Happiness is....

Tora is truly happy everyday when he's out in the garden. Indoors he mostly sleeps or is restless asking to be let out...
"Nyaaanyaaaanyaaaaaa, let me go out and play", he says every morning when he notices me waking up after having quitely watched me sleep for hours.
So the first thing I do is to open the door for him.
He does his rounds and an hour later comes back scratching at the door to come in and have his breakfast.
The two kittens have no idea what they are missing so they just watch him from inside without complaint.

Rainy season

Whenever I talk to a Japanese, they are so proud that in Japan the four seasons are so very distinguished, boxed in and clear. On the other hand they don't mention the other half unidentified seasons. Rainy season is one of those. In a matter of days the hot summer weather turned into cold autumn. Actually rainy season is supposed to be hot and humid but not this year. It was cold rain and winds. Yuck. Needless to say I got plenty of rest indoors.
Of course as soon as the rain stopped, even for a few hours, I ran out and tried to do something with my time. For example, I continued cutting the bamboos on the north wall and stack them nicely.

I think I'm about 1/5 of the way through

After the wall part is done, I will go a ask permission one more time, just to be sure, to cut all the bamboos on the north plot which may fall down on mine. The north plot is 2 meters higher than my plot. Right now I am just cutting the slope between which is common ground.
Other than that, I just let the bamboos soak in the constant rain...
The rain has filled the pond in the garden nicely and one more lotus flower has come up.

Ouhmmmm...serenity

I spent some hard time digging and pulling out the huge bush in the garden, at the same time as bees were trying to feast on its flowers. It is a miracle I didn't get stung.

Halfway done

The dirt under my fingers look very esthetic, it almost looks like I have had them done by a professional.

Not!

Anyway, what I did was to pull out as much roots as I could, and cleared a pretty wide circle. I also dug down the slope and made it more flat. The clay that I dug out from the deeper parts, I used to make the entrance to the garden more horizontal. When it is snowing or raining, that part gets slippery and dangerous, so if I make a clay path that resembles steps or something, maybe it is an improvement.. Before planting the apple sapling, I back-filled the hole with the contents of the compost bin which I was going to move. It is pretty smelly. Hope it gets better after being buried for a while. I haven't gotten the grip on composting yet. My composts attract flies and smell horrible.
Right now, the place where I planted the apple looks like a mound, which I will fix later by filling around it with more top soil from the slope above it. That way the shallower roots will have somewhere to go.

Done

Also I haven't "planted" the second compost bin yet. I just put it there for the time being until the rains stop and allow me to borrow it down into the dirt. After that I will try and fix the entrance path...
All the rain and wind is making some of the vegetables very happy and they are growing extra. Others don't look so happy...

The corn are tilting....

Nice surprise

Last night when I went to close the chicken coop door I saw this round thing just below the passion fruit vine.

That's not an egg

Seems I completely missed it. Didn't even notice the flower... and somehow it got pollinated too. The fruit is pretty big. Now just have to wait till it ripens. Wow.
In just a day or two, even the zucchinis seem to have gotten magical powers and are popping here and there real quick. Almost same speed as cucumbers I would say, just overnight.

zucchini time

The huge and gorgeous flower is withering

Ah crap!

So...the forest plot. I did as much sorting as was possible, then I saw that I had to start chipping cause the "to shred" pile was getting too big, plus the plan said I have to. I figured I would finish the remaining 1/3 later in summer where the plan says "catch up"

All set for a month of chipping

Loaded up the shredder with 5 liters of prime gasoline and started the day. It went pretty smooth, I had to stop once in a while to take a drink or to clean out the blades as they tend to get clogged with debris. It is pretty one sided work and instead of my usual daydreaming, I decided to count how many logs I would be shredding. I did not count the most thin ones which disappeared through the machine in an instant.
I counted up to about 210 when suddenly the machine felt like it was trying hard to stay upright and started shaking more than it normally did. I stopped feeding it and looked inside to see what was wrong.

Oh jeesus

Apparently a bamboo proved to be too strong for the blades and it must have ripped one of the four blade axles right out of its socket and sent it flying god knows where. You can see the force involved that warped the round hole. I was not surprised though... Just a few weeks earlier a much thicker metal sheet was bent in the same machine by bamboo which I had to cut loose. I guess bamboo is stronger that steel... haha.
With 3 blade groups rotating instead of 4, the whole system fell out of balance, hence the shaking. This machine has been one problem after the other and just fallen apart in such short time. I have fixed it as much as I have been able to , but this problem is beyond repair I am afraid. It was literally drawing its last breaths. I forced in maybe 20 more bamboos before it completely died on me.

I got this far.

I had to go home with my tail between my legs and rethink the whole plan....

Rest in pieces. You will not be missed.

I wrote a very polite mail to the company I bought the shredder from and explained what a worthless piece of garbage it had been. Then made a new time plan which did not involve shredding but instead burning everything. Also I removed the beehive part as explained earlier.

