Chopsticks of Doom

Two and a half years ago, when we moved from our apartment to the house we are in now, Dustin bought me a young Japanese maple tree. We planted it in front of our house and I have been a bit doting and over protective ever since.

Our brave/crazy friend Danielle who biked home with our maple as well as two other
bushes in her bike baskets.

In the late spring and early summer of this year, I noticed a dozen or so small, green limpet like things munching away on my maple leaves.  I pulled them off and disposed of them before they could do much damage. I didn't find them on any other plants in my garden though. 

About a week and a half ago, since the weather has cooled down a bit, I noticed they were back on my maple and this time I didn't really bother about pulling them off right away. Partially it was laziness and partially it was not really caring if the leaves get chewed up a bit since the tree will be shedding its leaves soon anyway. During that time they grew much larger and more caterpillar like. 

I finally decided to do something about them when Dustin brushed past the tree and instantly had a bad skin reaction. He said it was an itchy, painful burning sensation like fiberglass rubbed into your skin. The spot where he had touched the caterpillar stayed red and puffy for a few hours. 

The tree was pretty infested with these wee beasties and quite a few were at Rosie's hight, so I decided they needed to go. 

They always hang out on the underside of the leaves. Unfortunately for them, their
neon green colour doesn't blend in too well and they are easy to spot.

When William got home from kindergarten today, we decided to tag team this problem. I wielded the chopsticks of doom while William put them down for a dirt nap.

Always happy to oblige

In the wake of their destruction

Before you think I am a completely cruel and heartless killer, I did do a little research on this species before I obliterated them from my garden. The species is Parasa lepida, or the Nettle Caterpillar, and they are a nuisance invasive species in Japan. I may have felt a small twinge of guilt wiping out a native species, but the ecologist in me feels absolutely no remorse about assisting in removing a poisonous, exotic pest.

I am curious if they will show up again next spring but if they do, William and I will be ready for them!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

The ever changing, unpredictably of the seasons from year to year and how that affects plants and animals is something that I find endlessly exciting. I am one of those people that remembers within a week, and usually within a day or two, when flowers first open, shoots appear, or trees bear fruit from year to year. I may not always remember to grab my phone as I head out the door, but I can tell you exactly when the wintersweet down the street first started flowering during the past four winters. I am sure this natural inclination is what pushed me into studying ecology. So let me take you on a tour of some of the things growing in our garden this summer.

This year I decided to utilize a bit more of the space around our tiny yard and experiment with a few plants I have never grown before. In front of our house I have a small flower bed that self seeds itself with four o'clocks each year. This year I decided to plant okra, hot peppers, and shishito peppers amongst the four o'clocks. 

Before coming to Japan, I had only eaten okra breaded and deep-fried or in Cajun dishes like gumbo. I sort of liked it, but it would never have been on my top twenty list of plants to grow or even buy. It could be my love of natto that made my palate accustomed to sliminess or trying a new way of preparing okra (blanched and salted) but now I absolutely can't get enough of it. I would be satisfied with a whole bowl of okra as a meal. Okra was not just a delicious addition to our flower bed, but an aesthetically pleasing one too, since the flowers are absolutely gorgeous. 

light yellow and deep burgundy okra flowers

Shishito is a pepper that I have rarely bothered buying because they taste like bell peppers and are a fraction of the size. However, I was guaranteed by the lady at the plant store that these shishito were very spicy so I decided to give it a go. I have decided that they are absolutely fascinating peppers. Most of them have no spiciness whatsoever, but very occasionally there is a spicy one. I'm not sure I would ever grow them again, but they do produce quite well and since they aren't so spicy, the kids don't mind them.  

Shishito

I also planted a few hot peppers because, as anyone who had ever had a meal with me knows, pretty much everything is better with some heat.

Hot peppers ripening

We also seeded a couple of pots of basil and oregano.

