Farming, Japanese style

One morning it just hit me out of the blue. Why don't I just get a whole bunch of old tatami mats that no one wants and line them up to make the path? They surely will prevent anything to grow underneath them, right?

Said and done, I called a couple of places and found a guy who was happy to give them away. So we agreed that I would go and pick up 15 mats the day after. After the call I headed out to the plot to dig/fill more path and prepare for the tatami, and fate had it that my neighbor a couple houses away was having their tatami room refurbished. What a coincidence I thought and started talking to the worker, and asked what he planned to do with the old tatami he was carrying out. He said he was gonna throw them away, so I asked him to give them to me. The 5 mats I got from him would keep me occupied for the day at least, and also serve as proof of concept.

Nice eh?

After I had dumped them on top of my path, it looked like it might work. The next day I took my mini truck to the other guy and got 17 (!) mats from him. Turned out it was just about the weight limit of my kei-truck and I drove it veeery veeery slowly. There is a nasty slope on the road just below my plot where I wasn't sure if I could drive all 17 at once without capsizing. So I put half of the mats neatly in an empty space next to a parking lot just below the slope and took 2 trips up.

While I was putting the mats in the parking lot, a nosy old lady came by and just before she had time to wonder what I was doing, I excused myself, explained my dilemma to her and ask that she has patience 5-10 minutes with my mats being there. Not that it was her parking or anything, but I thought explaining would be the least troubling thing to do, otherwise she might either take them, call the cops or some other stupid thing. She said oh ok, and went her way, then came back 1 minute later (really, 1 minute) and said "you're not gonna just leave them there right?" I realized that I was dealing with an especially bright old lady so I smiled my nicest smile and said Ah no of course I would never do such thing. So she went away again, and came back in a minute, saying "I mean don't throw garbage in other people's land without telling them. You will be back and take those?" I sighed and said yes, and it is not garbage and just in case she was gonna come back again in a minute, I told her 2 more time the same thing, hoping that it might stick somewhere in her brilliant brain. As if I was gonna dump trash in a parking lot I would do it in bright daylight.

Amazingly I managed to get all the mats to the jungle without my truck getting stuck anywhere.

She is tiny and weak

And even managed to line up a couple more mats in the path.

At least it is more or less straight