The Melon

I am so proud of my first big size melon so it gets its own post. As promised here is a picture of it. Next to it a ping-pong ball for comparison.

Can't wait to pick it. Any day soon now.

It is also one of a kind because all the others were honeydew with smooth rind but this one is a cantaloupe with net pattern on its rind. I have put a plastic "tray" under it to avoid direct contact with soil and maybe to make it difficult for bugs to get to it.

Backyard melons

Well... Summer is peaking and the days are very very hot. The cats hang out where there is any breeze during the day, or just fall asleep along the corridors.

Oreo-chan having a look at the garden

The melon experiment is over for this year. The result, 7 or 8 small unripe melons, 4 normal size very sweet and tasty red melons and one huge melon still waiting on the vine. I am very excited about how that one will turn out. Not very good results, but it was my absolute first time and I made lots of mistakes. I gave the chilled unripe small melons to the chickens and they seemed to enjoy it in the heat.

They're not so picky

I saved some seeds from the very high quality melons we got for our furusato tax. Hopefully they will be ok for next year for second round of my melon challenge.
I got my finger out and went out and dug for a couple of hours at a time in the heat, and the result is that I have finished half of the backyard now.

Neat.

I plan to grow potatoes on the top level, to minimize weeds to start with and maybe enhance the soil quality. Not sure what to do with the second and third levels for autumn. Right now the melons are phasing out. Maybe more potatoes? hehe. The lower (forth from above) level is now de-weeded and mulched with leafs, and I have transplanted a dozen strawberry seedlings from my main area. It was originally thought to be flower level, but Chika said she prefers edibles. So do I. Of course we will have the occasional flower here and there to attract the bees and deter the pests but no special flower section. Lowest is the passion fruit that is climbing ever higher. It is almost as high as the second floor balcony floor now.
If you zoom in right into the center of the picture, you can spot the huge melon behind the trellis and leafs. I will take a proper picture later before harvesting it.

200

Wow, post number 200. To celebrate, I will put up some pictures of the garden I took with the Pentax last weekend when it was really really hot.

Eggplants looking really yummy

Big blueberries looking really yummy

Tomatoes looking really yummy

Peanuts looking really... leafy

Closer look at the leafs

There is a terminator hiding and waiting

The huge sunflower I harvested looking really yummy

Giant hornet?

Of course with the Pentax I just had to take a picture of the lily in the pond that does its beauty more justice.

Ahhhh...

 The pond is a nice feature. Plus dragonflies have started laying eggs in it. The frogs are all gone into hiding, but the other day I did spot one of them jumping around under the leafs in the peanuts bed. It had grown up quite a lot.
I have seen Tora chasing and eating lizards so I suspect that from the maybe 30 frogs that survived and are hiding around the garden most of them are being eaten up by Tora.... just a theory.

Dragonflies love to spend time around the pond

I'd like to think that we have less mosquitoes now that the chickens and the dragonflies and frogs are around. But I still get bitten a lot. Of course, compared to last year same time it is much less...
I have noticed that every morning there is a big wasp drinking/gathering water from the pond. Same thing in the evenings. I did watch closer for a few days, and it turned out they are several wasps taking turns and making rounds to bring water from the pond to I guess their nest. I tried to follow them and see where they fly to but it seems to be far away past the neighbor houses. At least that's a plus. I don't want a wasp or hornet next in our house or the garden.

Not sure what kind it is though

I hope it's not a giant hornet (suzumebachi). It is pretty big.. Maybe 4 cm. I don't wanna get too close to snap a picture, and they fly away quickly once they had their fill. I used the telescope lens on the Pentax to take the picture above. So this is the best picture I have so far. I will try to take a better picture some day.

The urban chickens

Here are some random chicken pictures I took with my Pentax. The days are hot and the chickens get to enjoy a cold watermelon rind almost every day. Plus whatever I happen to cut down from the garden. On top of that they get fallen or damaged blueberries, whatever bugs I dig up or catch, or a big handful of meal worms from my own worm farm.

They mostly stay under the shade of the big tree. Good thing I didn't cut it down.

On the ground is a huge sunflower I cut down and gave them the other day

Water nom nom

i think they're pretty happy

Pentax

Had enough of the crappy sony camera that messed up all the pictures, so I decided to dust off my old Pentax. Even with no special settings it still beats the sony by miles. When I take a picture of the black kittens, it actually captures what I see at that moment, instead of the guesswork that sony gives me. Result: a cute kitten with features in its face, rather than a black furry spot.