Cilantro is something that I have tried to grow multiple times without too much luck. Dustin and I absolutely love and you just cannot buy it in Japan at least in our area. Every time I plant it, I get a pot of gangly, pitiful looking cilantro plants that never seem to bush out. We do get a meal or two's worth and that is usually enough for to help stave off the intense cravings until I can plant some more. 

We also planted tomatoes on our side yard in our usual spot next to the compost bin. Within no time they turned into a dense tomatoey jungle that began to trail over the side of our wall and into the ditch. Our neighbours often come by and give me gardening lectures about how I should trim every side branch off to turn them into tall skinny tomato trees, which is how everyone seems to grow tomatoes around here, but I find that the plants just produce way less when I do that. Last year I was very careful about pruning but it was the worst tomato harvest I'd ever had. This year I only pruned occasionally, mostly let the tomatoes do their thing, and had huge yields despite the all the rain. I actually tried weighing all that I harvested over the summer and somewhere around 25 kilos I stopped bothering. All this from only 3 plants!  

Our house is right next to a small train line and the whole strip beside the train tracks used to be filled with vegetable gardens. About a year ago the neighbourhood was given a letter from the city saying we weren't allowed to plant gardens in this space. The majority of people complied but there are still a few gardens here and there. When my brother was out visiting in May, he encouraged me to feign ignorance of this letter and clear some space to grow some more vegetables. I pretty quickly caved to his bad influence and now have a sneaky secret garden. I decided to plant only short, non obvious plants, that couldn't be seen quite as easily from the train or street. So I chucked in a few sweet potato vines, cucumber plants, and peanut plants (which promptly died). I am curious to dig up my sweet potatoes soon and see if they grew!

Living and Growing

After our hot and unusually long summer, the weather has suddenly turned cooler. On my daily walks around the neighbourhood, I have begun to notice that it isn't just me enjoying the weather but all the plants and creepy crawlies too.

Our little street has a sort of rusty, run down beauty in early fall. The train tracks become lined with a healthy tangle of blooming cosmos and red spider lilies and the green mountains rise up in the distance. After a year and a half in our little house, it is really starting to feel like home.

The view down our street

Higanbana, or red spider lily

I have been coming across a lot of hornworm and hawk moth caterpillars (from the Sphingidae family of moths). It is almost impossible to miss seeing them since they are about 7 cm long, as thick as your finger, and have a little wagging "tail" at their end.

An Impatiens Hawk Moth (Theretra oldenlandiae) caterpillar making its way across the street

This caterpillar was a little smaller and also from the Sphingidae family (I have no idea
what genus and species though!)

A tobacco hornworm caterpillar making short work of a morning glory leaf on our bike shelter

And we have also seen the adult stage of these hawk moth caterpillars frequenting our four o' clocks and morning glories each evening. Dustin and I never grow tired of seeing huge hummingbird moths flitting in and out of the flower bed. 

There has also been a boom in the spider population as of late. Dustin managed to get a picture of this stripey and colourful individual last weekend.

Last year Dustin was pretty disappointed by the vines I chose to plant near our fence and bike shelter. He was envisioning a lush green blanket enveloping everything in sight but the flowering vines I planted barely covered half the fence before frost killed them off in December. This year I promised Dustin that I would make his dream come true and so I planted morning glories. I didn't really even plant that many of them, maybe six or seven plants around the yard, but they have really taken off. Every weekend I have to spend a few minutes cutting them back or else they would have long since eaten the road in front of our house, been all the way up the electric line and across the street, and completely covered the entrance to our bike shelter. 

Now that the weather has cooled, the morning glories have started to bloom. I love it! 

William posing outside our fence on a bright, sunny morning (yes, there is a fence under all those vines)

We also trained morning glories up a net in front of our window

From inside, it fills the room with green, dappled sunlight.

and the side of our bike shelter

Maybe I did go a bit nuts planting vines this year but there has not been one complaint from Dustin!

Tanuki

Wherever you go in Japan, you are sure to see a tanuki, or raccoon dog. In the city you will find little (or not so little) statues at every turn and if you stay up late enough in the county you might even get to see the real thing (Nyctereutes procyonoides).

