Our Farm

Solar Cafe & Farm’s Mt Fuji White Eggplant! mmm…..

Companion planting, white eggplant and basils

Our stage, ready and waiting.

The warm weather on Mt Fuji has us getting ready for a busy summer season at the Solar Cafe. The event space is available for rental. Contact us for bookings.

Organic Mint Chocolate Strawberry Tofu Cheesecake!!!

New on the Solar Cafe menu….this cake is made with organic mint and strawberries grown on our own farm, and fair trade organic 100% cocoa powder from Alishan. The “cheese” cake is made with tofu instead of cheese, so it is waaaay healthy too!

Companion Plants. Our salad lettuce and carrots together again!

Companion Planting; Organic Rice, Wheat and Soy Beans

We planted our first rice paddy today! The organic rice “ine” (seedlings) are especially adapted to thrive with the cold weather we have been having this year. We planted about 125 tsubo (410m2) which should yield about 200kg of rice come harvest time in November. Seven Earth Embassy farm staff and interns did this in about 2 hrs. Thats 100kg an hour! We also helped local farmer Hirata-san plant soy beans in between rows of wheat, which will help control weeds and fix nitrogen in the soil as a fertilizer. Looking forward to home-made bread, beans and rice come fall. Hope you can join us for a meal.

Our Fruits are almost Ripe ALREADY!!!!

Despite a chilly spring, all of our fruits and berries are already coming! The strawberries will be ripe within the week, the blueberries are getting some size to them, and the peaches are already starting to get a little yellow around the edges. It is going to be an amazing year for pies and shakes at the Solar Cafe. We also just perfected the recipe for our own HOME-MADE graham cracker crusts ( we make them from scratch with organic graham flour!) But come early and come often, because good homemade pie waits for no man, woman or beast!

Solar Cafe’s Spiral Kitchen Garden, fresh for the pot!!!

The treehouse

Basil and Rasberry canes in pots, open for business….

Wild Strawberries and Wild Dogs

These strawberries are actually a man-made variety that has grown wild in our home garden. They have been unattended for over 10 years, but are still growing strong, complete natural farming. We simply go in once a year and pull out some of the weeds around them. Even our animals help! Nora-chan, a wild dog from the village who adopted us last year, loves eating grass and was a big help with the weeds. The before and after pictures show the strawberries with a few weeds pulled out to let in the sunlight, and then piled along side for mulch.

Mulch, the Organic Farmer’s best friend.

The biggest challenges farming organically are bugs and weeds, and resisting the temptation to use chemicals. At the Earth Embassy, our basic method for weed control is mulch, mulch, mulch. The beauty of mulch is:
1) it can be harvested locally. We use fallen leaves from the forest and the trimmings from the grass and clover that line our fields.
2) it holds moisture and warmth in the soil by reducing evaporation, and thus limits our need for watering.
3) weeds dont like it! According to Robert’s professor at Cobelskill, you need mulch at least 3-5 inches (7-12cm) deep to keep the weed from sprouting.
4) as the mulch breaks down, it becomes fertilizer for the crops.

In this picture we have cleared and mulched fields ready for planting.

Some of our new staff this summer.

Robert Martin is a plant science major in his final year at  SUNY Cobleskill University in New York.  He has joined us for a 3 month internship.   Seigo Ota is a local Yamanashi boy whose family has a beef ranch nearby.  He is our new full-time handy man and helping around the farm as well as building projects at the Solar Cafe.   In this picture they are preparing the beds for our potato planting.  Welcome fellas and thanks for all your hard work!

The bears are doing fine!!!

With all the doom and gloom we hear in the news about CO2, climate change, resource depletion, etc etc, it is easy to think we are at the end of nature.  But once in awhile a small sign reminds us that nature is still doing ok and may come out the other side of this mess ok.

Bears were hunted nearly to extinction in Japan and still remain a rare sight.  But even when you dont see them, they may be watching you.  This claw mark was in a tree about 200m above one our cabins at Lake Saiko.    Glad the bears are still there, but hoping they do see me first, and give me a wide berth.

