bag of garbage was not dumped in the ocean. Someone was kind enough to pack up the garbage from their daily life, drive to one of the highest spots on the island farthest from the sea and dump the whole ocean-saving bag into the woods. How thoughtful!

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 26

2/8/2013

Discarded, literally, at the side of the road, for everyone to see

Today's finds are actually from three separate locations. First:

Two aluminum sliding doors with glass panes
One aluminum door frame

I considered this for my driftwood doggy duplex roof, but it was rotten and not salvageable

One plywood, dimensional lumber and sheet metal wall/roof

I could only grab and carry the things that were not held down by tree roots. I will have to go back later with a knife and free the rest...

Styrofoam buoys
Sheet metal bundles
Old blue tarps in bundles
Bundles of old plastic 35 kg fertilizer bags
Sundry fishing apparatus
Etc.

I have ventured far and wide and am finding that the garbage is becoming more and more concentrated in a few spots. I hope to clean up as much as possible before I depart for my EDE course next week.

Thank you all for your support along this arduous journey!!!

Ajishima Clean Up - Special Thanks Edition!

2/8/2013

I wanted to offer my sincerest gratitude to the Konohana Family Ecovillage for all their support. I am leaving for the Ecovillage Design Education course taught at their farm in Shizuoka Prefecture next week. I would like to especially thank Michiyo-san, Ikeya-san, and Nakano-san, who prepared the message in Japanese below.

Nakano-san has also been summarizing my daily exploits in the world of all things garbage and posting the highlights on the Konohana Family blog, facebook and mixi. Thank you very much for your kind words and encouragement along the way.

I am very excited to start learning next week. I am also looking forward to the meeting all of my fellow students and to working together to make our world a better place.

Please read the message below from Nakano-san and share it far and wide if you can. I appreciate your support!

2月19日から、木の花ファミリーではいよいよ「エコビレッジ・デザイン・エデュケーション（EDE）」の2013年度を開講します。

＊エコビレッジ・デザイン・エデュケーション＠木の花ファミリー　http://ede.konohana-family.org

その受講を希望されているリック・ミッケルソンさんが、ただいま、インターネットを通じて、受講費の寄付を募っています。

リックさんは東日本大震災の被災地である宮城県石巻市網地島にて、人と人が助け合い、自然と調和したコミュニティを築くことを志しています。網地島に人と人、人と自然が調和したコミュニティが出来るように。それが、東北地方の復興を支える光となるように ―――

そんな願いを抱いていたリックさんは、「エコビレッジ・デザイン・エデュケーション」の存在を知って、参加を強く望みましたが、予算的に厳しい状況にありました。

それでも諦めなかったリックさんは、私たちと相談して、インターネットの寄付サイト「JustGiving」を通じて受講費の寄付を募ることにしました。

「JustGiving」には、社会貢献活動をしている NPO がたくさん登録されています。そんなNPOを応援することで社会を良くしたい！もしあなたがそう望んだら、自ら「チャレンジ」を掲げます。「チャレンジ」の内容は、マラソンでも、ダイエットでも、ヒッチハイクで日本横断でも、なんでもOK。あなたのチャレンジを応援する人からの寄付が、そのままNPOへ届けられるのです。

＊JustGiving：http://justgiving. jp/about/justgiving

その JustGivingにて、リックさんは「1ヵ月間網地島のゴミ拾いをする」というチャレンジを掲げました。

＊被災地石巻市あじしまの清掃を1ヶ月間！Ajishima Clean Up!!　
http://justgiving.jp/c/8619
＊リックさんのブログ（英語ですが, 日々のチャレンジが詳しく綴られています)
http://www.dreamseedfarms.com/blog

