Garden in the air

 Today I and my wife visited a new shopping spot in Osaka, Osaka Station City, which is a  complex of major department stores adjacent to Osaka station and opened a few weeks ago.The complex has gathered many shoppers and tourists from the Osaka area and even in a weekday like today, we had to wait in a long queue for ordering my lunch and paying for my purchase.

 I and my wife recognized the signboard saying "天空の農園/Tenku no Noen or Garden in the air" is located in the top floor of the north wing of the complex. The garden drew our attention and interest so we headed to the top floor.


 When we got there, we were surprised with a open space with windmills and soler panels for electric generation and small sized vineyard and vegetable garden are set up there. We didn't expect that such green garden would appear there surrounded with many reinforced concrete high-rises.


 In the vegetable garden, many kinds of vegetables like tomatoes, carrots, egg-plants and even herbs are planted. The soil in the garden is artificial soil made from volcanic ash and fertilizers.
All vegetables are still young but we can see a green community of vegetables with fruits there in a few mouths.






 Many windmills and solar panels there can produce most of electricity used in the garden.


The production of electricity is shown in the counters below. Now we are facing the fact that we have to save use of electricity since the nuclear power plants were damaged by the last massive earthquakes which may cause the shortage of electricity or sudden black-out. We wish we would have more solar panels which can help us saving electricity but they are still expensive for us.



-- from iPod touch