Even though this animal actually exists, the tanuki is also popular character in Japanese folklore and legends. He is a magical, shapeshifting, trickster but cheerful and lovable none the less. He also plays music by drumming on his giant belly. Stylized ceramic statues of tanuki can be found peeking out at you from gardens and doorways and are supposed to bring you good luck and prosperity.

A tanuki statue usually has eight lucky attributes which are shown in this picture:

I find it very funny that they decided to go with the word "blob" instead of "ginormously oversized scrotum".

I have heard tanuki translated directly into raccoon time and time again and I know a few people that think they are the same as the North American raccoon. So, on a purely ecological note, I just need to set the record straight: the tanuki is not a raccoon and neither is it very closely related to a raccoon. It is about as related to a raccoon as it is to a walrus. They are in the Canidae family and are closely related to foxes, wolves, jackals and other dog-like creatures. An interesting taxonomic side note about tanuki is that they belong to a basal group of the subgroup Caninae in which there are only two extant species. The other species is the bat-eared fox (Otocyon megalotis) which lives in the African savannah. The rest of their basal buddies went extinct sometime before the end of the Pleistocene epoch.  

The fact that they look similar is an example of convergent evolution and a great opportunity for me to go on a tangent about ecological theory :)  Sometimes unrelated species develop similar traits completely independent of one another because they are living in a similar biome or occupy the same ecological niche. In the case of the raccoon and tanuki, they are both nocturnal animals that live in a forest environment. The black mask on their face reduces glare (like the black paint that football players use) and helps with their night vision. The striped coloration that they both exhibit helps them blend in with the long dark shadows that are cast from trees in a moonlit forest at night. Also, it has been speculated that the black markings on their faces help them to identify one another but I am not sure how much research has been done to support that theory.

If you will forgive me for my rant, here are some ridiculously cute tanuki puppies.  

Creepy Pets Redux

Whether due to budget, space, or the fact that we never seem to stay in one place for very long, the pets we have gotten our children have usually swung to the less than permanent side of the spectrum. However, just because we want a cheap replaceable pet doesn't mean I am going to settle for a mind numbingly boring one like a goldfish.

For those of you who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember a post about our first "creepy pet," a hermit crab named Crabby. For the record, we've never claimed that our son had the naming skills of someone like Carolus Linnaeus. Now that we live in a tiny Japanese apartment our options are again limited by all the previous criteria as well as the fact that we must now also factor in what constitutes a "pet" according to the rules and regulations of our apartment building. So this weekend when we were out shopping on Children's Day we came across a beetle starter kit which included the tank, soil, feeding tray, and one large and very shiny Rhinoceros Beetle. Needless to say, he came home with us.

Male Rhinoceros Beetle in nature.

 Keeping beetles as pets is very popular in Japan with almost every department store or 100 yen store selling some sort of bug hunting or keeping paraphernalia. In many ways it borders on the obsessive. Most of the time people simply go out and dig up their own grubs, which are quite easily found as Laura can attest to finding several large larvae the other day while she was weeding the local "sandbox."

On the way back home we encouraged Theo to come up with a name for his new pet by listing things in no particular order that were black. Thusly we have a beetle name "Coal." One bonus to keeping these specific types of beetles that unlike his crab, this particular pet can not pinch, bite or sting and so is virtually harmless which is I'm sure one of the reasons leading to it's popularity as a pet here in Asia. 

Our newest acquisition.

I am sure that with our imminent move to a larger space our menagerie will expand and we will keep you posted in regards to every new addition.

Kefir

For the past few months I have been experimenting with making a fermented dairy drink called kefir. I had never heard of the stuff until our neighbours brought some starter "mother" grains back from New York with them in January. In case you haven't had the pleasure of ever drinking or making kefir, I will regale you with all I have learned about it in the past three months.