リックさんのゴミ拾いへの寄付はNPO法人ぐりーんぐらすに入りますが、それはそのままリックさんのEDE受講費に充てられることになっています。

現在、たくさんのゴミが島の真ん中の空き地に集められています。地震の被害を受けた家はショベルカーで解体され、ここに運ばれてきました。

それらの家をもし丁寧に解体していれば、それだけの時間や余裕があれば、リサイクル出来る材料もたくさんあっただろうに…

有効活用が難しいゴミを前にして、リックさんは暗澹たる気持ちになるそうです。それでも、そんな状況の中、リックさんは自分に出来る最大源の努力をしています。

たとえば流木を再利用することで、愛犬の小屋や大きなコンポスト（生ごみ堆肥化容器）を作成しています。「流木を再利用することはモノを活かすことであり、カオスから平和を生み出すことになる。」そう確信しながらも、リックさんは流木が元々は誰かの家だったことにも想いを馳せています。

このチャレンジも、今日で25日目を迎えています。毎日、こつこつとゴミを拾い続けるリックさん。そのゴミから島の人々の生活を想い、想像し、愛を向けるリックさん。その先に、あらゆるモノが大切にされるコミュニティを心に描いています。

『木の花ファミリーメールマガジン』をご購読いただいている皆さま、リックさんのチャレンジを応援していただけませんか。

寄付は、500円からでOKです。JustGiving のサイトを通じて、クレジットカードや銀行振込で簡単に寄付できます。

皆さまのご協力を、ファミリー一同、心からお願い申し上げます。

＊被災地石巻市あじしまの清掃を1ヶ月間！Ajishima Clean Up!!　
http://justgiving.jp/c/8619
＊リックさんのブログ（英語ですが, 日々のチャレンジが詳しく綴られています)
http://www.dreamseedfarms.com/blog

本当に心からありがとうございます。Thank you all so much for your support! -リック - Rick

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 25

2/7/2013

The building that used to be on the concrete foundation was demolished months after the tsunami

Before we start, I want to address the recent change in format of my garbage collecting. I started out by finding garbage and carrying it back home for sorting and photographing on my green tarp. Since I have cleaned up many of the places closest to my house, I have to venture out farther than before. I am finding more and bigger pieces of garbage everyday, so much so that I cannot carry it all home first anymore. Therefore, there are many pictures recently from the actual location where I found the junk. I then walk home, get my car, go pick up the junk, go home and wait until the next day for when I drive to work and then throw the relevant junk in the dump.

Anyway, from the Negumi Beach Port on the southeast side of Ajishima, I gathered up the following:

Cardboard box and two giant styrofoam packing inserts
for a 4 stroke outboard motor
Plastic foam pad
Swimming/diving goggles
Bottles and cans
Fishing net
Plastic food wrappers
Styrofoam bits
Fiberglass boat hull shards
Etc.

I cleaned up as much as I could from the foreground and background in the picture. I put everything into the big styrofoam inserts and loaded them into my car for disposal at the dump. The smaller bits of plastic, fiberglass and styrofoam may be leftover tsunami debris that is just now getting uncovered by wind and waves that are removing the sand and stones deposited on top of them during the tidal wave back in 2011.

However, the cardboard box and its styrofoam inserts are relatively new additions to one of my favorite places on the island. They were not there on previous visits to the port. Many fishermen from the island lost their boats during the disaster. A year or so later they started replacing their crafts and motors too. This box belonged to someone who ordered the motor and had it sent from the Yamaha company by truck or train to Ishinomaki City, then delivered to the ferry port by truck, then shipped to Ajishima on the ferry, then carried by a smaller truck from Aji Port to Negumi Port, opened up the box, took out the motor and made the active choice to discard the box and two massively huge styrofoam inserts right there in the port.

The only reason the styrofoam had not washed or blown away is because their indentations were filled with rain or snow melt and therefore held down in place.

This is hard for me to fathom. I would love to peak inside the mind of one of our island's many many habitual and serial litter bugs. What is the thought process of the person who left this garbage there like that? It is not like tossing an empty beer can or cigarette package out the window of a moving car. This stuff is huge! And perhaps because of the sheer size of it, the person chose not to dispose of it properly. It must be infinitely easier to just leave the garbage right there than take it home, break it down and bag it up for disposal on one of our regularly scheduled garbage pick up days. That must be it, right!?

