Colours of summer

Summer seems to be here, although 'officially' we have just entered the rainy season. There were a couple of wet days earlier this week but yesterday and today have been bright, hot and quite humid. Driving back to town just after lunch, I saw a roadside temperature display which read 33 degrees...

When there is some wind, K loves watching this spin around. It was a present from H's relatives.

No, it's not jam, although it did put me in the mood for some lemon curd. We put dollops of this lovely gel into Ziploc bags (taped shut too, just in case...) and then K enjoyed squishing them together and seeing how the colours mixed and changed. I found this idea, called Rainbow in a Bag, on Jo's blog, A Bit Of This And A Bit Of That, ages ago and she originally got it from The Artful Parent. Shall I now pass it on to you?

Mix a cup of corn starch, 1/3 of a cup of sugar and 4 cups of water in a saucepan. Heat it and stir until it thickens, then remove from the heat and stir a bit more. Divide the mixture into 3 and colour it (red, yellow and blue), then let it cool. Put 2 spoonfuls each (or in our case, 'a dollop') of red and blue in one bag, red and yellow in another, blue and yellow in a third and all three colours in the last bag. Then squish! I forgot to take pictures of the results (....) so you'll just have to believe me that they were really quite beautiful.

The rice fields are full of water and lovely and green now, and we often see herons and egrets coming to feast on the frogs and tadpoles. We also spotted a snake close to a metre long yesterday - on our lawn!

A final rice update for the year

All the rice around us has been harvested now.

In late September, Mr A set this up in one of the fields:




No, nothing to do with The Wicker Man, it's a rack for drying rice. Most of the rice behind our house was combined and the grains were dried by machine straight away. One small field wasn't ready then though, so Mr A cut that with a smaller, walk-behind machine and then hung the sheaves to dry on the rack:

The old rice plants shoot up again really quickly; you can see a big difference in the ten days or so between those two photos being taken. Last week Mr A got his little tractor out and turned it all over:

So now it all looks like this, and will be left fallow until next spring:

Hope you enjoyed following the rice-growing!

Rice harvest

At the weekend Mr and Mrs A harvested most of the rice growing behind our house. You can see here that the grains had ripened and changed colour and that the stalks were bowed with their weight. And in the background you can see our house :-)


All the water from the rice fields has gone now but the ground is still very soft. The rice was harvested using a little combine on caterpillar tracks. It cuts the rice stalks and separates the grain from the straw.

And here it is in action! The rice grains go straight into sacks to be taken away and dried in some kind of drying machine. After that they are polished completely to produce white rice, or partially for brown rice.

Meanwhile Mrs A was cutting the corners of the next field by hand, so that the combine could turn.

Here are her nice little bundles of rice.

Traditionally the rice is cut by hand and then hung from wooden frames to dry. There are still quite a few of those drying frames about so if I see some I'll take some pictures for you...

Rice update

The rice is coming on nicely now, although the field nearest the house is a bit behind the rest. You can see a clear difference between that plot, still bright green and upright, and the next one where the rice is starting to ripen and bow over.

This photo was taken on a rather overcast day, but it gives a nice overview of it all.



As well as the nets, there's now a scarecrow to keep the birds away too.

On the subject of harvests, there's still time to enter my little giveaway!

Latest on the rice

Mr and Mrs A covering the rice with nets to keep the birds off:


Now it looks like giant spiders have spun their webs over the fields:

The rice grains are forming:


Photo credits to H :-)

Rice growing update

Here's the view from the patio nowadays:


The farmer has put up lines around and across each rice field in preparation for setting up nets to keep the birds away once the rice grains develop. There's still quite a bit of water in the fields, and the frogs continue to serenade us each evening.

According to the news last night, the rainy season has officially ended here now, 15 days later than average and 29 days later than last year. It's the latest end-of-rainy-season since records began in 1951. The meterological office in Japan is obsessed with these kinds of statistics but I have no idea how they decide when the rainy season starts and ends, as it's still grey and damp here...

