 Getting
Free Rice Chaff
November 23, 2025 - Today we went to Kuyama san's
farm processing area to get rice chaff, which is basically the unwanted husks of
processed rice grains. We walk the couple of minutes to the farm and Akiko drove
the bus over where we loaded 48 cow manure fertilizer bags of the stuff and
brought it home to be used in our garden and at the farm we're using. The chaff
works great as a soil amendment, as an effective mulch for suppressing weeds,
and as the "brown" material for composting. |
 Happy
Thanksgiving
November 27, 2025 - Hey everybody. Happy
Thanksgiving from our family to yours. This is yet another Thanksgiving in Japan
but our first in our new home in Setouchi City. Akiko is making turkey with all
the trimmings. Although turkeys are raised in Japan on a limited basis, there's
not many since Japanese people prefer chicken. Also, Thanksgiving is "not a
thing" here like Christmas or News Years. Thanksgiving is a food based holiday
and some of the items like sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows or "soaked
bread" (stuffing) as Akiko calls it is simply unappealing to most folks in this
country. Incidentally this year's turkey is larger than usual since they were
out of the smaller sizes but still not even close to the huge birds Americans
consume. Our particular gobbler weighed in at 4.3 kg (9.8 lb), is from America,
and came with a price tag of 12,000 yen which at today's exchange rate amounted
to about 80 bucks. We all wanted a traditional Thanksgiving meal and decided to
"bite it" (excuse the bun pun) on the turkey price. |
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