How Does Your Garden Grow?

The ever changing, unpredictably of the seasons from year to year and how that affects plants and animals is something that I find endlessly exciting. I am one of those people that remembers within a week, and usually within a day or two, when flowers first open, shoots appear, or trees bear fruit from year to year. I may not always remember to grab my phone as I head out the door, but I can tell you exactly when the wintersweet down the street first started flowering during the past four winters. I am sure this natural inclination is what pushed me into studying ecology. So let me take you on a tour of some of the things growing in our garden this summer.

This year I decided to utilize a bit more of the space around our tiny yard and experiment with a few plants I have never grown before. In front of our house I have a small flower bed that self seeds itself with four o'clocks each year. This year I decided to plant okra, hot peppers, and shishito peppers amongst the four o'clocks. 

Before coming to Japan, I had only eaten okra breaded and deep-fried or in Cajun dishes like gumbo. I sort of liked it, but it would never have been on my top twenty list of plants to grow or even buy. It could be my love of natto that made my palate accustomed to sliminess or trying a new way of preparing okra (blanched and salted) but now I absolutely can't get enough of it. I would be satisfied with a whole bowl of okra as a meal. Okra was not just a delicious addition to our flower bed, but an aesthetically pleasing one too, since the flowers are absolutely gorgeous. 

light yellow and deep burgundy okra flowers

Shishito is a pepper that I have rarely bothered buying because they taste like bell peppers and are a fraction of the size. However, I was guaranteed by the lady at the plant store that these shishito were very spicy so I decided to give it a go. I have decided that they are absolutely fascinating peppers. Most of them have no spiciness whatsoever, but very occasionally there is a spicy one. I'm not sure I would ever grow them again, but they do produce quite well and since they aren't so spicy, the kids don't mind them.  

Shishito

I also planted a few hot peppers because, as anyone who had ever had a meal with me knows, pretty much everything is better with some heat.

Hot peppers ripening

We also seeded a couple of pots of basil and oregano.

Cilantro is something that I have tried to grow multiple times without too much luck. Dustin and I absolutely love and you just cannot buy it in Japan at least in our area. Every time I plant it, I get a pot of gangly, pitiful looking cilantro plants that never seem to bush out. We do get a meal or two's worth and that is usually enough for to help stave off the intense cravings until I can plant some more. 

We also planted tomatoes on our side yard in our usual spot next to the compost bin. Within no time they turned into a dense tomatoey jungle that began to trail over the side of our wall and into the ditch. Our neighbours often come by and give me gardening lectures about how I should trim every side branch off to turn them into tall skinny tomato trees, which is how everyone seems to grow tomatoes around here, but I find that the plants just produce way less when I do that. Last year I was very careful about pruning but it was the worst tomato harvest I'd ever had. This year I only pruned occasionally, mostly let the tomatoes do their thing, and had huge yields despite the all the rain. I actually tried weighing all that I harvested over the summer and somewhere around 25 kilos I stopped bothering. All this from only 3 plants!  

Our house is right next to a small train line and the whole strip beside the train tracks used to be filled with vegetable gardens. About a year ago the neighbourhood was given a letter from the city saying we weren't allowed to plant gardens in this space. The majority of people complied but there are still a few gardens here and there. When my brother was out visiting in May, he encouraged me to feign ignorance of this letter and clear some space to grow some more vegetables. I pretty quickly caved to his bad influence and now have a sneaky secret garden. I decided to plant only short, non obvious plants, that couldn't be seen quite as easily from the train or street. So I chucked in a few sweet potato vines, cucumber plants, and peanut plants (which promptly died). I am curious to dig up my sweet potatoes soon and see if they grew!

Living and Growing

After our hot and unusually long summer, the weather has suddenly turned cooler. On my daily walks around the neighbourhood, I have begun to notice that it isn't just me enjoying the weather but all the plants and creepy crawlies too.

Our little street has a sort of rusty, run down beauty in early fall. The train tracks become lined with a healthy tangle of blooming cosmos and red spider lilies and the green mountains rise up in the distance. After a year and a half in our little house, it is really starting to feel like home.

The view down our street

Higanbana, or red spider lily

I have been coming across a lot of hornworm and hawk moth caterpillars (from the Sphingidae family of moths). It is almost impossible to miss seeing them since they are about 7 cm long, as thick as your finger, and have a little wagging "tail" at their end.

An Impatiens Hawk Moth (Theretra oldenlandiae) caterpillar making its way across the street

This caterpillar was a little smaller and also from the Sphingidae family (I have no idea
what genus and species though!)

A tobacco hornworm caterpillar making short work of a morning glory leaf on our bike shelter

And we have also seen the adult stage of these hawk moth caterpillars frequenting our four o' clocks and morning glories each evening. Dustin and I never grow tired of seeing huge hummingbird moths flitting in and out of the flower bed. 

There has also been a boom in the spider population as of late. Dustin managed to get a picture of this stripey and colourful individual last weekend.

