May 11

May 11 was cold and rainy. But our newest garden enemy didn't mind the bad weather. When my husband made the new fields, he mixed earth from by the river. Gorgeous black soil. Which we now know was full of seeds of these weeds that are like little needles. So sharp, I actually pricked my finger on one. I think the black plastic my prove to be useless this year.

Here is our main pumpkin patch in it's full expanse. Jack 'o Lantern in the front. An empty space for future pumpkins. Kabocha and Howden in the next group with the corn. And at the very rear, out of view, Cinderella. Cucumbers along the fence.
And the Jack Be Little mini pumpkins are planted in front of the classroom. I plan to grow them up to the roof of the classroom.
Two artichokes, planted near the tomatoes.
The strawberry patch, which is a bit of a disaster, really, we will have to redo it in the winter. It is not raised, so they get all muddy and eaten by insects from below. It is nice to have the neighbor's azaleas growing through our fence. Watermelon in the foreground. The okra is going to go here this year.
One of my three shades of purple iris.
These pretty little purple flowers by the driveway are about to bloom.
I tried sweet peas for the first time. The blossoms are pretty, but the bottom half of the plants are totally brown. I think I need to do them in bigger planters, they get dried out too quickly.
My husband took this photo of a bee. We are lucky to have quite a few bees. If only we didn't have so many evil bugs!

bugs and other bits

Here are the promised, and eagerly awaited (?) aphid photos. They aren't very good photos, because I was in a rush to get to tomato planting, but you can get the general idea. The green aphids have infested our soramame (large beans, English, anyone?)

Whereas the black ones prefer to destroy one of our Rose of Sharon trees, oddly leaving the other three identical (well, except they have leaves that haven't been eaten by aphids) neighboring trees untouched...
Here are the girls feeding the fish which they caught from the river with my husband. The little fish (medaka in English?) are going strong, and the water plant that has pretty purple flowers in the summer is starting to get leaves.
This is my next project, the herb garden is in a dreadful state, the rosemary and lavender need pruning, the chives are flowering away, the basil patch-to-be is overrun with baby weeds and I haven't planted any basil yet, and the whole thing is dandelions and moss...
The girls spent most of the time while we were planted tomatoes in the west plot chatting with the lady who has the garden to the east. She lives downtown, but she and her husband have rented the plot next to us for many years.
And, the girls must have been charming because they scored a huge bag of sugar snap peas! I have been coveting their peas for the past week as ours are not quite ready yet. Hooray! Here are a few...

In other Vegetable News...

Wait, you mean there are other vegetables? From reading this blog, you would probably think there was nothing but tomatoes...

But, no, we do have other vegetables. Lettuce is going strong at the moment, but a few are showing signs of bolting. This is one set of lettuce. Also a few late broccoli (which I think are ready to flower even though they are barely an inch in diameter) and some soramame (big beans?) which are being attacked by aphids (I have a close up photo of the aphid problems I will post soon, isn't it nice to have something to look forward to?) Our compost bin is on the left and the small mini tomato patch from yesterday's post behind.

These are other other lettuces and behind them, baby okra. And my husband is thinning! No really! Stop presses! It is a rare event indeed. I was watch a Desperate Housewives episode where Lynette and Tom go to a marriage counselor and she is upset that he is always good cop, forcing her to be bad cop. Well, that's what I sometimes feel like in the garden. When infanticide is called for, I'm the one who has to do the deed. Anyway, here he is, I made him thin his okra and cucumbers himself. These were okra seedlings from the garden store. Salad okra, green and red. I also have some seedlings I started, but haven't planted out yet.
Zucchini is going strong. I planted Black Beauty and Lebanese varieties, and so far the BB seems to be growing faster than the L.

These are the pumpkin seedlings my students planted. Jack o'Lantern on the left and Howden on the right.

Kabocha on the left, then Jack be Little, and Cinderella pumpkins. A few artichokes at the top and bottom. I planted two artichokes near the big tomatoes yesterday, and big pumpkins at the bottom of the embankment this morning. Jack Be Little mini-pumpkins are going to be on a trellis in front of my classroom.