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 24

2/7/2013

This place looks familiar...

...because this is the place I cleaned up only four days ago. This is what I found today:

Over 100 plastic bottles
Broken ceramic cups
Aluminum cans
Steel cans
Steel pole
Styrofoam box
Plastic food wrappers
'An-ko' sweet bean paste containers
Plastic 35kg fertilizer bags
Plastic shopping bags
Etc,

All of this (except the styrofoam box on the right of the picture above) came from the cemetery that I highlighted in my Day 20 post. This is only a fraction of what one family dumped down the slope from their grave site down towards the next family's site.

I have noticed something about myself throughout this challenge: at the beginning I was totally gung ho about cleaning up the island.Towards the end of the second week, it all kind of hit me and I became pretty agitated by the sight of any garbage. Now, I have moved on to accept the situation. I do not like it, and I do not condone it, but such is the situation that we have on Ajishima. There are mountains of trash spread across the island by the islanders. I cannot change that fact. I can, however, try my best to clean up as much as possible, and to hopefully influence other islanders not to litter in the first place.

Today, while picking up the trash around the cemetery I became content and happy. I found peace in doing a simple task and in showing respect to the resting place of our island's ancestors. I may not be able to read or pronounce the Japanese characters of the families' names, but I beg their forgiveness for trespassing on their hallowed ground and then proceed to clean it up to the best of my ability.

If I had time every day for another month, I still would not be able to clean up half of the trash dumped in the cemetery. I would like to showcase some of the other dumping grounds on the island, but I am drawn to tidy up the cemetery. I am not sure what I will eventually do for my final week of the challenge. Please stay tuned for the details of what and where I end up cleaning up...

Ajishima Clean Up - Special Origin Story Edition!

2/5/2013

We found the following pictures in the waiting area shelter at the docks in Ishinomaki City. They are of the main harbor and docks on Ajishima at various times throughout the tsunami back in March 2011. They were taken by a one Mr. Shiraiwa, printed, laminated and hung in the shelter. We took pictures of his pictures and share them with you now:

The island's entire harbor emptied, feeding the tsunami as it hurled itself towards the mainland

The water returned; this is when most of the damage was done to houses along the harbor

A few days later all looks calm but everything has changed

These scenes are awful and awe inspiring at the same time. It must be about twenty feet from the dock landing to the bottom of the seabed. For all that water to be sucked out in an instant and vanish for who-knows-how-long must have been an incredible site to behold. The rushing water returned after laying waste to Ishinomaki, washed ashore and wiped out many houses in the low-lying areas of the island. The last picture doesn't hint to any of damage done, but just outside the frame, it looked like a war zone. It still does!

This is how our current story began. Well actually, it began sometime earlier when Michie and I decided to move back to Japan to build a Bed and Breakfast on Ajishima. We even thought about starting some kind of intentional community or ecovillage. We arrived in Japan three weeks before the disaster, but were thankfully on the mainland visiting family and friends. We finally were able to move to the island in May because until that time, the ferries could not operate due to the debris in the ocean and the fact that the island sank 1.4 meters into the sea. This meant most of the docks sank as well and were unusable.

Eventually, a small temporary dock was built and crews of workers came to the island to get the utilities back up, and the clean up started. At first islanders gather up debris and burned it, plastic, wood and all. Then a demolition company came and gathered the garbage into several dumps to later be loaded on barges and shipped to Ishinomaki for burning, dumping at sea or recycling, or distribution to other prefectures in Japan for similar processing.

The tsunami debris has long been cleared up and shipped away, but our island is still covered in garbage from everyday use and improper disposal in the woods, fields, mountains and sea around us. I was able to get a job driving a dump truck for the demolition company last summer. They came back this year in January and I was able to start driving for them again. So, every morning I wake up, feed the dogs and drive a dump truck full of unfortunately destroyed materials from old houses demolished by my employer. After lunch I am free to walk about the island and gather up as much trash as I can. I take it to the dump, and this will be shipped off the island at some point as well.

