Alex Howell

So the horsetails have started popping up here (Equisetum arvense), and I'm looking forward to a good harvest this year!

I've read conflicting information online about the best time to harvest, but that's likely as people are harvesting them for both culinary and medicinal reasons, so was wondering if anyone here had any insights.

I'm mainly looking to harvest them for medicinal reasons, so any advice here would be greatly appreciated.

So far I've heard:

If the strobil (initial fertile shoots) are sporing then they've already lost their medicinal potency.
Harvest the strobil, cut off the heads and peel them before eating.
Leave the vegetative until late spring to ensure maximum growth before harvest.
Harvest the young vegetative shoots before they branch out.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Has anyone ever asked one of these LLMs for information and had it just say "I don't know" or something to that effect? I haven't had that happen, which seems kind of weird.

If you catch them in a lie and call them out on it then they will admit fault and admit that they didn't know the answer.

There are LLMs which will document their thought process as they draft their responses. They will often say during the thinking stage: "can't find relevant information for this query", but then will still provide you with an answer which is posed as objective truth anyhow.

At least if you can see the "logic" behind the response it's easier to make an informed decision on whether to trust it or not.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:
there is more to AI than LLM's. Outside of the current hype, it seems there are small AI's in radiology, astronomy, chemistry, being trained specifically on hard and proven scientific data. The analyzing potential is astonishing; and I suspect these are the AI models that will matter to us all.

Totally agree with you here. As with all tools it depends on how they're used, and the expectations you have for them.

You wouldn't call an axe useless because it isn't good for digging holes.

If you ever want to lose faith in AI, just ask it questions about things you're a specialist in...

LLMs scrape answers for your questions from places like Quora, Reddit, Wikihow, etc. then make a bunch of assumptions to fill in the rest of the information that they can't find, but because it's "superhuman intelligence" people will take those suppositions for fact and act on them as such.

There are extremes of this issue where people develop "Chatbot psychosis" after being gaslit by their AI into believing they are destined to save the world, etc. Ultimately it will feed you answers that will keep you spending tokens.

If you are looking for a place for forums to co-exist with AI, you can always treat forum communities as a second opinion.

Anne Miller wrote:Do you have a way to get leaves?  Here in the US it is easy to find bagged leaves on the curb in the fall.

A lot of folks have routes where they pick up coffee grounds from coffee shops and veggie scrapes from restaurants.  

These all make great compost.

Leaves are a funny one, I suppose it probably depends on what part of Japan you live in, but my prefecture leans towards mainly planting pines, cedars and other evergreens... Bagged leaves are therefore pretty rare, but around this time of year I can pick up an almost unlimited amount of freshly pruned branches. My only qualm with doing this is that I have no idea if they've been sprayed... I used to pick up lots and chip them for mulch, but more recently have started feeling paranoid about the unknown gick.

Coffee grounds I get a large amount from my work which is nice. I buy beans for the office and know that they're organic, so have no issues with using used grounds.

Veggie scraps I hadn't thought of! I know for certain that supermarkets throw away large amounts of cabbage leaves every day (people tend to peel off the top leaf or two when they buy them), I can imagine that making great mulch!

Just pitching in because this thread suddenly got revived.

Mk Neal wrote:My instinct is to steer away from proving a treatment worked, and focus on proving a widely accepted, approved treatment was administered, or perhaps grown/preserved. I think this would be on par with the effort required for many other lower level BB's.

I also agree with this. Seeking proof of something being the direct cause of recovery is something which even modern medicine struggles with. Broken bones will eventually heal, so who's to say whether the comfrey poultice actually helped?

Preparation and administration being separate BB tasks certainly seems like a good move to me.

Hey Everyone,

I wanted to make this forum to make a log of places where I inquired about receiving things that would otherwise be thrown away in Japan, and my successes and failures for any Japanese Permies who might need to find similar things in future. I will continue to update the thread as time goes on and I locate more things.

If there's anyone with advice for me also, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Furniture:

Picking up free furniture really isn't hard in Japan, especially if you like the older, Japanese style. Most young people don't want it, so copious amounts end up on sites like jmty (Japanese craigslist) for free providing you are willing to collect.

Wooden Pallets:

A staple of the up-cycling world, pallets was one of the very first things I went looking for... But so far I've not had much luck! So far I've managed to locate 3 and build a single compost bin, but preferably I'd like to find a lot more...

Hardware Stores:
DCM: I asked, but all their pallets are rentals and get reclaimed by the shipping company they work with.
Komeri: The locations I've visited only have domestic wooden pallets (unmarked with no stamps, but likely untreated wood), and plastic pallets for international shipping... I haven't asked them for any yet because I'm really looking for a solid source of marked HT pallets.

Shipping Companies like Yamato are my next target, I always see large amounts of pallets stacked outside their offices, and by the looks of the ones at the bottom of the pile, they're not intended for re-use.


Woodchips

Municipalities will often do river clear-ups and chip down driftwood into big piles for collection. Sometimes they just leave them as logs also. There's often other stuff they found in the river mixed in... So I don't know if I would personally recommend this for use as mulch.

If you become friends with a carpenter they'll give you all the mill ends you could possibly want, disposing of things in Japan is expensive and generally speaking people are more than happy to get rid of stuff for free. Wood shavings are often incinerated on-site also. If it's a carpenter that only works with kiln dried wood then you can be pretty sure that your supply will be gick free.

I haven't had responses from arborists regarding woodchips, but I get the impression that most people don't own chippers like they do overseas... There are often large piles of green waste left out on burnable rubbish collection days, and the prefectural waste plant owns enormous chippers to process all of it. I've inquired with them to see if I can collect woodchips, but no responses yet.

Manure:

I'm lucky enough to live near an amusement park that does pony rides for kids. The rancher owns 4 horses that produce about 100kg of manure a week. A farm near me takes all of it from him, but there's about 3 years worth piled up in their storehouse (and consistent weekly deliveries), so they've kindly said I can take as much as I want.

90 Gallon Drums:

No such luck yet. Any I can find were previously used for holding agricultural chemicals/have unknown history. I'd like to find food-grade ones, so the hunt continues here. I'd likely have more luck inquiring with small restaurant owners...

IBC Totes

They seem easy enough to purchase for around 10,000 yen (60 or so USD), but their history is generally unknown by the scrapyards which have them. Again, I'd like to find ones that haven't been used for petrol or chemicals... Maybe I'm overthinking it and a good wash would sort them out?

Tereza Okava wrote:I have two "hand scythes" from Japan (kama)

I have a few of these in various shapes and they're very useful! It's often translated as scythe, but I definitely see that as sickles in terms of usage...

I did actually find a Japanese blacksmith who's prototype made one here, but he said that he'd need a group order of around 10+ to justify making more... Who knows how much he'd want to charge for them also...

Hugo Morvan wrote:Very surprised to hear the Japanes do not have the best scythes in the world...

I was quite shocked also! They have many great tools here, but scythes just never caught on... My guess is just that the lack of grassland just meant it was never deemed necessary (no shortage of extremely tall fields of weeds though).

Would you be willing to send me a link to the company you mentioned?

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to make this thread for two reasons!

The first was to ask if anyone had any idea of where to buy a scythe in Japan, or if anyone knows of anyone who would provide shipping for one to Japan.

The second was to show everyone all the funky scythe-adjacent weeding tools which Japan has available domestically. To me they all feel a bit awkward to use as they are all based on a pulling motion (sickles on sticks or hoes), rather than a sweeping one.

Hopefully these will be of interest to some people.