And here are mystery pumpkins which were growing out of the mini-tomato plot. They are the most healthy of all our pumpkins, but we have no idea what kind they are. Last year we had Howden, Cinderella, standard kabocha, and a oval shaped gourd that didn't look or taste very good, but was strong enough to beat back weeds on the embankment. If these are any of the first three, we want to keep them, but if they are the steam roller gourd, we don't. Hmmmm....

Here are baby corn at the bottom of the embankment. We are going to try three sisters this year with corn, vine beans, and pumpkin.We had lovely spinach, but Mr. Must-sow-all-the-seeds-in-the-packs planted them all at the same time and despite my most valiant efforts (spinach for every meal, including breakfast) most of it ended up going to seed.
Cucumbers... Mr-I-won't-kill-a-baby-seedling has an undisclosed number of these hoarded up in curious places around the garden. Oh well, when they are at their peak, we won't be here. If he wants to give himself the cucumber crud again, it is is his choice.
Carrots. He planted them in rows at least this time, but see what I mean about the thinning? I think I will have to give in and be designated murderer again.
Beans...

Onions, peas and potatoes. Just a few potatoes, because M hates potatoes and L is allergic. Well, I said, "Just a few potatoes, okay, honey?" See how he listens to me... I love potatoes, but cooking anything with potatoes means cooking an alternative for the girls. I don't love cooking. But I see a lot of potato cooking in my future. Maybe we should consider a third child. Pregnancy gives me major potato cravings.

The girls check out the potatoes. Do you think Daddy is going try to make us eat all of these??? You're lucky, you're allergic!

Tomatoes!

Well, I have been neglecting my blog for a long time and decided to change that today, so I took over a hundred photos. Needless to say, it will be a long time, if ever, before I post them all. We are leaving a for a local festival soon, so I must resort to triage, and, of course, tomatoes take priority! We planted 49 tomato plants (started from seed) this morning, and 3 more in pots. We managed to give away about 20 before and have 12 left over as "spares."

Here are the mini tomatoes:

Varieties include: Sweet Orange II, Golden Currant, Jelly Bean Yellow, Jelly Bean Red, Reisentraube, Black Plum, Sugarlump, and most of all, "Dad's" which are seeds saved from absolutely delicious grape tomatoes my father-in-law grew last year but can't remember what variety. My husband saved seeds, and we raised about 25 seedlings, 8 of which we gave to his dad to raise again this year, since he had so much success last year. He was picking them into December.

A side view:
And the planting begins...
We did 8 minis ("Dad's", Jelly Bean Yellow, and Sweet Orange II) in our yard, for easy picking by little fingers.
This is a view of the 8 yard minis from the west plot (where the rest of the tomatoes are).
And here are the big ones:
Varieties include: Money Maker, Mortgage Lifter (one has to think about the economic climate when choosing tomato varieties, you know), Cherokee Purple, Big Rainbow, Brandywine (just one), maybe a Black Krim (but it might be a CP), Evergreen, some sort of sauce tomato that I am forgetting the name of, but labelled in CG. I think it was something Genovese.

A side view:
Money Maker on the left is my favorite for taste. Only got two tomatoes last year before the plant died, so I am hoping for more this year.

And here is the tomato patch, ready to go in the newly prepared west plot (the lady who owns it agreed to let us use it, in exchange for my husband keeping her weeds cut).
And here are the seedlings in their pots, contemplating their new home-to-be:
On the right, you can see some seedlings my husband bought at the store. Why, you may ask, would you buy seedlings when you have 70 of your own??? Well, truth be told, I asked him the same thing. But my big tomato seedlings are all heritage seeds and not necessarily suited to the Japanese climate. He bought some standard Mamotaro and such. But he didn't label them and doesn't remember what he got. Sigh.