THE PLAN.... version 3

I will not have much to do in the summer according to it, which is just as well, because it is hot as hell to do any serious work. First thing to do is to wait until no more bamboo grows out and then cut down north side bamboos. Then wait again until it is not too hot to burn stuff.
I guess I will use my free and waiting time in the summer to fix things in the garden. I was going to buy a midget (dwarf?) apple tree to put next to the plum tree. In the weekend I happened to see that the last apple saplings in the home center were being sold off real real cheap. I know home center saplings are crap but I bought it anyway. I am not even sure if it is a midget or not. I am not even sure if it is self pollinating.
Anyway, I guess we will find out in a few years. Now I have time to clean out the "bush", oh and after I have planted the apple tree, I will use the rest of my time to divide the strawberry field into 3 rows, and also add one more strawberry row in the backyard.

Da boosh

Flowers, bees and other facts of life

More flowers pop up every day in the garden. The biggest ones are the zucchinis. These things are HUGE.

Pretty pretty

They share so much with melons. Same huge flowers, same leafs, even same bugs that eat them. Only difference is they don't climb trellis.

It is one of the garden's sunniest spots so the flowers are happy

The lotus in the mini-pond has bloomed again this year. I guess it means it is here to stay. Actually one more flower is on its way up.

The surrounding of the pond start to look more and more natural

And we even got a rose which opened last week. Extremely fragrant.

This was actually here even before we moved in

All these flowers and others are attracting lots of bees and it got me thinking I should prepare and learn a bit more about bees before putting hives in the forest plot. So I started reading up on the subject and it turns out although they are pretty harmless, people walking by and neighbors in general, not knowing the facts (same as myself) are often afraid and complain. Also there are many who have bee allergy, plus I need to report to the city about apiary on a yearly basis, even if it is one hive for hobby. Their rules are that a hive should be at least 50 meters away from any nearby neighbors or roads etc, which means I need at least a 50 meters wide plot even if I push the hive to the edge to the north. Not having a giant plot (mine is only about 30 meters) I have to forget about keeping bees and postpone the dream to later when I have a big big land. Oh well... one less thing to worry about I guess.
OK, so we have talked about flowers and bees. What other facts of life are there?
Well, the other day I saw that the cats were trying to hatch some eggs I had put on the counter by sitting on them.

Come on... we are hungry

And I think they believed that their sitting gave results. They got a yummy bite of omelette from that.

Just let us know if you need egg sitting again

Sorting out the forest

According to the time plan, May is the bamboo sorting month. With only a few days left, I have been fighting like crazy to finish it. It is not easy at all. The sun is extremely hot and I can literally only spend about a minute in it working before I feel dizzy and have to run to drink and then work 10 minutes in the shade before next attempt to pick up anything from the sunny area. The shady area is almost cleared out. There are lots of nettles growing there and on them these hairy caterpillars that hurt like shit if touched. I guess it is only natural that they are the only bugs crawling on the nettles without problem.

Not a nettle. Smelly leafed weed with runners which I hate.

Anyway, last weekend I managed to sort out 1/3 of the forest plot into 3 categories. (branches, chippers and burners). Hopefully this weekend I will finish the rest. But the heat is already killing me, and it is not even real summer yet. I can only work 1,5-2 hours a day before getting completely exhausted.

Branch pile to the right, chippers in the back next to the machine, burners to the left

    

Summer approaches

...and with it gradually the growth in the garden. Let's see what we got here.

String beans

For the mailman and anyone ringing the bell at the gate, there are newly germinated string beans with their first leafs to see. Also inside the garden there are more string beans where the green peas used to be.

still the green peas are there

In the backyard, the corn are getting bigger and more visible leafs. 2 rows of corn, 1 row of strawberries and top row is potatoes.

The net in the back is where the civet climbs in and out

In a tiny space next to the walnut tree a couple of sunflower seeds have popped out of the dirt. It's a nice and sunny spot so there are possibilities... That spot is like a lucky box

Not only sunflower but a mix of various leftover vegetable seeds

In the bed nearest to the kitchen I planted watermelon seeds, and a couple of them have emerged. Still the leafs are pretty tiny and if a caterpillar or another bug decides to eat it, that would be the end of it.

Hello World!

Watermelon leafs in bamboo mulch

Another watermelon baby

Next comes the huge and unruly strawberry bed, which I will divide later on.

It's a couple of meters wide

Next to the strawberry field is the plum tree recuperating from the sickness. With one or two lonely still healthy plums hanging in there...

"For dear life"

I also have a bed with melons only. They have also just started to emerge.

I think there are 16 (4x4)

The vegetables in the garden are actually very slow in growth because the soil is not exactly top quality. It all used to be lawn... Berries are doing better though. Now that the short strawberry season is ending (At least in my garden) next in line are blueberries and mulberries. Not sure which will be first, but both have already developed lots of full size berries and I am just waiting for the colors to change.

All blueberries in there, just zoom in.

The middle blueberry bush seems to have survived my crude unearthing and 180 turning of it. Good. It means I don't suck at everything.
Next we have the tomatoes. However, one of the tomato beds is kind of invaded by leftovers of last year's potatoes.

Potatomato

It's a race with win-win outcome for me. The other tomato bed is simpler

Just tomato

After that, we got two beds of zucchini growing huge leafs like crazy, and gathering those annoying brown bugs that last year ate all my melons.

Zucchini, with a bit of eggplant leftover growing from last year.

More zucchinis

And what comes after the zucchini bed? The chicken run of course.

Angry birds

And on the other side of the garden there are small fruit trees and stuff. Oh, and of course the asparagus forest.

It's a mess...

Oh I forgot the mulberry. Here it is

There are some big size berries in there already