Oreo chilling on the table

Oreo chilling on the floor

Minion chilling on the floor

Tora chilling outside

The days are extremely hot so he has become expert at finding shade

Oreo doesn't get to go outside, but I am sure he would love to

I had forgotten what a joy taking pictures could be, thanks to sony

NPK

I don't need to get the garden soil analyzed to know it's crappy. Almost everything I have planted has turned out with huge foliage and little to no fruit or flowers. So I will need to get some serious fertilizing with potassium and phosphorous going.
Here is an example of what I am talking about. The passion fruit is now way over its net, but not a single flower.

2 meters and still growing. Hope it survives the frost.

Life is short

The cicada from the previous post died of natural causes and was recycled by the ants and other small creatures.

Circle of life

Another thing that suddenly looks dead is one of the 2 small cherry saplings I planted last year. Within a week all its leafs have turned brown and dry. Something ate its roots? Not sure but I will not dig it out trying to find out. Just let it be there for a year...maybe it is just asleep.

some disease?

The "dead" cherry is on the left in the picture. In the middle is the "living" other cherry they are different cultivars but started out at the same time and same size. A bit further down is the peach sapling struggling. The weeds are just crazy. I have pulled out weeds from that whole area twice already this year but they just explode out again... stupid weeds.
Totally unrelated, the kittens can now access pretty much everywhere in the house so nothing is safe anymore. Everyday I come home from work I find the result of their shenanigans in shape of something or other pulled out from a closet or shredded into tiny bits or hidden behind the fridge etc.
At least they have fun I guess. They already have all their regular toys but apparently household goods are more fun to chew through.

One of their favorite places. Just don't fall in...

The heat is still preventing me from digging and cleaning the backyard top level. Just in case, here is how far I have come:

It's the part that looks like a hole

I'm gonna bury a thick hard plastic sheet just under the net to stop the roots to invade from outside. I will back fill it tightly under the concrete. The concrete by the way is a very cheap and sloppy job. Looks like they just poured concrete over a hill. It is already falling apart. So much for government paid and owned quality. In front of the net/concrete, above the buried plastic wall, I want to put some kind of wall... but if that is too difficult I will have to do with just filling dirt and let it go down like a slope.... If that makes any sense.

Scorched Earth

The last week was extremely dry and hot... Good thing I have the huge water tank, so I watered the whole garden twice and still got like 500 liters left. It's kind of a nice workout. If I get tired of it later on maybe I can design a water way that goes through the whole garden so I don't manually have to carry water.
Bad thing about the heat is that I could only spend maximum an hour a day digging in the backyard before feeling all dizzy and ready to pass out. So not much progress in that department.
Cicadas are crawling out. Here is one near the entrance.

The kittens had a lot of fun playing around with the empty husk

Near the entrance a huge lily has opened. I was super happy at first because I got the idea to plant lots of lilies at the strip near the entrance. Later I also thought I should mix them with daffodils. It will look and smell amazing. Today when looking up info about the flowers I saw that both lilies and daffodils are extremely poisonous to cats, so that's the end of that idea. Back to the drawing board.

Too bad. It smells like heaven and it is huge and beautiful. Oh well

Now I kind of wonder if the root cause of Chubby's kidney failure wasn't the lilies.... she loved to lick everything... so it is not so unlikely. Poor kitty. Although there were no lilies out when she got real ill, I heard about cats whose kidneys broke from lilies but who managed to still live normal a while before the symptoms showed.
Still, flowers would be nice to have there. It's not easily accessible and part shady so veggies would not be ideal. Maybe roses?
The kabocha are officially dead. And half the melon patch is also kind of dying... Saturday it still looked green but Monday suddenly it had turned all dry and yellow. I didn't over water the patch but didn't let it dry out neither. 

Well, it was just a first try so I was not expecting a huge success

I cleaned out the lower right side melon plant that turned all dry and dead. Basically picked off all the melons from it. Remember the three lower melons are the ones that looked like they were dying in the nursery. In fact they did much better than the others. So maybe the extra time in the nursery was good for them? Something to think about next time. Also that row only has 3 plans, while the above patch had 10 squeezed in there with netting etc. Plus the above row has got moles digging in it, so the roots are constantly fighting.
Anyway, the melons I picked are here. Opened the smallest one and it was very very sweet and also soft. Yum yum yum.

Still more melons are growing in the patch. The biggest out there is twice as big as the biggest here.