I, on the other hand, am a planner. I took about 45 minutes deciding which tomatoes to plant where and even talked the girls into having popsicles rather than a cucumber for a snack because I was two sticks short for labeling (it wasn't hard to convince them, and I was pretty impressed that they suggested cucumbers as a snack). Here are all the tomatoes in position, waiting to be planted.
And here is my husband, planting the last tomato! Hurrah! I did plant them, too, but nobody took photos of me doing it, so it looks like he did it all. Anyway, that last short row he is working on is mini-tomatoes and the rest are all big.

Golden Week

We did lots of gardening during Golden Week, which is a string of 4 national holidays here in Japan. Actually, my husband did lots of gardening. I didn't even take many photos, as I am trying to record all my classroom readers "This car is blue...ding!"

Here are our remaining tomato seedlings. We gave 12 to my father-in-law and had (sob) to say goodbye to a few of the weak, and are down to 72. We have about 40 spots, so we will see how they do over the next few weeks.

We had our first bbq of the year. It is perfect, no mosquitos yet and light until almost 7pm!

And today was Children's Day. When was a kid, I found out there is a children's day in Japan, I asked my mom why there wasn't one in the US, she said "everyday is children's day".

It was a perfect day. Sunny and warm. We celebrated by having a picnic in the garden with friends and breaking out the pool.

Play

This post really has very little to do with gardening, except that you may notice that the time has come to whack some weeds on the embankment in these photos.

I was just reading a very disturbing article about the importance of play and how it is disappearing at a rapid rate from schools and homes in the US (and probably other countries, too), and what this means for our children (nothing good). Apparently, lots of kids don't even know HOW to play any more, even given the opportunity. Needless to say, as a mother, a teacher, and a worrier, I found all this rather distressful.

However, I am rather confident that our girls have ample opportunity to play, both at school and at home. Recently, they have learned to entertain themselves for an entire day outside while we garden with minimal fighting. Today M's friend spent the day with us, and they had lots and lots of play. I think this is how they will spend the rest of Golden Week, except for the day we go to the pottery festival. Oh, and my husband is planning to cut the weeds back tomorrow, so hiding spots for hide-and-seek might require a bit more inventiveness. Right now, they just walk a few paces and sit down.

They did manage to catch a few butterflies, but let them go.
Hide and seek, L and friend are hiding front left, M is seeking.
The hiders...
Almost found...

Transplanting tomatoes

Well, once again I haven't blogged for ages and have a desktop full of photos from late March and the first half of April yet to be blogged. I will have to go back to that when I have time (ha ha).

Anyway, today was a perfect day for gardening, so I finally tackled transplanting tomato seedlings. As you may recall (since I haven't blogged anything in the weeks since...) we planted over 100 tomato seeds. Well, the vast majority came up. So, today I had to murder quite a few and managed to pare it down to 71, still far more tomatoes than will ever fit in our garden full grown.

Moving them to bigger pots is a bit of a gamble because we have had unseasonably cold nights recently, even with a frost watch sometimes. In bigger pots, they won't fit in our green house. Because, it's really more of a green shelf.

Anyway, here they are (half of them) in their original seedling pots...

And we made a special mixture of soil, manure (cow), and egg shells to plant them in. I know I am getting obsessed with the tomatoes again because when we went to Hanamaru (dollar udon, it's like the McDonald's of noodles) the other day all I could think was, just think how many egg shells they THROW AWAY every day. I even thought of asking them if I could leave a bucket in the corner to collect them, but decided that might be pushing the crazy foreigner with crazy foreign ideas envelope a little too far. Anyway, here is my senior assistant egg shell smasher...
Empty pots waiting to be filled... My husband frees all the green and blue plastic baskets from his work warehouse btw. The perks of being the only person who is willing to clean out the warehouse.
And all of my repotted tomatoes! It only took me 4 hours...
Meanwhile, my husband was hard at work doing his human rotatiller (sp?) thing, getting the okra beds ready. The girls were busy weeding all day, but helped him with the black plastic.

And finally, I mixed manure and compost into the back of the flower bed in front of my classroom. This year my oldest class (6-7 year olds) planted Jack Be Little mini-pumpkins. I want to grow them (the pumpkins, not the kids) up to the roof of the classroom. It will be easy for my students to watch them grow and it will be nice shade in the summer.