Garden record

Picture: Edamame, corn, and a neighbor's house.

We live in Hokkaido, in the north where there is snow on the ground about 4 months of the year. People really get excited for spring and summer here! In the spring, everybody gets busy cleaning up and planting flowers. Summer activities include camping and going to a beach packed with beach bars decorated to look like somewhere in Hawaii or Jamaica, I guess.... pineapples, large signs for Jamaican rum, surfboards, and so on... it looks cool, not dorky, because it has all been homemade by bonafide alternative types, with dark tans, cutoffs, piercings and so on!

Well, my main summer activity now is gardening. We're renting a house, since last year, and when we moved in last year I was too busy with moving and then it became too hot, so the garden got really overgrown. As I fought my way through the plants later, I little by little discovered cherry tomatoes, pumpkins, big purple grapes, parsley, and lots and lots of shiso (a herb used with sushi and other cooking). There was a veritable shiso field in the lower garden. I don't really use shiso, so I gave a lot away and then in the fall pulled out all the plants. They come back up in the spring, anyway, so no harm done. The kids loved the grapes, I made a couple of pumpkin pies, and we ate fresh cherry tomatoes all summer. I didn't use any store-bought tomatoes for 3 months, which was great since tomatoes are about 4-5 medium ones for $3 here. These things had all been planted by our landlords before they left the place in the spring. They are an elderly couple, and moved to a condominium somewhere - we have never met them. I called the real estate agent one day to suggest that we send them some of their produce, but he said we didn't need to, and I didn't want to complicate our relationship, since they seemed to prefer to go exclusively through the agent.

Well, this spring I planted:

2 cherry tomato plants
daikon seeds
carrot seeds
pumpkin seeds
corn kernels
edamame (beans)
some new flowers, like cosmos and morning glory (there are already tons of bulbs, flowering bushes, and other flowers that come up anyway)
cilantro (fresh coriander) -- 3 small plants and some seeds
basil seeds
spinach seeds
a small field of potatoes (may queen and danshaku) in place of the shiso field
my friend bought a raspberry plant which will live here, and we will share the raspberries.

Here are the results so far:

Tomatos -- one plant died, the other got shaded over by fast growing plants and I had to move it. It gave us today its biggest harvest so far: about 7-8 small cherry tomatos, nothing special in terms of flavor, either! Last year I would go out every three days and come back with a large mixing bowl 2/3 full of delicious cherry tomatos - this was from plants that had no care whatsoever, and were just lying all over the ground. Will try again next year, with more plants from a different supplier.

Daikon -- nice looking, and I pulled out two of the biggest ones yesterday to give to the neighbors. About 2 inches thick and 8 inches long.

Carrots -- I didn't thin them properly, and there are too many small carrots growing in one place, so none of them seem to grow. I have yet to see one even as long as an inch. They smell like carrots, though!

Pumpkins -- I left just the healthiest two sprouts standing, and for some reason they are not growing taller/longer than 6 inches. There have been a couple of flowers.

Corn -- some sturdy looking corn stalks with nice waving leaves. Some flowery things are coming out of a few of them, and pollen comes off them when the stalks are shaken. Hopeful here!

Edamame -- coming along nicely, with plenty of beans. The beans are still too skinny to harvest.

New flowers -- Nothing so far... but there are plenty of other flowers, anyway.

Cilantro -- the 3 plants grew very big, but I should have harvested the leaves earlier, and frozen them. I waited too late and they changed shape. Then I harvested some, and the taste was wrong and seemed bitter. Now I'm letting them go to seed, in the hope that we'll see something next year... The seeds I planted have grown into small, feeble-looking plants that will hardly come to anything.

Basil -- this was in a container, and I didn't do the drainage part right, so the whole thing had to be scrapped.

Spinach -- these were used and added to salads as babies, and then the plants got strangely tall and scraggly. I harvested some more the put them in the freezer. Will try a different type next year.

Potatoes -- great! We have just started eating the new potatoes, and gave 1/2 a shoebox full to the neighbors on either side, along with a daikon. They look just like storebought potatoes, but in all different sizes, and they taste extra yummy! I have dug up about 1/5 of the patch.

Raspberry -- looks so-so, and about 30 raspberries grew. I suggested to my friend that there were too few to use, and we should let them fall and hopefully more plants would appear next year. The ground is so fertile here, and we have an amazing variety of plants, many of which seem to have sprung up from last year's fallen seeds, for example there are plenty of shiso plants and also sunflowers this year!

Also found and used this year (I didn't plant these):

Very vigorous parsley -- several feet of snow were no problem to the parsley plants, which defrosted nicely and started growing and growing!

Grapes -- some are growing, but they are not ready to harvest

Asparagus!! -- I didn't notice it at all last year, so was shocked one morning this spring to look out the window and see asparagus coming up. There is quite a bit in the freezer now. I've let two of them grow big and go to seed. When they grow big, all those little things at the top turn into little branches, and grow out away from the main stalk.

Some kind of nira thing -- nira is a green plant related to chives or garlic. We used it for a while, but then I got nervous about whether it was really an edible nira plant or just some inedible nira-lookalike.

My friends and neighbors have taken some shiso -- I am making sure there is a lot less than last year, by pulling up the larger plants. It smells nice to walk through a shiso field, but it is a pain because in the fall the plants all go dry and crackly, and then you have to pull them up and dispose of them somehow.

All the flowers are lovely! We saw the early-mid spring flowers for the first time this year, and the summer flowers are much more visible too, since the place is not so overgrown. I've heard that the owner really looked after this garden, but after they moved out last year, no-one did much with it until September and it was hard to see what was what! In the late fall, all the wilted or dry plants need to be cut down and thrown away, or they turn into a big mess under the snow. Plants which stay through the winter need to be supported with bamboo poles and little net dresses, so they are not damaged by the weight of the snow.