Expansion of my gardening plots in a cold day

 It's been so severely cold days since the new year holiday in Japan that I don't feel like seeding any vegetables with less expectation of germination and many vacant gardening plots. That means it's the time to carry out my idea of redesigning my gardening plots. I spend this whole weekend cultivating my vacant plots to create more available space. At the same time, I added more fertilizer and dried cow manure into the soil for making the soil more fertile.



 The expansion required digging the soil deeper, which was the hardest job to me,  since the original soil was so hard that root vegetables like daikon radishes can not grow in soil.



 After 2-hour chore, I was able to create new gardening spaces, which are shown with yellow-lines in a photo shown below.



 Drainage is always my concern when I think of changing design of my plots. I dug deeper the soil to create drainage to make water run to a main drainage.


 I believe the expansion can give me a great hope for harvesting more various kinds of vegetables.
I want to try to grow fruits like strawberry and herbs in the new spaces. I'm looking forward to seeing my plots will be filled with colorful vegetables and fruits in near future.



--from iPad

What a poor harvest!

 As I mentioned in the last blog, timely thinning-out is very important for all vegetable gardeners. And I realized again today what really happened after I skipped thinning-out. I would like to share my fault with you and I'm very happy if you can learn from my poor result of my daikon radishes.

 All of my daikon radishes were mature but very short. I've been waiting for better growth of them for months but I decided to pull out all of them since they would be bolted if they had been left in soil.

 The poor harvest is definitely caused by me. I didn't thinned them out timely and properly. I should have thinned them out to make enough space ( about 5-inch space ) between radishes.

Thinning out in a cold day

 Working in my garden in a cold winter day is sometimes boring. No weed to be removed and no seed to be seeded. All I have to do there in this season are cultivating, watering and adding fertilizers.

 Thinning-out is also important among those "winter-chores" to make my vegetables like spinach and pak-chois bigger. Today I thinned them out expecting future's bumper harvest.  Usually, I thinned out my spinach and pak-choy with making about 5cm space ( about 2inch ) between two sprouts

Aligned my spinach in a vinyl tunnel

Thinned-out spinach sprouts

My pak-choi in a vinyl tunnel

Thinned out pak-chois

 What will happen if we don't thin out properly? I'll show you an example of my failure.

I forget thinning out my daikon radishes when they were young sprouts so my gardening ridge for them are so crowded with grown daikon radishes like the photo shown below. Making daikon roots bigger and longer requires more space but my daikon radishes have been forced to grow in the "limited space".

 Eventually, most of my "grown daikons "are much shorter than ones I harvested last season.

 I would like to show a good example. One of other gardeners have grown big and long daikon radishes since he thinned them out properly with making enough space between two daikons. He has about 10cm space between them as the photo below shows.