Wild cat

Tora really no longer likes it in the house... when he is in he constantly gets harassed by the two young kittens who either want to sleep next to him, which he only on very rare occasions allows, or chase his tail as a toy, which really annoys him, he hisses at the kittens and gets so mad that he whacks furiously with his tail, which then looks even more like a toy and gets the kitties more motivated to chase the poor thing.
During the days when Tora is out in the garden, the kitties play a bit and then sleep a lot. At night when Tora is in and we all want to sleep, the kitties are up and wanna play, and no one gets to sleep cause Tora keeps yelling at them as soon as they come near him. Poor guy is really stressed. But hopefully that will all change as soon as we get the two kittens fixed. They should then calm down a bit. Right now we are waiting for Minion to get just a little bit bigger, and also for Oreo to grow his second ball. For some reason he has only got one testicle it seems. Even the vet thought it was odd (odd, hehe!)
For now though, we all put up with the situation and I try to let Tora stress off by going out as much as possible. Yesterday I saw him catch a lizard and gulp it down whole, so he gets some of his food outside too.

Tora looking like he belongs there, which he does.

One of the sunflowers was starting to wither and bend down from its own weight so before it got all dry and eaten up by the birds I cut it and brought it in to dry. Let's see what kind of seed quality I get. Also, the "giant" corns turned out to be midget corns, the kernels are all full size, but the cobs are real small... Anyway I picked those too and mixed up with tomatoes and the cucumber from the garden into a nice and sweet salad.

Cats are curious as usual.

I really got the get my thumb out and fix the backyard's upper level but it is too hot during daytime right now.

Summer heat

It's almost unbearable how hot it gets during days. But the plants love it, and we get the occasional rain too so it is not bad.

Eggplants are starting to get in shape. Behind them 3 types of peppers.

The sunflowers are getting huge. Look forward to eat the seeds.

The asparagus patch is one of the few weed-free ones

Finally, real sweet tomatoes. Both orange and red ones.

Black mulberry bush is growing too much horizontal.. Need to prune it into a tree shape

The walnuts twins. The wind there is pretty strong and the left one has started to lean so I anchored it

Found this naughty thing chomping away at my grapes. No grapes this year but a tasty treat for the chickens

Pulled out an old cauliflower to make room for new veggies. Put it in the run.

A little later half of it was already eaten.

Cats in things

Mini and Oreo have both grown a lot. They got their second vaccines last weekend, and now weight-wise they only differ 50 grams. Mini weighed 300 grams and Oreo 550 grams when we got them. Now they each weigh around 1,75 kg. They are still much smaller than Tora of course, and still very cute. Just not super duper cute. That time passed very quickly.
My hat which they used to sleep in together, does now barely fit one of them at a time. So now they take turns.

Oreo in the same hat.

There is a picture of them both sleeping in the same hat in the first blog post I wrote about them.

Minion wearing my hat

Just to be fair, here is a picture of Tora in his favorite sleeping place nowadays, at those odd times when he is not roaming the garden. I buy expensive cat trees and cat houses, and they still prefer homeless fashion sleeping quarters.

Tora napping

Passion

My second go at passion fruits seems to go better than last time. The last time I planted the sapling near the wire fence, unprotected by the strong wind, in shallow and very poor quality soil with lots of bamboo weeds around it. Needless to say, the poor thing fought and fought but finally gave up and died after a few months, not having grown that much.
This is what my new passion fruit patch looks like.

Climb, my beauties!

Those with good eyes can spot the couple of tomato plants growing on the right side of the passion fruits. Somehow some tomato seeds must have made it through the compost which I put in the soil before planting the new passion saplings. The passion fruits seem to now have established and climbing for all they're worth to the netting. I need to put more netting higher up soon for them to hang on to. Wonder if I will see any flowers this year.
Otherwise not much. I get a LOOOT of blueberries everyday. Fruit and berry wise, my garden covers the spring and summer at least now. First came the strawberries in spring. If I manage to make the strawberry patch survive the winter, next year there shall be much more berries. Right after the strawberries time was over, the mulberries kicked in and I got lots of real yummy berries there. The bush/tree will need pruning in the winter. It is growing real fast. After the mulberries were done, about a week ago, just then the blueberries started popping up. I also had a few plums that actually made it out of literally hundreds due to disease. But those few were so sweet and delicious. Hope to save the next year's fruits better and reduce the disease damage.

The plum tree with its last fruit.

Still to come in the future years are cherries, peaches, yuzu and mikans, pomegranate, nuts, figs and grapes. And of course, passion fruits.
I still have the long strip near the entrance that I am not sure what I should do with...

The flower strip

Right now there is roses, lilac, jasmine and some other random flowers. But it's pretty big and it ends with this huge flower bush that attracts bees which is good. But there is a lot of weeds too.
The neighbor jungle's trees drop lots of leafs and fruits on the strip which roll down the slope. I think the soil is good quality. And it faces south, although it is shaded by the house most of the day...