I was inspired in part to clean up Ajishima because it is my home and will be until the day I die. I want to have a clean and safe place to raise a family and to start a community of like-minded people. I was also inspired by a worldwide garbage clean up project undertaken by millions of people in dozens of countries, which I researched after the disaster: Let's Do It World Clean Up. Check out their video below and webpage for more information. There is even a map of some garbage in Japan. I would love to map Ajishima's garbage if I have time before my EDE course.

With the dumps here now we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to get rid of a lot of trash scattered about our island. This is woefully unsustainable (I only have a week left before I depart for my month-long EDE-course) and the demolition crew and their dumps and their garbage barges will leave the island for good in a month or two from now. We need an action plan to clean up Ajishima in the future, but more importantly, we need to figure out ways to prevent the garbage from polluting our home in the first place. I think we can take these ideas to the rest of Japan as well and help make this country cleaner and safer for everyone. Are you ready to do it? I am! Please join me in cleaning up Ajishima, Japan and the world!!!

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 23 - Rainy Snow Day Edition!

2/5/2013

It is cold today. And wet. And raining. And snowing. All at the same time!

The inclement weather is a great segue to another project we did last spring. We employed the usual components: tsunami debris, dump finds, hand tools, cordless drill, and 100Yen shop hardware to produce a nifty little contraption we dubbed:

The Driftwood Cold Frame

It all started with a bed frame, a pallet and some plywood...

...then came an old sliding door frame...

...with seven different panes of glass...

The cold frame in action in our field with complimentary recycled desk drawer seed trays

A Driftwood Trifecta!

Cold frames are awesome ways to get seeds started earlier in the spring and to keep plants warm longer into the fall and even winter. You basically need a box or 'frame' with a cover that lets in light, and can be opened or shut to keep in or let out warmth as needed. You can half bury the frame into the soil for more insulation and stable temperatures. We left ours above ground over a 'hugel kultur' bed as an experiment to see if the decomposing wood under the bed would warm the cold frame. We weren't very scientific about it, but it may have had some effect.

The funnest part of this project for me, was getting the seven different glass panes for the cover. We went to the dump and found a massive pile of interior sliding doors used to partition off rooms in Japanese style houses. These were collected from demolished houses and discarded. Most of the frames were broken, but the glass was intact, so, to the pleasure of my inner child, I karate chopped and kicked the doors to pieces and rescued the narrow windows. I then affixed six panes to a door frame that already had one pane in it, then used some hinges to attach it to the box.

We had great success growing just about everything we planted in the cold frame. We used old desk drawers for seed trays and recycled discarded plastic seed pots for some fruit seeds. Still in the cold nights of spring we were able to germinate tomato, corn, zucchini, pumpkin, melon and herb seeds, among others, as well as sprout persimmon, date (tropical fruit-bearing palm tree) and citrus trees from seed.

We learned some important lessons from the cold frame last year. Towards the end of spring we needed to go to the mainland for some family functions but knew that a hurricane was heading towards the island. I watered everyone well and closed the cover to keep our plants safe. Because of the hurricane and a second one that followed it, the ferries back to the island were cancelled, so we had to stay away longer than expected. Once we finally got back to the island, most of the plants had doubled or tripled in size due to the long exposure to the heat trapped under the closed cover. However, the sudden growth spurt was spindly and not hardy enough to withstand a short coldsnap, and most of the veggie starts either died or failed to produce later in the season.

Towards the end of summer I left the lid open with a wire screen on top to keep the crows out. This let our pumpkins explode out of the cold frame and cover an area outside the box more than twice the size of the actual box! That was the good part. The bad part was I left the cover opened and propped up with its foldable legs, well into winter. Either the wind or a massive amount of snow knocked the cover down and one of the window panes shattered and another one cracked. The glass we used was not tempered glass, and therefore is very brittle.

So, cold frames are a wonderful tool for extending your growing season in cool climates but they need to be adjusted daily and should have safe tempered glass covers (or plastic in a pinch if it can be recycled properly at the end of its use). They can be built out of just about anything like: bricks, stone, logs, driftwood, bed frames, and even straw bales. Give it a try and let us know about your experiences growing in a cold frame.

