Growth Report

 My carrots are growing well thanks to the insect screen protection. It wards off swallowtail butterflies which they can lay eggs on carrot's leaves and the young worms feed them.

 I thinned out some carrots and I was very happy when I saw the carrot's roots have grown! I believe it was worth spending times screening out pebbles before sowing. I believe they can be harvested in the mid of July.

A baby cucumber

Tomato's flowers

Planting sweet potato sprouts

 I planted 12 sweet potatoes sprouts today in a space where my onions had grew. There are variety of breeds among sweet potatoes and I picked up 3 types for this time.

1 Naruto-kintoki

2 Beni-azuma

3 Annou

 Planting sweet potato's sprouts is a bit different from other vegetables since they have no root.

Should I call them "vines" because of no root on them?

 Anyway, they've grown to about 25cm (10inches) so I buried their trunks into soil. As the sprouts grow, their roots will also come out of their roots and extend into soil.

 While the roots extending into soil, what I should do to them is only watering them. They don't need any fertilizer since they are more fertile than other vegetables.

  Sweet potatoes are so popular among Japanese that we use them in various ways like cooking cakes, adding into Miso soup and even distilling them into "Imo-Shochu"/ a Japanese distilled liquor made of sweet potato. My wife and daughter are looking forward to baking sweet potato cakes!

The Purple Onion Festival

 My 70 purple onions have grown and I harvested all of them at this weekend. Some of their leaves have not fallen down yet, which shows it may still early to harvest but their bulb were so big and their trunks are so thick that I assume I should harvest all of them. If I wait for their leaves falling down, they will be bolted, I believe.

 The gardening space for my purple onions are now vacant and I've decided the vegetable I will plant their. Can you guess what? I'll show it on the next blog.

Kitchen things for aphid control

 Pursuing an perfectly organic gardening is the dream and goal for all gardeners although I believe we recognize that the road to the goal is harder and more difficult for us than we think  especially when we need some quick solutions for urgent problems like pests and bugs.

 Organic solutions are sometimes less effective but expensive and time-consuming while they are environment-friendly. How can we balance between effectiveness and eco-friendliness?

 I believe one of solutions is using LESS harmful chemical things in gardening chores. I'm also afraid of using chemical pesticides in my garden for the health of my family so I adopt much safer chemicals and goods as solutions for bug control. They are kitchen things like a kitchen detergent, cooking oil.

 I found that many aphids on my broad bean's tree and tomato's trees in my garden and I always mixture of water, cooking oil and kitchen detergent. 

 Mixture ratio:

 1. 100(water) : 5(oil) : 1(detergent)

 I think you want to know how the solution kill aphids. Most of insects are holopneustic, which means they have stomas on their belly for breath. The solution contains millions of oil molecules and when the solution vaporizes the molecules block the aphid's stomas and they will be suffocated.

You can see hundreds of aphids on my broad bean trees,,,,,.just spooky.

 We have to spray the solution thoroughly on the aphids. 

 One of the aphids on a leaf were struggling for the air in the solution for a while.

 When the solution had vaporized, many dead aphids were found on the leaves and trees.
Oh,,,sorry for poor bugs!!

Finally, I rinsed the solution with showering. The dead aphids also have gone with water.

 Protection from bugs is also important. We can create more effective protection with learning habits of bugs. Aphids hate the reflected light. So I used aluminum foil to ward off aphids.

 I rolled a sheet of aluminum foil around plastic polls for tomatoes, eggplants and cucumbers. I hope the reflected light can protect my vegetables from aphids and I'll monitor how effective the way is.

Planting summer vegetables.

 Every year in May, I plant summer vegetable sprouts like tomatoes, egg-plants, cucumbers and other and here is the list of my summer vegetables which were planted yesterday.

1.  6 tomatoes (Momotaro)
2.  4 cucumbers
3.  3 egg-plants
4.  2 green peppers (Manganji)
5.  1 black chili
6.  1 ginger

I sometimes had a problem in growing tomatoes. Some tomato fruits were cracked just before I harvested them. According to some books and my wife's aunt, my gardening teacher, tomato fruits should be protected against rain drops which might cause the crack. I know that some kits of vinyl tunnels specialized for tomato trees are sold at a local home center and that they are expensive so I don't feel it worth paying for them. Fortunately, I have many plastic poles like straight ones and curved ones so I decided to assemble them into "a canopy for tomato tree".



 After assembling a structure with plastic poles, I covered a vinyl sheet, which were used for a vinyl tunnel for winter vegetables, over the structure.

 After planting those sprouts, I placed some bunches of straws beside them. Straws are very useful for keeping soil moist even in a scorching summer day in Japan.

 I bought some chili's sprouts including black chili, and Manganji green peppers. You can see the difference between the colors of both sprouts. The black chili has a purple trunk.

 I planted a ginger for the first time but it's not so difficult even for beginners to grow it according to my wife's aunt. Ginger is very popular in Japan and especially during a hot summer, we use a grated ginger for a condiment for cold white and thin noodles (Somen) and buckwheat noodles (Soba).  I bought a large seed ginger this time.

 The large ginger is too big to be planted in a hole so I divided it into 3 pieces. It's ok to divide it but the cut sides should be dried for a few days for avoiding infection in the soil.

 The soil for ginger should be always moist and my straws serve as a blanket for keeping water in soil.

Buying grafted sprouts of summer vegetables

Crop rotation is an effective way to avoid consecutive crop injury. But gardeners, who have small and limited space for growing vegetables like me, sometimes have difficulty in rotating their crop properly.

Grafted sprout is an effective solution for avoiding the injury and I always buy grafted sprouts at a big sprout shop run by a farmer specializing for grafted vegetables. Grafted sprouts are more expensive than usual sprouts. For example, one grafted tomato sprout costs about $2.00 while a normal one is $1.00. But I believe it's worth paying for them.


The photo shows the one of grafted tomato sprouts I bought. You can see the sprout is "clipped" with a rootstock. Eventually, I bought 6 tomatoes, 4 cucumbers and 3 eggplants which are all grafted, costing about $20!


--from iPad