Mint Tea Packaging Crew

The wonderful people at Oguri Noen in Shizuoka are processing our mint and packing it into tea bags.  The tea farm was started by Mr. Oguri’s father nearly 40years ago and has expanded to become the main packaging operation for all the local green tea farms.  Their high-tech clean room facility and extreme attention to detail ensure the utmost care is given to cleanly and safely packaging our tea.

We also will be working with their blending master this year to develop a few new flavors for our line of Mt Fuji Natural Teas.  Check back with us in the summer for new tastes and herbal medicinal teas!!!

Rueben

Our dearest and oldest friend, Rueben the sheep, passed away on Nov 29th, 2009.

He was one of the original founders of the  Earth Embassy way back in 2000 and saw it through the good times and the bad.  Rueben appeared on Japanese TV numerous times, starting with a cameo on MTV and eventually having his own 30minute New Years Special that was seen by 6 million viewers.  None of it went to his head and remained humble and sweet all of his long years.

Rueben made friends from around the world, and always ran over to greet new visitors. He was happy in his field with his girl Eva until his last day and died peacefully in his sleep.   He will be dearly missed.

Farm life with wild roses….

What can I say.  Some days you pick roses, and some days they pick you….

I was checking out a new piece of land next to our mint field, thinking of cutting back the wild brush and planting in the spring.  But the wild roses growing there seem not to want to go without a fight.  If we do plant it, I think we will leave those rose bushes for the birds to feed on and content ourselves with a few rose hips in fall.

virutal farming is BIG!!! ….Farmville

For those of you using Facebook, I suggest you check out the Farmville game. It is simple but addicting, plow your fields, plant some crops, harvest, sell and make money to buy more seeds, cheap pink flamingos, etc.  The coolest feature for me is that you can visit friend’s farms and see what they are planting.  It gives you a big insight into their character.  Alex who is currently out of work (in real life) has planted cash crops from egde to edge. Yoko has 2 boys (in real life) and lots of playthings spread around the farm.  Janel likes to win (in real life) and her farm is huge with an enormous plantation house in the middle.  Mine is permaculture based of course….

Yes, its just another game, but we have actually had visitor come to our farm on Mt Fuji all the way from Singapore because their son had gotten interested in farming through playing Farmville!  The huge popularity of this game is evidence that we humans are all farmers at heart.  The numbers as of Dec, 2009…. “69 million active users are using FarmVille alone, that’s more users than Twitter.”

I think this is a trend we shouldnt ignore. What if we set up a bunch of real mini farms with web-cams attached for people to plant their own crops and be able to watch them grow for real online?  We could build the farms next to the orphanages we support in Africa and the Philippines and have the kids maintain the crops!  If we got 1/10th of 1% of the Farmville  players to pay $10 to rent a lot and plant their own seeds, that’s $69,000 to start a little farm somewhere.  Then again that is 6900 webcams we need to set-up…..

Any ideas?  Let me know if anyone wants to talk about starting something….jreiner@earthembassy.org

Chestnut Harvest

The wild chestnut trees were just babies sprung from seeds carried by the crows when we first started farming the land on the edge of Aokigahara Forest. Now 15 feet tall they provided us with a months worth of chestnut cake, chestnut rice, and of course roasting on an open fire. And those are just the ones that the deer left for us.

Fall Colors

Our fields are fading to brown and we are picking the last eggplants and tomatoes of the season from our greenhouse. Even though the nights are going below freezing, our greenhouse still gets up to 30degrees C during the day and this is the latest into winter we have ever been still eating fresh food. We also harvesting lots of organic seeds for next springs planting. Out in the fields the broccoli, cabbage, parsley and carrots are still holding on. They arent getting any bigger, but a little walk everyday at sunset to harvest a big pot for dinner is saving us that trip to town and shopping.

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