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 22

2/5/2013

Leftovers from two houses demolished last year

This is all stuff I found in two vacant lots where two homes once stood:

3 fire extinguishers
18L plastic kerosene tank
18L plastic gasoline tank top section
Aluminum window tracks
Steel water pipes
Broken window panes
Rusty metal motor oil bucket
Fluorescent light bulb
Plastic utensils
Plastic food wrappers
Fishing net floats
Plastic hose
Bedding
Many 35kg plastic fertilizer bags
Etc...

Actually, the baskets were salvaged from a current demolition site. The houses on these two now-empty lots were torn down last summer. All of the lots with demolished homes look very similar with heaps of trash still let behind, basically smashed into the mud by the machines that are too big to pick up the smaller pieces of trash. No human effort is made to tidy up after the machines move on to the next site.

I am reminded of an observation made by Abraham Maslow in 1966, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." In our case on the island, we have huge steam shovels and scissor-clawed cranes to destroy old houses then pick up and remove the debris. If it is not big enough to smash and grab then it literally falls through the cracks of the machine's claw or bucket and is left to litter the ground.

Without the machines we would not be able to efficiently remove the old unsafe houses or the original tsunami debris. But, with the machines all of the useful materials are destroyed and smashed to bits. Where is the happy medium?

This reminds me of another great (paraphrased) quote by Albert Einstein, that will close out today's thoughts: “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

Ajishima Clean Up - EDE Fundraiser Update - 募金活動更新

2/3/2013

Thank you all so much for your support!!! Your donations, facebook posts, tweets and word-of-mouth sharing of our Ajishima Clean Up challenge are truly amazing and very much appreciated.

As of today (Day 21 of the challenge) we have raised 66,000 Yen via our JustGiving challenge page and 80,000 Yen from direct donations, for a total of 146,000 Yen or 81% of my Ecovillage Design Education course tuition.

If we exceed our goal, any extra will go towards a scholarship for the next course's students. If you would like to use the widget you see to the left to help promote our challenge, please use the html code here.

By attending the EDE course taught by Konohana Family, I will be able to learn a set of skills and techniques that will be useful in helping Ajishima, Ishinomaki, Miyagi, Tohoku and beyond, recover from the great disaster two years ago. I am collecting garbage and cleaning up our island now so that in the future we will have a clean and safe place to build an ecovillage that will hopefully be a model for the rest of the region and the whole world on how to live in harmony with one another and with the Earth as well. Thank you for all your support along the way!

皆様のキフとサポートをありがとうございます！

トータルで今までチャレンジの半分をあつまれました（146,000円 = 81%）

私たちの挑戦をサポートするために、このHTMLコードをご利用ください。

これまでにご協力頂いた方々に、重ねて感謝申し上げます
木村浩昭様, 増田力也様, 安曇野パーマカルチャー塾様, たけべよしひさ様,
山田長＆桂子様, 小椋能子様, 瀬政光彦様, 宮本民子様

JustGiving を通じてご協力頂いた方々に、重ねて感謝申し上げます
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Ajishima Clean Up - Day 21 - Week 3 - Rainy Day Edition!

2/3/2013

Today's garbage gathering extravaganza has been called due to rain. But, we can still look back at a previous project that utilized tsunami debris and treasures found at the dump. This little project took three days to build over the hottest part of the summer just after the disaster. Everything is recycled except for some screws, nails, hinges and door latches. And except for my cordless drill, I used only hand tools, including my trusty 100Yen-store handsaw!

I give you: The Driftwood Tool Shed!

It took a while to gather the materials, and the weeds tried to swallow them up!

We leveled the ground and used scavenged cinder blocks as pylons

An old chest from the dump and an old cabinet from the beach

We added two roofs and a rain barrel fashioned out of a huge plastic fishing buoy half

Oh, pallets. How I love Thee!

