Screening out pebbles for carrots

 I have failed to grow carrots last year and what I learned from the experience is that pebbles might interfere the carrots growth. According to many guidelines and blogs by veteran gardeners, carrot roots might stop the growth when they touch pebbles, small stones and soil mass and we have to get rid out of them carefully. Yes, I also should have done it.

 I have to avoid the recurrence of the failure before seeding carrots so today I screened out pebbles with the about 50cm wooden-framed screen, which my wife's father gave me for free.

 Screening-out was a tougher job than I thought! The soil of my plot for carrots contained water so it was so heavy that I got tired even after screening-out for 10 min. But the method was so effective that hundreds of pebbles were removed out of the soil.

  You can see easily the deference between the soil after screening out and the one before.
The soil on the left divided with a green plastic pole is the soil after screening out.

  The new carrot plot was completed after 2-hour taxing chore! I'll seed carrots there in a few days.

Remember the 3/11

The photo above shows a woman leaving flowers on a beach for people who were killed in the earthquake. She is not only one who lost beloved ones.

Today is the 1st anniversary of the great earthquake which occurred in the northeastern Japan on March 11th of 2011.

Damage and loss by the earthquake:

Death toll:15,854
Missing person:3,155
Evacuees:343,935
Amount of wreckage:22,530,000tons

The vast amount of debris are still left on the ground and many people are missing. And the government estimates it would take many years to clean up the radioactive out of the damaged soil. There are too many problems to be solved toward full recovery.

I would like all of people to remember how massive the earthquake was and the devastated people.

--from iPad

Germination in a new gardening space

 The spinach and pak-chois, which were seeded in a expanded gardening space 2 weeks ago, have germinated and been growing faster in a vinyl tunnel.

Spinach sprouts

 I've learned how important proper thinning-out is for growing bigger leaf vegetables from my experience so I secured more space for the growth of the spinach and pak-chois with about 10cm interval between each other.

Pak-choi sprouts

 The weather since mid of Feb has been so tricky that some day was warm without wearing an overcoat while other day was severely cold. I had thought that I wouldn't have need a vinyl tunnel any more but I decided to continue it due to cold days.

One of the expanded gardening spaces

My daughter harvesting the first-generation spinach.

The first spinach, which were seeded last year, have grown to 20cm height.