And now for something completely different!Our Japanese friends have two hatake 畑, vegetable patch/fields for their 100 kinds of fruits/ vegetables, and today we went to the farther flung one where lazy Mark was put to work gathering a year's worth of cut branches (some as big as small trees)
as well as lots of dried leaves... and incinerating them! It was several hours' worth of schlepping and stacking, squinting through smoke and brushing off the ash-wraiths of leaves, but, of course, fun! But I was a little creeped out that all those magnificent things had been reduced to a pile of ash...