Time travel with Google Maps

When I took a ride to the "countryside" of my countryside town, I used Google Maps to navigate around. And saw by chance that they have updated their satellite picture of my home.

First though, a bit of history...

March 2011

The orchard next door looked kind of barren, at least weed wise. There seems to be structure to the land and there are many beds arranged there. Amazing how chaotic everything gets after a few years and the nice fields turn into jungle. On my plot it's just empty except for the big tree and the row of trees along the southern fence. I can't see the fruit trees (maybe they were still too small) or the blueberry, but there is something there.. could be the tiny bed where the previous owner planted roses. Note that the line between the orchard and my plot is very clear.

March 2012

No big change. Looks like the rose bed has moved. So maybe it's not a bed. Maybe a barbecue? Maybe a mini-tractor they used to till? Who knows. There seems to be a white limo at the end of the street, hehe.

The slope on south which leads down to the railways is still quite clean. No jungle there yet. The beds in the orchard are still there but the lines are starting to look sloppy.

March 2014

Two years later, and the limo is gone. The row of trees along the south side fence are growing taller, and on the other side of the fence a jungle is starting to form with weeds. In the shade of the big tree a white corpse can be seen. Or is it a ghost? no idea

October 2015

Maybe it's the seasons when the pictures were taken though. Maybe the jungles were there earlier. Anyway, a year later after the summer growth the south of the fence is a proper jungle. Can't see the orchard for all the leafs but I assume the jungle is established there as well. On my plot there seems to be just lawn. Can't really distinguish blueberries or fruit trees because of bad image quality.

February 2017

A year and a half further on. Just after winter, the same year I bought the house. I can't see the rose bed or any other beds so they must have put those in that same year.

And finally, over a year later, after my move in:

May 2018

The pond is there, and the paths version 1. The roof and the house is painted and look nice and clean. The big tree is gone and so is the row of trees along the fence. Of course the chicken coop and the run can be seen too. 

Getting colder

Especially in the mornings it is really cold out. I can almost see how the ground is just on the border of frost. The sun is quite low all day and the vegetables are not growing as fast as they did earlier.

I have now covered the wide strawberry bed with a double tunnel. Hopefully it will reduce some frost damage. This was a lesson I learned last winter. The big difference in temperature in the tunnel and outside. This summer I think I learned another lesson. Pruning helps.

I did a bit of pruning in the beginning of summer but after that I pretty much left everything to grow as they please. As result, the vegetables I got in the beginning were nice and big but got smaller and smaller as time went.
Here is an example of eggplants I picked last week. These are not new eggplants, but have spend almost same amount of time on their branches as the big full sized ones.

OK, the one in the left is not an eggplant

They just don't get bigger, and stay midget sized as the plant keeps making more new branches and leaves.
I took a bicycle ride halfway to Honda. It was a nice morning and it only took a few minutes until I could not hear any trains neither cars. So extremely quite and serene. Just farms, fields and forests. I was talking to a local guy there and he told me that most of those farms and fields are not for sale although they may be empty or look abandoned. It's just the same old usual thing, namely that the owners are too old to work them, and their children are busy in cities or not interested. However, I heard it is easy to ask around and just borrow a field from its owner to grow crops and sell.
Doing so a year or two, one can achieve the coveted farmer status, and may eventually be able to buy actual farmland, instead of like me having to just go for forests...
Once I feel comfortable with the garden and don't have to spend too much time on it, I may have time enough to take over a tiny or medium sized field...

Sex change

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Perennial Marigolds

Well hot dam... when I first got the marigolds I thought they were annuals and I would have to replant seeds. But it looks like at least one of them is popping out flowers for the second year.

So now it is a mixed marigold and strawberry bed, with a side of weeds

The garden is not exploding with growth exactly, so I can maintain the weeds better. It's mostly cloudy these days so I stay in and play with the cats. Except they are mostly sleeping...

They fit in like a glove together in the circle

But they have to wake up when I want to play so I pick one of them randomly to bully... this time it was Minion. He forgot to put his tongue in when he woke up.

I wanna sleep more...

The thumb is out

OK, finally I managed to do most of the things that I had postponed for a while. First a picture that I missed in my previous post:

The after picture of the compost bins

Since last year, every time there is rain or snow I keep slipping on the tiles on the ground. It really is dangerous and every time I slip I think to myself "Gotta do something about that soon, but first let me just.." and walk off to whatever I was going to do.
Now finally I got a couple of sacks of pebbles and poured over the slippery.

