BEE Japan

A brief explanatory introduction:

This blog post is fictional, based on an idea that stemmed from our inspiring experiences at Fuji Eco-Park.

Mercedes is Amiena`s mom. We`ve all heard many wonderful stories about her mettle and spunk – and we get to see it in Amiena every day – but none of us have met her, though we`re sure looking forward to it!

Mercedes didn`t know what hit her. One day she and the small dog were living peacefully together in their Sewickley, Pennsylvania farmhouse, gazing out on the green grass growing in springtime and the leaves tumbling down off the trees in fall, and the next day – well, like I said, she didn`t know what hit her.

For that was the day that the BEE team moved in, took over the farmhouse, and began converting 15 acres of hilly Pennsylvania bush and brush into the most impressive display of organic and sustainable agriculture and lifestyle founded on permaculture principles that anyone, especially Mercedes, had ever seen. In fact, Mercedes really wasn`t quite sure what permaculture meant, except that her life and her land were permanently upturned by this group of crazy kids.

Now, the question is, how did the BEE team go from cycling to words ending in -culture? When did they stop bicycling down the roads of Japan and start bicycling in the living room – bicycling on a stationary bike to run the TV, the iPod, the computer…. Bicycling outside the kitchen window on a bike attached to a contraption that powered a pump that cycled (ha ha) water through a series of ponds and platforms and who-knows-what-else that somehow both cleaned the water and distributed it to a variety of different plants and fishes? (The fishies, of course, were, huh-hum, never, uh, eaten).

The team members weren`t only bicycling; they were building too. First priority, most definitely, was the outdoor hot tub. Their muscles were somehow incredibly sore every day – or perhaps they just couldn`t accept that they were no longer in Japan, with magical onsens on every corner. The water in the tub was, naturally, heated by the sun, and then the warm water, which, of its own accord, tended to rise, flowed upwards through pipes into the tub. The cool water, which sank, flowed out the bottom of the tub back into the tank, where it was re-warmed by the sun and found its way back to the top of the tub again…(slightly reminiscent of the itsy-bitsy spider). After the tub they realized that a house might be a good idea, and that their muscles perhaps could recover better in beds than on therma-rests in tents. The house they built utilized a variety of different kinds of natural insulation – rice husks, straw, paper pulp, and recycled sheep`s wool. All the electricity came from solar panels which were connected to batteries that could store enough power to keep the lights on and the water warm for up to five days. The toilets were a fancy version of the composting wood-chip kind, which is really too complicated to explain here, but Mercedes sure liked the smell of cedar chips every time she walked into the bathroom.

While some people were hammering and pounding and stuffing walls full of good wool that Mercedes would happily have knitted into a warm sweater on one of those chilly fall afternoons, others were digging in the dirt and constructing all kinds of odd-shaped planters that there was apparently some kind of magic mystery to. The spiral gardens rose up layer by layer like twisted wedding cakes, creating microclimates of shade and sunlight so plants that required different growing conditions could grow together in a small space. The secret center of the keyhole gardens made great hiding places for the grandkids while simultaneously allowing the caretaker (that`s a euphemism for whoever got stuck doing weeding) easy access to all of the plants, and the whole shape allowed plants that offered each other mutual benefits to all get the most of the deal. The BEE team couldn`t quite explain how that worked – or more like they couldn`t come to a consensus about the explanation, but each person offered his or her own personal idea about how it worked. While I`d like to say that Mercedes put together the different thoughts and found that they actually congealed into a somewhat coherent concept, I regret to inform you that she`s still being spun around in circles.

But that`s okay, so are the sheep. Yes, I said it, sheep. Where else could we get enough wool to fill the walls of a house big enough for six active people who all need personal space? Contrary to popular Scottish opinion, however, sheep are good for more than just producing wool (we won`t even discuss the meat part here). You see, if you fence in a big circle of yard and divide it into three parts, and you call one part spring and one part summer and one part autumn, and you make a little spinning wheel like the kind your mom had for chores when you were a kid, you can work out a little system where the sheep do something different in every season. In springtime, you put the sheep in the part called spring, and they trod up the ground with their feet while dumping their nutritious little sheep droppings and make the earth perfect for planting. In summer stuff grows on that nice fertile ground, and then in autumn the sheep come back and eat the leftovers of the plants, mix up the dirt and compost with their nice little hooves, and voila, it`s spring again! Oh, oops, I forgot winter. That`s when you try to make sure the sheep don`t die.

Okay, this is turning into a really long story. There`s just one last part that`s really important. That was the surprise that Mercedes got…. Every member of the team had to offer some profound and proliferate apologies for slightly mispronouncing a particular word with (almost) tragic effects. We were showing Mercedes around the farm one day – really just as an opportunity to show off all the amazing things we thought we were doing – and we asked her if she wanted to see the warm compost house. At least that`s how Mercedes understood it. She happily followed us into the little glass-and-wood gazebo, but when Emi lifted the lid of the bin…. Well, that`s when she realized we`d been saying `worm`, not `warm`, and she fainted.

Thankfully, Mercedes is a fairly tough woman, and she recovered nicely. These days she even occasionally goes out to check on the worms and have a little chat to them.

All in all, we have to say that we think we`ve become the heroes of Masa-san of Fuji Eco-Park, in the same way that he feels like the hero of the woman who first planted the idea of creating a sustainable mini-eco-village in his mind. Inspired by his fascinating little farm sitting in the shadow of Mt. Fuji (unfortunately the one aspect that we couldn`t reproduce in Sewickley), we took everything that we learned in a couple hours one afternoon in September and did our best to bring it alive in Pennsylvania. Come visit when you get the chance!