Last year Dustin was pretty disappointed by the vines I chose to plant near our fence and bike shelter. He was envisioning a lush green blanket enveloping everything in sight but the flowering vines I planted barely covered half the fence before frost killed them off in December. This year I promised Dustin that I would make his dream come true and so I planted morning glories. I didn't really even plant that many of them, maybe six or seven plants around the yard, but they have really taken off. Every weekend I have to spend a few minutes cutting them back or else they would have long since eaten the road in front of our house, been all the way up the electric line and across the street, and completely covered the entrance to our bike shelter. 

Now that the weather has cooled, the morning glories have started to bloom. I love it! 

William posing outside our fence on a bright, sunny morning (yes, there is a fence under all those vines)

We also trained morning glories up a net in front of our window

From inside, it fills the room with green, dappled sunlight.

and the side of our bike shelter

Maybe I did go a bit nuts planting vines this year but there has not been one complaint from Dustin!

Home Sweet Home

view from the street

It has been almost a month since we moved to our new place. We have all settled in well and are really enjoying the extra space and privacy. Our neighbours, who are all elderly, are extremely curious and friendly and are always stopping by to drop off a vegetable or two from their garden and to chat with the kids. The only snag we have run into is with our internet. After waiting four weeks, we were called by the internet provider and told, for some reason we couldn't quite understand, that our house can't be hooked up to their system. We now have to figure out some way of getting internet, either by changing the type of internet we will receive or going with a completely different company. Either way, it means that we will be waiting at least another 1 - 2 months for internet. This will be the longest that we have been without internet service in over 10 years and has been a bit of an adjustment not being able to use Wikipedia to settle our ever occurring disputes and feeling cut off from our friends and family back home. Our friends in the area have been generous in letting us use their internet when we need it, so I am going to make a point to put a blog post more often than not in spite our solitary confinement.

peering through the fence that Dustin built

So here is the catch up on what we have been keeping ourselves busy with in the past month. The first two weeks in June were spent unpacking and getting our yard set up.  Before we came, the yard was a patch of bare earth with an opening to the street and two bushes. Our first order of business was to build a fence to close off the yard and keep the children from running into the street. Dustin attracted the attention of all the old men in the neighbourhood while he built it. They kept stopping by periodically to see how far he had gotten and give him advice and praise. While he did that, I made a flower bed by the front window and a vegetable patch in the side yard and got all of the assorted plants from our apartment balcony into the ground. I also got our compost bin set up which pleased me to no end. Those of you who don't compost may think I am crazy, but for those who do, I think you share my inexplicable joy in watching food scraps decompose.

digging out the smallest of the three tree roots

The second weekend in June was taken up by removing three stumps from the yard, building a bike shelter, and planting grass. Some of our fantastic friends came over and with their help hard work we were able to get everything done in a weekend. We had hoped to put sod down on our yard since we didn't have much space to cover and didn't want to go through all of the time and hassle of growing grass seed. When we went to buy it however, there was only a few small, half dead bundles left in all of the garden centers we went to. The sod here is very different than what we are used to in North America. Here they sell a stack of eight 30 cm x 30 cm squares tied in a bundle. The sod that we bought had been sitting for over a month at the garden center so it did not look too great by the time we got it. When we bought sod in Canada, it was cut that day and rolled into big healthy green rectangles that were about 60 cm x 150 cm. Not many people plant grass in Japan, or have very much space to do so, and this was reflected in the health and quantity of sod available. So in the end we sprinkled grass seed over 3/4 of the yard and put the half dead sod on the remaining 1/4. We were pretty lucky that the weather turned drizzly for a week and a half afterwards and I didn't have to waste water while the seeds were germinating.

our baby grass growing in

The bike shelter that Dustin built has a living roof on the top of it. We still need to put a bit more soil up there and plant some nice hearty succulents in it. 

the top of the bike shelter waiting to be planted

There are still a few more things that we would like to do outside, but for the most part it is just being patient until the new grass fills in. As a point of reference, here is a picture that I took before we moved in and another of nearly the same angle that I took yesterday:

Before

After

Sometime soon I will take some shots of the inside of our place and put them up. After only four weeks it really is starting to look and feel like home!

Botanical Blunders

Winnipeg is home to the Royal Canadian Mint which continues to create one of the most annoying botanical blunders in our country. When people think of Canada, the sugar maple leaf usually springs to mind. One would think that those leaves on our penny are from a maple, but in fact they are leaves from a sycamore or plane tree. A sycamore's leaves grow alternately along a stem (like the leaves on the penny), while maple leaves are oppositely attached along the stem. The one we have to blame for this embarrassment is George Kruger-Gray, who must have never looked very closely at a maple tree and had no botanist friends. The only other coin that he designed in Canada is the back of the nickel. It seems that he researched this one a bit more, since as far as I can tell it actually looks like a beaver, not a coypu or other R.O.U.S.