The tragedy brought by heavy rain

 Tons of water brought by rainy season starting from the mid of June is essential not only for human being but for vegetables but sometimes too much water might give serious damages like flood.

 

 The heavy rain for 3 straight days through the last weekend caused flood in my garden and all planting ridges had been perfectly submerged for the 3 days, where my carrots had been growing.

 After the heavy rain, I found it unusual that all of my carrot's leaves tuned yellow and pull out one of them. The carrot root was "melted" from the mid of them as you can see in the photo shown below.

 Eventually, I found all of my carrots was decomposed and It was so painful for me to have to give all of them up!! Grrrrrr!!!

 The decomposition was caused by the flood when the carrots had been soaked for too long. 

I saw water still oozing out of the soil when I dug a hole just 5inches deep. I should have make the planting ridge much higher for avoiding the flood.

 I was shocked when I realized that the decomposition was just One of the damages brought by the heavy rain. One of my tomato was infected with "bacterial wilt disease". You can see the tomato's leaves wilted in the photo. The criminal bacteria might be drifted by the flood and prefers wet soil. I felt down when I had to abandon the poor tomato tree with many fruits in order to avoid further infection.

Cucumbers in "Cute" shapes

 Sometimes easy tools can make gardening more fun and I found funny tools in the Internet.

 A pair of "Cucumber Molds" are clear-plastic molds in heart-shaped and star-shaped and you can imagine easily how the shape of the "molded cucumbers" will be when they will have grown.

We can use them easily and quickly. Open the mold and put an young cucumber into it and,,,

                                   
 Close and lock up the mold. Literally a cucumber was molded.

3 days later, the molded cucumber's grown in a star-shape.

 I and my kids said "Wow!" when I cut the cucumber. Yes, it was truly a star-shaped cucumber.

  My kids sang "Twinkle, twinkle little star, now I've found what you are♪" while they were eating "the Stir-spangled Salad".

Harvesting all potatoes

  It took 4 months since I and my daughter planted seed potatoes and today all of them have been harvested successfully. It's difficult for me to see an opportunity to harvest them in the mid of a rainy season but I managed to harvest them while the sunshine was seen, which was only about a hour.

 I'm very satisfied with the size of those potatoes which was much bigger than the last year's ones.

Today's harvest:
3 cucumbers
100 potatoes

Harvest of this week

11/Jun:
3 cucumbers and,,,,


12/Jun
4 cucumbers!


--from iPad

The Weed Busters

 Can you guess who he is and what he is doing? The man in the photo wears a mask, working wears and rubber boots holding an engine-driven circular saw.
 Yes! We are " The Weed Busters "! My family, my brother and sister in law visited my wife's father to help weeding in his garden.




 The 2 circular saws are very effective to weed in a large area like his garden, which is about 300 square meter or 3000 square feet. They don't have any complicated mechanism but require maintenance. My brother in law, an electric specialist, has knowledge and experiences in dealing with engines and power transmission so he was so reliable that he changed their ignition plugs, some worn-out gears and fuel.




 Why do we have to be so "heavily-armed"? You can see the answer when you see the photo of the garden of my wife's father. He used to grow various kinds of vegetables and to sell them to local shops with his wife. But His wife died 4 years ago. He is also paralyzed due to a stroke. His garden has been abandoned for years and has become like "a deep forest" as the photo shown below. All of those weeds were almost 2 or 3 feet in height and had rooted too deeply to pull them out manually.


 I wish I could show how the saws powerful were in movie! (my movie camera's battery was dead.) They are powerful but so noisy with tons of exhaust gas which actually caused sore eyes and throat.

Our team spent about 1 hour weeding a whole garden and at last we completed our mission!



 Other weed busters, my wife and kids, contributed to making his Japanese-style garden more beautiful by weeding manually.


 My wife's father was so happy and satisfied with our work and he treated us to a nice dinner, Sukiyaki!

--from iPad

Harvesting potatoes in a rainy season

 Some leaves of my potatoes have become yellow, which shows it is the time to harvest potatoes. But most of the leaves are still green and I wonder when I should harvest all of them since a rainy season (梅雨/Tsuyu) will start in a few days in my place. We should harvest potatoes in a sunny and dry day because wet mud on potatoes have to be dried.

 Today was not fine with many crowd and no shower so I decided to select mature potatoes and harvest them.

 I found potato trees with yellowish leaves and dug them out. I found from 5 to 8 potatoes per tree and 2 or 3 of them were big, which shows this year's result of my potatoes is better than that of last year.

 Eventually, I harvested about 70 potatoes till scattered shower interfered me. About two-thirds of my potatoes are still in soil. I have less chance to harvest during the rainy season so I'll have to watch weather reports carefully to see when I should harvest them.

Today's dinner: Deep-fried potatoes

Butter and say-sauce are added on the potato.
Just try it! I make sure you will be satisfied with the taste!

Sweet potatoes only live twice.

 As I mentioned in my previous post, sweet potato's sprouts have no root and they extend them into soil as they grow. But can you guess what could happen to them until their roots grow enough?

They have no root at the beginning so they can't suck up water and nutrition to grow but they are so strong that they can survive that harsh environment.

 Here is one of my sweet potato's sprouts. It obviously looks dead. All leaves had gone. I guess novice gardeners might take they are truly dead and throw them away.

 But don't give them up! They are still alive! They have no leave because of no water and nutrition to be sucked up but they were extending their roots in soil. In a photo below, taken a week ago, you can see the sprout have successfully been revived.

Now I've found all of my sprouts are healthy.