NOT slippery when wet

It feels great, and I get a nice and cozy sound when I walk on them. The next thing to do was to get rid of the hanamizu tree in order to extend the bed near the kitchen. OF course, as soon as I had finished cutting the main part off and was about to dig out the root, it started to rain.

This sucker has some deep roots

But I had decided that the thumb was out and I was going to do this rain or shine. So there I stood in more and more sticky mud and kept digging away and cutting off roots. The roots I cut off I dug out separately, and then went back to the main roots again.
This went on for a couple of hours and the rain stopped a couple of times and started again. I had to take a break and eat. Once I was done eating it was too dark to continue.
Next day was less rainy but the mud was still yucky. I managed to dig deep enough to finally be able to move the tree a bit if I put all my weight and might on it. So I stopped digging and started kicking the tree and for each kick it got looser. I missed a couple of kicks of course but managed miraculously not to fall on my butt in the mud. Then I started pushing with my hands again, and the trunk was real wet so a slid a couple of times and my force made me fall really hard onto the trunk with my chest while standing. Ouch! But the end was near and panting I put the shovel under the root system and stood on top of it while pushing the tree away. How can such a small tree have so huge and powerful roots?
In the end the roots were unearthed. My hands were super shaky when I took this picture.

Too heavy to lift though so I cut it into smaller bits before moving it away

With the tree out of the way, I could make an extension of the bed. Hooray!!

New bed seen from the kitchen

View from the north bed

The things that look like gravestones in the background of the last picture are concrete blocks I got to stabilize the backyard upper slope and have a wider bed there to work with. I just put the blocks where I thought they should go up against the fence, but didn't dig them in yet.
Here is a summary of the garden now, seen from the second floor window:

Lower part

Upper part

The next day I took an hour to dig the concrete blocks in the backyard. Now I can rest for a few days.

Naturally Inspector Tora was there right away to check what has changed

Oh, I also put up more tunnels :)

Living things

Just thought to make an update on the animals and bugs... since not much exciting is happening right now with the vegetables. It is mostly cloudy so growth is slow. The beans are trying their best though. Somehow the beans in the backyard have grown twice as fast as the ones in the main garden. Maybe it is because they get double sunshine thanks to the reflection from the big windows on south side of the house.

backyard beans

Compare them to the garden beans:

It's the ones on the back

Maybe the soil is not so rich there.. I don't know. By the way I got tired of waiting and dug a bit to see what is happening with the broad beans and why only three of them popped out so far.. and yep it looks like the recent constant rains have made the seeds to rot, so these three are all I got now.
Already aphids have started sucking on them too with their ant guards... so I spread a bit of DE around them, and flour where the aphids gathered. Now we are back to Halloween mode again. The onions are too small and too far to repel them I guess. Lessons learned? I don't know. A couple of hours after I doused the beans with powder we had a nice rain that washed away some of it and made the rest into dough. Thanks weather!
To comfort myself I picked a mikan that looked almost ripe and had a taste.

Not super sweet, but not bad neither.

Looking for more sweet stuff I went on to check on the carrots. They are still small though...

Maybe a couple months more?

If you wonder why I keep talking about veggies when this post was supposed to be about animals, you can stop worrying cause here it comes.
Looking at the nice carrot leafs and starting to forget about the aphids, I thought some of the leafs have a bit odd color... had a closer look and:

Aw crap

Damn, the carrots need all their tiny leafs in this cloudy weather to produce anything useful. Stop eating the leafs!!!

How did you get so big without me noticing?

For some odd reason the chickens just take a look at these fat ones and just walk away. Maybe they taste bad. Anyway, all I could do is to squish them. Which is rather fun because just before their innards pop out their orange antennas roll out like party whistles. Oh small joys of gardening. More bugs...

Jack having his breakfast.

Grossed out by the bugs? Here is a cuddly triple. First time ever they do this, and I suppose they won't be able to do it much longer as the two kids are growing bigger by the day, and they won't fit.
Anyway, it is starting to get cold so they decided to sleep together.

In the background is the aquarium. Cats lost interest eventually.

Just chilling

It was a long weekend, and to be honest not much to do. I found a used final fantasy PS4 game for cheap and bought it. I had to waste about 5 hours just to run it because I must download and update stuff. Thanks again Sony. Then it turned out after searching for a couple of hours, that either stupid sony or retarded squarepants had removed the language pack to the game from all their stores, so I had to settle with Japanese. Which is no problem except after an hour of playing the game turned out to be pure garbage. Great. Half a day wasted.
Back to the garden topic... I have neglected the pond, and it has really paid off. It looks real natural.

