CHAFF

What a word is 'chaff,' truly biblical in its power, perfectly conveying the castoff, the useless, the windblown negligible fragment. There will always be chaff. But the bad rap isn't completely unwarranted. Soba chaff, for instance, makes an excellent filling for singularly uncomfortable pillows. As for rice chaff, naturally the big chaff here in Japan, it seems that not much is done with it; each year after the rice harvest there is a surfeit of the stuff, and of the punky scent of its slow burning in situ. Specifically it comprises the rice hulls, of which there are light beige piles everywhere after the grains have been culled, hulled, bagged and stored away.

I've recently learned of the many gardening uses of rice chaff, for example it is an ideal mulch, and soil loosener, among its other qualities. So I've been keeping a lookout for unwanted chaff to use in my garden. But the problem is, how do you tell if a pile of chaff is really unwanted? Just because it's sitting in a pile in the corner of a paddy doesn't mean it's been orphaned. This may be an intercultural thing, but it keeps me from going to farmer-neighbors' doors and asking "Say, do you have any unwanted chaff lying around?"

And is chaff ever really wanted, or is it simply one of those non-commodities farmers have to put somewhere, like worn-out tractor parts? Many of the farmers, as I say, simply burn their chaffpiles right in the fields to get rid of them, generating an aroma that characterizes this time of year (like autumn leaves back in a NY of the past, but much less aromatic) and leaving ash scars all over their fields like geomantic moxibustion. There seems to be nothing systematic about this; some farmers simply let the chaff lie where it falls, some put it in piles at the paddy edge, or in small piles here and there randomly; others lay it down in strips, others mete it out neatly along the rows, some use it to blanket their daikon (BIG radish) sprouts, all of this I suppose reflecting the character of each farmer in some way, and the way he thinks about time, and his fields, how punctilious or fussy or lazy or symmetrically inclined he is.

The other day farmer T., who has a field across the road, drove up with six big bags of chaff (more than twice the size of the conventional western burlap bag) in the back of his truck and, taking each bag in turn in his arms, the bags being nearly as big as he, staggered to a different part of the now dry, shorn paddy and spun around fast and randomly like a kid in a schoolyard, whirling and scattering chaff everywhere till the bag was empty and he went dizzying back to get the next bag.

His was the most fun chaffscatter I've ever seen, by far. That chaff was definitely used, and each summer farmer T.'s rice plants appear to be happier than most. The cattle rancher across the Lake where I get my fertilizer simply scatters chaff six inches deep on the concrete floor of his cattle barn, then every couple days plows it all into big piles outside and lets it heat itself up till it's cured into the finest organic compost in Shiga Prefecture. Folks come from kilometers around to smile as they shovel it into bags to take home and spread on their gardens.