A German composter, and other useful ideas

I wanted to write about a German Composter. If you didn't read carefully, you might be expecting Brahms or Beethoven, but they are composers. Actually they were composers. Now they are de-composers. You probably wouldn't want them in your compost anyway.

Here are the results from some more weeding of my email drafts box.

Materials for making raised beds...
http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16676705/list/8-Materials-for-Raised-Garden-Beds

...how to make them...
http://www.wikihow.com/Construct-a-Raised-Planting-Bed

...and please avoid treated wood
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to-plans/lawn-garden/4308264#slide-1

Self watering planters
http://www.verticalveg.org.uk/containers-with-water-reservoirs/

Drip irrigation
http://eartheasy.com/grow_drip-irrigation.htm

Drip irrigation design guidelines
http://www.irrigationtutorials.com/dripguide.htm

And here's an instructable
http://www.instructables.com/id/Rainwater-drip-irrigation-system/

And another recipe here
http://thewrinkleddollar.com/garden/drip-irrigation.html

You can use drip irrigation on your lawn
http://homeguides.sfgate.com/can-use-drip-irrigation-system-lawn-area-70912.html

But you need to make a lawn first
http://uktv.co.uk/home/stepbystep/aid/65

Choose which grasses to use
http://www.gardenplace.com/content/calculator/seeds.html

Or you could even think about alternatives to grass
https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/grass-free-lawns/rethinking-the-traditional-grass-lawn/

Then you'll need to mow the lawn
http://item.rakuten.co.jp/tuzukiya/ryobi-pab-1610?scid=rm_198680

This ain't gardening, this is herbicide
http://www.permacultureorchard.com/the-farm/

Here is the German Composter. Available on Amazon. We ended up getting a Japanese one that is black. 

And by the way, the picture at the top was James Watt, a Scottish inventor.

Harvesting Rainwater

Here is a list of municipalities in Nagano prefecture that offer financial incentives to have rainwater tanks (in Japanese; no guarantee that it's up to date and I can't remember where I found it):

市町村	指定タンク	助成金額	担当部署連絡先
長野市	100リットル以上500リットル未満	費用の半額 25000円	長野市河川課 026-224-5046
	500リットル以上	費用の半額 50000円
安曇野市	100リットル以上500リットル未満	費用の半額 25000円	市民環境部環境課 0263-82-3131
	500リットル以上	費用の半額 50000円
飯田市	100リットル以上500リットル未満	費用の半額 25000円	地球温暖化対策課 地球温暖化対策係 0265-22-4511
	500リットル以上	費用の半額 50000円
上田市	100リットル以上500リットル未満	費用の半額 30000円	市民生活部生活環境課 0268-23-5120
	500リットル以上	費用の半額 50000円

It had to be yew

We finally got a yew hedge planted a couple of years ago, and I recently thinned them out, with the hope they will grow more like a hedge and less like a row of trees.

Just like the cut branches strewn on the ground, here are some links to websites about planting, growing and trimming yew.

Ashridge Trees.co.uk: How to plant yew hedges

Ashridge Trees.co.uk: Pruning yew hedge plants

Shumi no engei - (in Japanese)

Caring for Japanese yew

University of Arizona: Pruning hedges

University of New Hampshire: Pruning evergreens in the landscape

Turf laid... Time to get a lawn mower

Lawns are not really a big thing in Japan, so the lawn mower culture is very different. I remember lawn mowing in England as a childhood chore. First we used an old petrol-engine Mountfield that collected the clippings in a case at the back. I have bitter memories of lugging it around the lawn, and later trying to clean all the grass crud that had accumulated in the nooks and crannies. Next we got a Flymo that cut the grass as it hoovered around the lawn.

We also had one of those manual cutters that had no engine and relied on you pushing to spin the blades around. This didn't seem to cut the grass and we never used it.

I thought these would be long obsolete, but they sell them in Japan. Not so much as a cheaper option for the lawn-owning poor (who do not exist) or the congenitally tight-fisted. The tag line is that these lawn mowers are quieter, so they won't disturb the neighbours.

They also have these:

Honda Demonstrates Robotic Lawn Mower - WSJ

I can think of many things that would hinder the robot on its path. 

Another amphibian

We get loads of frogs in the garden. Then recently I saw this chap.

​

My son told me about him. "He's my pet," he said.

"Oh, what's his name?" I asked.

"Tiny."

"Why do you call him Tiny?"

"Because he's my newt!"

A Japanese fire bellied newt, I think. 