Beautiful

Yesterday we went for an all you can eat yakiniku lunch, and after 1,5 hours I was very round and about to explode. Came back home and decided to use all the energy from the meat to deal with the bed nearest the kitchen. Basically to remove the tomatoes, cut down the tree, and make the bed longer.

I think the tomatoes have had their run. No leafs left...

I started by sawing off a couple of branches on the tree. The picture above was taken after that, when I remembered I should have a before picture.
The leafs on the tree are more or less dry so I proceeded to put them in the compost bin. Halfway through though the bin was completely full, and I had to finally deal with what I had postponed for a while now... to dig in the second compost bin.
So I abandoned the "elongate the bed" project and jumped on the "install the compost bin" project.
Originally I was going to dig it just behind the first bin, but seeing how inconvenient and hard to access it would become, plus I had to cut into the roots of the fruit tree there, I decided to reclaim some land to the right of the first bin, i.e. dig into the bushy area at the entrance to the garden.
No big loss, cause those bushes are just flower and shit and they grow like weeds anyway, plus I always wanted to get my hands on those running roots.
Spent a couple of hours cutting bushes and pulling out roots, and cleared out enough space to place the bin on, next to the path. The bushy area looks less bushy as a bonus.
Dug in the compost bin, put in the rest of the leafs in it, and realized I should postpone the elongating project as it was getting dark and the mosquitoes were starting to show interest.
Forgot to take a picture of the bins...
In the evening while surfing around I learned about myiasis... and boy is it nasty stuff. Especially in the mouth and ears.
Later when I caught myself with my dirty-post-gardening-nails-probably-full-of-insect-eggs fingers scratching inside my ear, I jumped up and washed my hands thoroughly.

Watchdog

Good news: Tora has taken to chasing butterflies and moths around the garden. He hangs around and as soon as he spots them he jumps to kill.
Bad news: He doesn't care where he jumps.

Oh my tunnel!

Well I suppose it is ok if the tunnels are not perfectly sealed as long as he makes sure no moths are around to get into them... 

Still here

Typhoon 24, Trami, passed over us and it was pretty intense. I had all the window and door shutters drawn in the evening before the winds got too intense, and locked in the chickens in their coop and closed their little door. From around 10:30 it started sounding pretty bad out there with the wind intensity at its peak maybe around 2 in the morning and the house shaking.
I could only imagine what was going on outside in the garden...
When we woke up it was still pretty windy but nowhere near the 35-40 m/s winds of the night. Removing the shutters and opening the window, at first glance I was glad the garden was still there. Looking closer there were bits and pieces broken here and there but luckily nothing major. The garden is situated partially in a good area, if winds are coming from north, they are weakened a bit by the orchard in the north and the house. If the winds are from south, as was the case this time, the long slope on the south on high ground protects the garden a little.
Still...

The path tarp is torn up by the wind. Pinned it down again.

A couple of peppers and eggplants were pulled out with their roots, so I put them back into ground and secured them again to their stakes. They are pretty hardy and will recover.

Not so huge damage that it sounded like during the night.

The chicken coop was still standing too. Not bad for a first time carpenter.
A large branch of the hanamizu tree had broken off and fallen right over the peanuts bed. Plus the string beans stake had tipped over. Just removed both, and everything looked much tidier.

The strawberries are still attached to the soil

The saplings are all fine still. Only the passion fruits took a real beating and all the flowers which I had pollinated so nicely had blown away. But except a few broken/twisted branches all three passion fruit plants are still there and they still reach up to the balcony. I guess thanks to my strong rope support.

Zoom in and you can see the resident praying mantis

Jack (The praying mantis who lives in the tomato/passion mess) looked a bit surprised but still there. Later that day I found him taking a ride up the passion fruit on the back of a gray, much larger mantis (Maybe on their way to honey moon?). If they were going to mate up there.... well congratulations, and it was nice knowing you Jack. R.I.P.

I had just thinned out the broccoli a couple days earlier

The broccoli tunnel had opened up in one end, and the wind had thinned out the seedlings further by breaking them. If I knew I would have not thinned them out before. Almost all ripe tomatoes had also blown off and were scattered all over the garden. The tomato plants themselves were in pretty bad shape too. Let's see if they recover eventually. If not, not a huge loss anyway.

All the pea are lying down

The green pea seedlings are all still alive, but a bit messed about. I will give them a couple of days and then just keep the strong ones and stake them up.
All in all, the garden survived the typhoon in much better shape than I thought it would.  😅