Author: admin

My grandfather (ca. 1884-1956) was the youngest of eight sons born to a general in the German Reich’s army. He had fled Germany alone just before World War I. In his early 40’s he married my grandmother who was 18 and in 1933 my father, was born. In 1938 they purchased the farm I grew up on in northwest Oregon. My father lived on that farm all his life. When he was a child he would ride the draft horses that pulled a plow while his father walked behind.

My father did not like horses. When he was a teenager he bought a used Ford 9N tractor that we still have today. I grew up driving that tractor from before I was ten years old. My dad bought a single-bottom plow and some other implements for preparing the yearly gardens and my mother taught us how to plant seeds.

Our soil was a hard, lumpy and predominantly clay. Dad’s plow was a shiny curved steel blade that could lift the top 12 inches of soil and turn it upside down. This left massive chunks of shiny brown sheets of dirt that had to be broken up with a small walk-behind gasoline-powered rototiller. I hated tilling the garden with that rototiller. It was hard to control while it bucked and tipped from side to side. It always tried to climb up out of the furrow and run across the top of the ground without chewing anything up.

On the other side of town my mother’s cousin had a Troy-Bilt rototiller with rear tines. It was vastly more cooperative. His soil was a fine predominantly silty soil. He had a greenhouse and a green thumb. Everything he touched grew and flourished. Our chunky clay dirt clods managed to grow squash, carrots, corn, radishes, beans and other vegetables, but not like the gardens on the other side of town. I wanted dirt like they had. I was vaguely aware of descriptive soil vocabulary such as clay, silt and sand but mainly there was “good dirt” and “bad dirt.”

Each year we spread animal manure on the ground before tilling. We had sheep, goats, cows, rabbits and horses. My daily chores included feeding all the animals and milking the goats. Periodically I had to remove the manure from the various barns. It stank and I didn’t like work. The only animal I appreciated was my horse. He was mostly American Quarter Horse with some Morgan mix. Morgans are draft horses so he was a huge 1400 pounds, had a strong thick neck and stood 17 hands tall. He loved to buck me off but riding was all pleasure and my time in the 4-H Horse Club generated some of my best memories. More than 40 years later, in Tokyo, I am becoming keenly aware of how little I ever knew about the living “dirt” that supports our lives, and I hope readers here will join me on my journey of discovery.

Worm herds, that is. I grew up on a farm in the 60’s. I enjoyed countless hours riding horseback in the surrounding mountains, but I dreamed of living in the city where the streets were paved. Skateboards just don’t roll on gravel roads. 50 years later I find myself living in Tokyo, but skateboards have changed.

My migration to the city has been convoluted. I spent four years attending an agricultural high school on a 360-acre farm in southern Utah followed by four more years on a 100-acre farm in the mountains of Okinawa where I became fluent in Japanese. My father was a machinist and automotive technician and I had always gravitated to the machinery aspects of agriculture. So back in the US I spent a decade in autobody repair, and then 15 years in IT (computer and network support). I started college at age 29 and spent the next 29 years earning a double-major B.A. in Applied Linguistics and Japanese. Some years before finishing my degree at Portland State University I made my way back to Japan, working as a linguist at a medical university. I have no intention of ever returning to agriculture, at least not as a farmer.

I love crowded streets and trains. I try to imagine where all those people come from and wish I could get to know more of them. I am fortunate to have two homes. Part of the time I live just 3 minutes’ walk from one of Tokyo’s busy train stations in high density jungle of concrete hi-rise apartment towers, but most of the time I choose to stay in my country home just a minute’s walk from rice paddies where frogs sing in loud choruses at night. In the city I wonder how all those people will find food if the economy collapses, and in the countryside I am surrounded by small-scale farms, mostly run by very old people. I feel more secure around farmers and feel more at ease surrounded by farms and gardens. This has driven me over the last several years to look for a way to contribute something directly to the farmers near me and to Japanese agriculture and food security in general. Then along came the new SARS-COV2 corona virus. The pandemic spurred me into action. When the local organic gardener complained that everyone should be growing their own vegetables, another voice told me there are many people like me who simply can’t or don’t want to grow vegetables, but who would be happy to contribute soil they’ve built using their kitchen scraps, composters and worm herds. Since then I have spent countless hours reading books and articles on vermiculture, searching the web, watching videos, planning, and generally attempting to accelerate my vermiculture learning process by coupling my acquisition of theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience. In May of 2020 I set up more than 10 herds of redworms in various types of environments and am practicing everything I already know about the husbandry of redworms while continuing to read. In this series I will keep you posted.