A cluster of kefir grains

Kefir grains are symbiotic communities of around thirty different bacteria and yeast strains that produce a sugar and poysaccaride matrix that binds them all together into a cauliflower-like lump. When the grains are added to milk they ferment away and produce a wonderful drink that is chocked full of healthy living cultures. It has the consistency and flavour of thin yogurt but is actually much healthier for you since there are so many different live strains of bacteria present. For anyone curious about the nutritional content of kefir here is a website that is pretty informative. I thought it was interesting that the cultures reduce the amount of lactose in the milk by about 50% and also make it mildly alcoholic (0.5% - 2% alcohol by volume depending on the length of fermentation time).

This is the basic process that I follow to create my kefir: 

1. Place grains and milk into a container with an airtight lid and place it out of direct sunlight. 

2. Let it sit for 2 days. I might let it sit for less time once the weather gets warmer since this will speed up fermentation.

3. Pour thickened kefir through a sieve to catch all grains. 

4. Wash out the container, place the grains back in and start all over again.

Fresh milk kefir, ready to drink!

Using this method I produce about a liter of kefir every two days. I find that it is the perfect amount for the four of us to put on granola or drink with a bit of honey and cinnamon. The grains will also grow larger and produce more grains over time. I have found that it is kind of like chain letters, the more kefir I make, the more grains I grow and have to give away to new people. One interesting thing about the grains is that they often contain different communities of bacteria and yeasts depending on where the grains came from originally. This can change the flavour and texture of the kefir produced. You can actually use the grains to ferment basically any liquid that contains sugar. I tried honey water and really don't recommend it. One sip and the whole batch ended up down the drain.  

Kefir has a fairly bizzare and interesting history stretching back at least a few thousand years that includes princes, magic, beautiful communists, and kidnapping. 

If you ever get the opportunity to get some kefir grains, or are anywhere near Fukuyama and would like a few of mine, be sure to take them. There is actually an international exchange where you can obtain starter grains wherever you are in the world. It is an easy, tasty, and healthy experiment and lots of fun to prepare! 

Rodents of Unusual Size

One critter that we see fairly often on our bike rides is the nutria, or coypu (Myocastor coypus). They seem to be everywhere in the canals and in the Ashida River that flows through the city. As you can see from this shot of one I took this weekend, they are a semi-aquatic rodent are about the same size as a beaver but with a long, rat-like tail.

I am surprised this one let me get so close

Originally from South America, they have been introduced to every continent except for Antarctica and Australia for their fur. Nutria were introduced to Japan in 1910 and the military promoted small fur farms to raise nutria. When the price of the pelts dropped, many nutria were released into the wild where they happily procreated, due to a lack of natural predators and lots of prime habitat. Since 1963, nutria have been hunted in Japan to control their ballooning population. When looking for population counts in Japan, I discovered that Okayama has the highest number of nutria in the country. It is about 9.5 kilometers from our apartment to the border of Okayama Prefecture, so it makes sense that I see them so often.

Super cute baby nutria

The foraging and nesting habits of the nutria have an incredibly detrimental effect on the health of wetlands and water systems in the countries in which they are introduced. They destroy nesting habitat for native species and cause massive soil erosion by eating marsh plants and burrowing through root systems. Places like Louisiana (are you surprised?) have created a 5$ bounty for every nutria shot in an attempt to decrease their population. Some countries are even trying to popularize the sale of nutria meat for human consumption. The meat has euphemistically been named "ragondin", the French word for nutria, and has been found to be much leaner, higher in protein, and lower in harmful microorganisms compared with farmed conventional meats. If you ever manage to get your hands on some ragondin, there are lots of recipes out there that will help you make the most of it.

Shooting them for fur, meat, or even a 5$ bounty may seem cruel, but in many of the countries to which they have been introduced, humans are the only predator able to lower their populations. The wetlands they are destroying are incredibly complex and fragile habitats which play a critical role in maintaining water quality and species richness. In many countries, hunting, whether done by individuals or the government, is one of the few viable options for controlling their population. I say, if you are going to shoot it anyway, why let it go to waste?