Our life is full of so many happy coincidences, such as the pallet planks being the same size as the cabinet

If a regular pallet yields a small door, what do you get from a double-wide pallet?

Voilà! Two fully functioning doors...

...that keep the rain out...

...and the tools safe inside!

Since we built this shed almost two years ago the steel bolts on the door latches have rusted and seized shut, so I will have to replace them with some simple hook latches I thankfully salvaged from a neighbor's shed before it was torn down by the demolition crew last week. Other than the latches, everything else is holding up. This rain barrel is the third one added to our main field and really helped us get through the hottest and driest parts of two summers when we had to hand water all of our veggies.

Whenever I post about our old projects and reusing other peoples' property, I think it bears repeating my thought process: I have had a dilemma in my own mind over using the things we find on the shore and at the dump. Obviously, these items were once in someone's home, integral parts of their daily lives. I have convinced myself that by reclaiming wreckage from the disaster and repurposing it, we are creating something peaceful and practical from the chaos and carnage. I hope it does not offend anyone to put these things to use, rather than have them rot on the shore or be burned away. We are grateful for each and every scrap that has come our way and hope that we are doing it justice and giving all the embodied energy within it new life.

I hope you agree! I would love to hear your thoughts on this, so please use the comments section and let's have a discussion about putting disaster debris to good use.

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 20

2/3/2013

This place looks familiar...because I have cleaned it up before!!!

Today's adventure started last night while taking the dogs for a walk. I found two coffee cans in on the side of the road and picked them up. Even in the dark I noticed more cans in the area. I decided to go back this morning to the same place with my backpack basket. I soon filled it up and had to go home to get two extra pink containers. This is some of what I found:

Nearly one hundred plastic and glass bottles & steel and aluminum cans
Plastic shopping bags
Plastic 35kg fertilizer bags
Plastic foam bath mat
Broken plastic basket
Plastic sheeting
Plastic food wrappers
Styrofoam boxes
Styrofoam food containers
Styrofoam instant ramen cups
Cardboard boxes
Rusted out steel bowl
Rusted out push cart/seat walker
Etc.

The deeper I descended the more garbage I found

This location is the same cemetery I visited earlier on during our Ajishima Clean Up challenge. There is a steep slope right off the edge of the road and it is covered by many low hanging branches from the surrounding trees. This is very similar to the site we cleaned up yesterday, but still hidden behind the foliage, and therefore an ideal place to dump garbage surreptitiously. I definitely found the dumping grounds of another serial litter bug. I suspect someone walks or drives by here daily and throws their plastic tea bottles or steel coffee cans down the hill because they think no one will ever see them.

There were so many layers of garbage, bottles and cans separated by topsoil and then more layers of trash very deep in the ground. I dug everything out by hand. I thought I would clean up a couple cans at the top of the hill, but the more I looked around the more I found. I ended up spending over two hours rummaging around the leaves and dirt even before I had breakfast this morning!

Once I filled my backpack basket, I quickly filled the two containers I fetched from home. Then, without fail, once one container was full I would serendipitously find another container or plastic shopping bag or plastic fertilizer bag, fill it up, and find another. There is still more garbage in the cemetery, that I was not able to pick up, because I was really hungry! I will have to go back another day or maybe even a few times.

These push cart/seat walker things are very popular with the island's grandmas

I have to admit a morbid thought I had once I saw this walker discarded at the bottom of the slope; judging by the way our societies treat old people like trash I would not have been surprised to find someone's poor grandma discarded along with the broken walker. And since this was in a cemetery it was even creepier.

All I did find in the cemetery were mountains of garbage; mostly plastic bottles from all the sake and shochu offered to the ancestors. One family would empty a bottle and throw it down the hill and their garbage would pile up around another family's grave. That family would do the same and toss their garbage down the hill to the next family, and so on and so forth, until the last family's refuse ended up in a small valley only to be washed out to sea by a small stream that swells in the rainy season and after snow melt.