Free trees

When we built the house, the city offered us two free trees. If we'd got the application straight in, there was a chance we could have had them in March 2012, a couple of months later, but the deadline was the end of January so we had to be quick. We weren't quick, and a year later we missed the deadline, again, so it's only now that the trees have arrived. 

There were several choices, with translations below.

Sarusuberi Lagerstroemia Indica or Crepe Myrtle

Grows to 6 metres. Flowers in August.

Originally from China.

When I hear this name I always think it must be a transliteration of Salzberry, which of course does not exist. Saru means "monkey" and suberi means "slide" so it is a tree which monkeys slide down.

Hanamizuki  Benthamidia Florida, Flowering Dogwood

Grows up to 10 metres. Flowers from the end of April.

From Eastern US. Apparently the state flower of Virginia. 

Hana means "nose" and mizu means "water", so hanamizu usually refers to the liquid that runs from your nose. Not an immediately appealing name for a tree. I'm sure that's not what it means.

Shidekobushi Magnolia Stellata or Star Magnolia.

So that's what a magnolia is! I didn't know that. Heard the word loads of times and always wondered. 

Flowers late winter before the leaves come out. Grows to 5 or 6 metres in height.

This species is native to Japan.

Akamatsu Pinus Densiflora or Red Pine.  

That's a literal translation. Japanese Red Pine is a more natural translation. Or Korean Red Pine. Grows 20-35 metres.

Renge tsutsuji  Rhodedendron Molle subspecies Japonicum

I never knew "tsutsuji" was Rhodedendron! 

Grows 1-2 metres and flowers April to June. Since they are small we get two of these for one of the others.

Chishio kaede  ?

Seems to be a very local species of maple. Also known in Japanese as momiji. Also known in English as acer. Maybe acer is kaede and maple is momiji. My first guess was that etymologically speaking, the acer is Latin, and Kaede is the Japanese reading of the Chinese character. Without going into too many details, there are semantic similarities between words of Latin origin in English and words of Chinese origin in Japanese. Maple is English, while momiji seems to be Japanese, meaning "red leaves", although in some different dialect, as "red" is usually aka and "leaf" is ha. 

As usual, my first guess is largely wrong. Kaede, while written with a single Chinese character, is also Japanese, meaning "changing hand" from kaeru "change" and te "hand". I guess the leaves look like hands. Momiji is a more general word for changing colour, and applies to a whole host of things from vines to deer meat.

Apparently there are around 130 species of maple, mostly trees growing 10-45 metres high, but some shrubs. 

The Japanese maple, Acer Palmatum, grows 6-10 metres high and has 1,000 cultivars. Presumably the chishio kaede is one of these. chi means "blood" and shio means "salt" and in this case it does mean "blood and salt". When I googled it, most of the hits mentioned Matsumoto City, so it's clearly a very local species, or at least a local name.

There was a maple in the garden in the last house, and we brought a few of its baby seedlings, but none of them survived the short journey, or my clumsy gardening. 

In the end we chose one Hanamizuki and one Chishio Kaede. Now they've arrived we need to decide where to plant them quickly. 

The old, the random and the ugly

I walked to work on one of those those beautiful spring days where it's summer in the sun and winter in the shade. It's four kilometres each way, which gives me plenty of opportunity to look at walls and fences. We need one for the boundary along one side of our house with the new neighbours and their new house.

The words "wall" and "fence" have slightly different meanings between Englsih and Japanese, being defined more by material in the former and function in the latter. Kabe is a wall of a house or building, while hei is a standalone fence or wall. The English words seem to be distinguished depending on whether they are made of wood or stone, although of course you can have a wooden wall. The Great Wall of China is called the ten-thousand-mile castle in Japanese, and probably Chinese too, but I digress.

I live to the West of the city centre, and work to the North, and walked two different routes through residential areas. The whole time I was looking out for inspiration and fences or walls that would look good for us.

I found none. 

The walls I saw break down into three groups: traditional, random and ugly. A lot of the traditional walls and fences looked really good, but would not suit our house. There were walls of beautiful stone, and fences of dark wood with tiled roofs running along the top. 

Actually most of the traditional walls didn't look that great. They would better fit into the random or ugly categories. A lot of them were all three. There seems to be a tendency to throw up anything without worrying about those details like function or appearance, or even cost. Some of them looked really expensive, but they would stop short of whole perimeters or even sensible spans. Walls with posts at the end but no gates between making you wonder whether they are there to actually do anything, or just look like a large receipt for materials and building services.

Many of the old wooden fences were rotting or splintering and in need of repair. Even when they were new, you could see that in a few years they are going to look terrible. Short-term cosmetic additions to a short-term and cosmetic building.