Rice update

I'm afraid I haven't been keeping you up to date with the rice-growing, have I? I did take some photos on July 1st, but didn't get around to posting them here... At that point most of the water in the fields had gone, leaving masses of tadpoles thrashing around in ever-shrinking puddles, which made very convenient snack bars for the herons. Here's how it looked then:

A day or two later more water was let into the fields from the river. Heavy rain also helped to raise the water levels, but not before a lot of little tadpoles had met a sun-dried end.

Today there is still quite a lot of water in the fields and the rice has grown noticeably in the last 10 days:

Growing, growing, growing!

The rice...

the lawn...

the tomatoes...

and the little monkey...

It must be all that rain we've been having...

Ten days...

... and already you can see a difference in the rice:

For the past week or more it's generally been warm (17 to 20 degrees) but overcast and sometimes rainy. Not ideal for catching up with mountains of washing, but great for rice-growing and for newly-laid lawns. Unfortunately it's also great for weeds, which have sprung up everywhere in the Japanese garden. The other day we woke up to see that we'd had a visit from the Weeding Fairy (aka H's dad, popping round to weed in the very early morning!), but there's still a lot waiting there for me...

Rice planting revisited

After writing about rice planting the other day I noticed that there was still one field behind our house which hadn't been planted yet. I kept an eye on it all Friday - nothing. Then, just before we went out for the day on Saturday, planting began! So I got a photo of the little tractor in action for you after all:


The farmer's wife was there too (supervising I suppose...), and she told me a little about rice-planting when she was young. It was all done by hand then, and the people planting the rice would sing songs as they worked. She said that there was a lot more rain at this time of year years ago, and that people wore capes made of woven rice straw to keep them dry. Nowadays a lot of the fields around here are not being used and are just full of weeds, but in the past, when all the fields were being planted, there was often a shortage of water apparently. The farmer's wife told me that people used to sit guard by the irrigation canals overnight, to make sure than no-one was taking water out of turn, and that water was (a long time ago) the cause of more than one fight around here!

Meanwhile Mrs A was spotted filling in odd spots by hand:

Lovely weather for ducks

Today was one day this week that I was out all day, so of course Mr A planted his rice and I missed it. So no photos of his little tractor in action again, sorry.

It was a bit rainy and overcast when I took this picture but if you look carefully you can see the rice seedlings just peeping out of the water, and a duck. The flooded rice fields attract lots of ducks here, and millions of frogs. Every night the sound of the frogs is unbelievably loud, even indoors behind double-glazing!

Luckily I did spot some rice seedlings the other day, grown in little polytunnels and awaiting planting into the rice fields. You'll just have to imagine the actual planting...

Rice growing

Our house backs directly onto some rice fields. Every year I think that it would be good to document the rice growing, and every year I fail to do it. So this year, for the benefit of those of you who do not have rice fields on your doorstep, here's what is happening...

The fields are left fallow over the winter and so this is what it looked like a couple of weeks ago:

Then our neighbour Mr A (otherwise known as The Strawberry Guy) got his little tractor out and worked it all down:

All finished!
After that it was a matter of waiting for the water. Around here the water for rice growing is mainly provided by snow melt from the mountains, which makes its way to the rice fields via a combination of natural rivers and manmade channels. Little sluice gates in the channels are closed to stop the water to allow it to be diverted into the rice fields. Once the fields are flooded the gates are opened again and the water carries on to fields further downstream. Here we are quite a way from the mountains so we have to wait until everyone upstream has got their water before it reaches us. Here's one of the irrigation channels near us:

And here's a field being flooded that I noticed last week:

On Saturday, after flooding began, the field behind our house looked like this:

After more flooding and weekend rain, it was time for Mr A to get his little tractor out again and churn it all up into a nice muddy soup, all ready to be planted:

More rice growing news as it happens...