On the Farm...

As the weather continues to warm, we have found ourselves wandering in our front yard more and more…we cut the weeds down, raked up the fallen flowers, enjoyed the tulips, built a pizza oven…what else was there to do? Well, make it a real farm by planting vegetables of course!!There is a large plot of land below our house with a smattering of fruit trees (cherries are starting to grow right now…). It is full of overgrown weeds and stones but we had been told by the owner of our house that we were welcome to garden it. So that is what we decided to do…

The "before" shots:

We went to Juntendo (the local hardware shop) and gathered our tools of choice- three hoes of varying size. Yes, Daddy that was it. We had this old rake and bucket for stones already in our shed (the rake was soon replaced by a better one...) We got home and started hacking at the ground…Craig didn’t realize the hoe is supposed to do most of the work for you. He started whacking at the ground like it was a jackhammer. It was comical. I told him a few times to let the hoe work for you but he preferred the “beat it to pieces” method. By the end of the day the edge of his hoe was so bent it is probably unusable (in his defense, he claims it is...) My biggest problem was the stones, or perhaps I should use the word, rocks. I had to stop every swipe of the hoe because I kept hitting them. They make this terrible ringing, scraping sound on contact. I lost count of how many buckets I filled and hauled away from the plot. But despite our respective rough spots, we had the earth loosened and cleaned of rocks and thick roots in about 5 hours. (We knew we were old when we took a lunch break and promptly fell asleep for 30 minutes after eating). This was our progress at lunch:

The space is about 10 feet by 8 feet. We were so surprised by our progress (had thought it would take to weekends...) So we headed back to Juntendo and picked up these 17 little seedlings including tomato (mini and regular), cucumber, eggplant, colored peppers (red, yellow, and green), and watermelon. I was putting them in as the light faded and Craig was burning the large pile of growth you can see in one of the above photos.

The "after" photo, not much, but we were proud...

Over the next two long weekends (Golden Week) and assuming Katy gets over the nasty bacterial infection she is fighting, we plan to expand to make room for the influx of melon vines and for Japanese pumpkins (more like a yam) and beans!

While I would have liked to have a rototiller to turn the earth, we got by just fine. It was also a great lesson to us. It was so quick…We started at 10 in the morning and finished about 6:30pm with an hour break in the middle somewhere. Who knew you could make a simple garden in a day? Assuming all goes well, we will have delicious vegetables (free of chemicals and thousands of miles transport) in a few months. Not a bad trade-off. Very exciting…so go plant something if you haven’t already. It is cheap, easy and you get to watch it grow. COOL!!! and don't protest that you have no space to plant because I just got an excellent book on planter gardening. You can grow lettuce, herbs, mini varieties, sky is the limit...so use that patio space, my condo friends.

Lastly, after eight months of studying the 'tateru' (standing up) arrangment, my teacher thought I should move onto to the next one 'kata mukeru' (shoulder slanting). Forgive the horrid translations...