What occurs to me, is that, if the islanders care so little about the cemetery where their ancestors are interned, a place where cultures usually show their greatest reverence, then how can we expect them to show any respect for the rest of their surroundings on the island. I think it will be very hard to influence and change this habitual dumping behavior for the better. Hard, but not impossible.

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 19 - Special Reporter Report

2/2/2013

The Usual Suspects

Where do I even begin? Today I had some special help, but up first: our biggest haul to date. The two blue and two pink baskets are previous rescues from the dump, everything else came from the tiny space in front of the trees in this picture.

Bottles and cans (including our old friend, the pull tab can, buried deep in the soil)
Clocks, many and assorted
Three rusted out galvanized steel buckets
Yellow plastic basket
Re-freezable ice packs
Gas range / cook top stove (I collected some stoves from this very spot last year!)
Many square meters of plastic sheeting
Literally thousands of square meters of old fishing nets
Broken plastic buckets
Styrofoam
A piggy bank (no coinage inside, though!)
Scrub brushes
Plastic shopping bags
Plastic food wrappers
Full shaving cream can
Hairspray can
Bleach bottles
Fluorescent light bulbs (intact)
Camp stove fuel canisters
Plastic and metal broom handle
Plastic flower pots
One massive spool of unused barbed wire
Two battery operated kerosene fuel pumps (both with corroded, leaking batteries)
Etc...

I spy with my little eye, something...garbage

My special helpers today included Michie and two reporters from the 'Nikkei' (日本経済新聞) newspaper of Japan. They randomly came across our Ajishima Clean Up challenge on FirstGiving, and contacted us to learn some more about our vision for an ecovillage on Ajishima, especially in regards to the disaster recovery effort in the Tohoku region. One of the reporters has visited the island many times in the past. I will post a link to their report once it is published. We are really excited about the possible exposure this will help generate, and very grateful for the opportunity to have been able to talk about our plans with them.

Anyway, back to the clean up...We spent just under 30 minutes on the slight slope and space in front of the trees. We did not even get a fraction of the junk dumped here. We ran out of baskets to pack up, but found another basket and some buckets and filled them all too quickly.

This space is on the corner of a t-intersection of two narrow back roads. It was covered by dozens of low hanging branches and loads of weeds, until someone cut all of the lowest branches down last summer. Once the foliage was gone, it revealed an enormous pile of trash. This turned into a huge "trash magnet" as it has been added to steadily since last summer.

We have located the dumping grounds of yet another serial litter bug!

We're gonna need a bigger boat!

Ajishima Clean Up - Day 18

2/1/2013

Have wheels will travel...

Short and sweet today, and very convenient for me:

One wire framed hand cart
Blue plastic tarp
Two styrofoam buoys
Sheet metal
Rope
Assorted other trash

...all the way to the dump!

This hand cart as abandoned some time ago. The frame is rusted through and the tires are disintegrating. The tarp and styrofoam buoys are as solid and intact as the day they were manufactured.

I wish all of the trash spread over Ajishima was this easy to gather up. I actually had to use a truck today to load this hand cart into. I found it a couple months ago along one of the most beautiful paths on the island. Now, the walkway is even more beautiful, sans a huge pile of garbage!!!

Exhibit A: Styrofoam Buoys

These buoys are solid styrofoam a little bigger than my entire body, but they only weigh a few kilograms. They are wrapped in blue plastic tarps to protect them from the waves and weather and then deployed in the sea by the fishermen. I do not know how they use them specifically, but perhaps they hold up nets, fish farms, or oyster or seaweed cultures.

Once the fishermen are done with they buoys they are disposed of in the sea or in the forest. The styrofoam breaks down into smaller and smaller bits, but it never stops being styrofoam.

The buoys in the picture above are a relatively new addition to Ajishima. They are only a few months old and have not been used at sea yet. I imagine they will be deployed once it warms up. I only hope they will be disposed of properly once the fishermen are done using them. However, experience informs me that they will end up in the sea or some forest sooner or later.

This begs the question: if we choose different materials and consume less stuff overall, then we will have less waste to worry about later on. I am not sure many people think about this kind of thing, but I am obsessed with it now!