In many cases walls and fences had been patched together, not matching the building behind or anything on either side whether on the same plot or next door. Where a low wall had a fence fitted on top of it, the fence had often been replaced by something entirely incongruous with the surroundings. I guessed that a wooden fence had been neglected for years, then replaced with aluminium.

There was a lot of aluminium. Maybe it's a sensible thing to make fences from, as it's relatively cheap, strong and light, and allows gaps where wind could blow through rather than adding pressure to the wall. In several places I saw louvred aluminium, which I'm sure must have some useful function, but I can't really imagine it. Perhaps it lets in light and heat in the winter but not the summer. At least it would do that if aligned in the right direction, but it didn't seem to be very often.

And there was even more wire mesh. I suppose there's nothing wrong with wire mesh, if you have a car park or a tennis court, or if you keep fierce dogs. 

Once I saw a wall made of concrete blocks that had been painted in a thick red paint that was peeling off in several places. 

The most annoying materials for me were imitation brick walls, obviously imitation because the bricks are cut off at the edge of each block so the natural pattern of overlapping bricks is broken. 

The most pleasing boundaries were hedges and a few had tasteful herbaceous borders.

I suppose, following Edison's philosophy, it was worthwhile as I now know a couple of thousand things that I don't want.

A composition

Composting seems to be a good idea in general. My dad was always a keen composter and we grew up with a couple of the classic square frame designs made from interlocking planks that would grow up as we emptied lawn mowings and things into it, and the other one would shrink as compost was used around the garden. We were all trained, so that if ever we ate melon, we had to cut up the skins into small peices so they would break down more quickly. We took turns taking out the compost bin from the kitchen.  

At one point I was going to do an A-level project harnessing the energy of compost to make hot water. I think it was going to use a heat pump, although I ended up dropping that A-level in favour of more academic ones so I could get into a university engineering degree. A tragedy.

If you're living in an apartment it may not be very practical to compost your kitchen waste, but with a garden, producing it's own variety of foliage and requiring fertilization, composting seems like a good idea in our specific case too. Although over seven different kinds of rubbish are collected here, and burnable rubbish is used at an efficient incinerator that heats a swimming pool and spa, composting seems more sensible than putting garden waste into plastic bags to be driven away by a truck.

The garden behind the new house was getting a bit overgrown with weeds, so it seemed like a good idea to start composting now, so that when we start our garden in earnest next spring we'll have something to help our plants grow.

The first composter I made was an old bin with a broken bottom. I sawed the bottom off, and drilled holes every ten centimetres or so up the sides. This filled up very quickly and the pile of weeds next to it began to grow, so a larger scale solution was necessary.

I decided on a hexagonal version of the classic interlocking plank design. I'm sure there were many reasons for this, but I'm not entirely sure of a good reason. Perhaps you can think of one.

The hexagon has a slightly larger ratio of area to circumference than a square. This means that for a given amount of materials, you get a larger volume of compost. Nature's solution--the circle--has the highest possible ratio, which is why so many things are cylindrical or spherical. As well as being the most efficient use of materials, the corresponding lower surface area to volume means that round things end up with lower heat loss. This may be a factor in compost heap design as the heat they generate speeds up the work of the bacteria.

The difference between squares and hexagons is pretty tiny, barely significant in fact, at less than 10%. 

Ignoring the widths of the walls, the ratio of unit area to circumference for a square is 1/4, or 0.25; 

for a hexagon it is 1/2√(2√3), around 0.27;

for a circle it is  1/2√pi, around 0.28.

And all the materials I used were offcuts and discarded packaging materials from the house, so didn't cost me anything. The only materials I did buy, in fact, were screws, and the hexagon uses more of these than the square. Also the hexagon involves more work as each layer has six, rather than four components, each needing work on each end. The work itself is also more complicated for the hexagon, involving angles of 60 degrees rather than right angles.

So the hexagon, while theoretical a more efficient shape in terms of material use, in fact cost more in terms of materials, and took more work of a more complicated nature to make. 

But time is free if you're having fun. 

The hexagon may be a little more stable than the square, and there's something aesthetically pleasing about the hexagonal shape. 

You can see how each part was constructed below. One of the major revelations for me was the power of power tools. I started off with a hand saw, and a hammer and nails. The carpenter let me borrow his power saw at one point, which he set to cut fixed lengths with ends at 60 degrees. This was quicker and easier. In view of the strange angle at the ends, the nails were not working so well, and on the carpenter's advice I started using screws. I also used my electric drill with a screwdriver bit. I've never done any serious amounts of woodwork, and only ever used a regular screwdriver, but the difference in speed was amazing.