My kids spend the last day of their spring vacation in my garden.

 I'm very happy that I and my kids could spend the last day of their spring vacation working in my garden. I'm happy not only for their help but for their positive attitude toward working in my garden.

 I did't asked them or invited them to come to my garden but they said "Take us to your garden, Dad!" when I left my house with my hoe. You can see their great jobs in my garden in the photos shown below.

Mission 1 : Weeding

Mission 2 : Cultivating soil

Mission 3 : Covering ridges with black mulch-sheets

 When I see their positive attitude, I strongly believe my education through my gardening will make for establishing their views in a good way. I always tell my kids that we live on food like meat, vegetables, fish, what we can get by growing and killing them. They seem to feel or acknowledge how important it is to know how we live and how interesting and valuable it is to take part in gardening, where they can grow their food.

Exploring the rain forest in Iriomote island

I had a dream for long time. It's exploring a rain forest with canoes. At last my dream came true!

My family have trip to Iriomote island, located in about 450KM southwest of Okinawa main island.

90% of the island is covered with rain forest and is famous for indigenous wild animals an plants and various kinds of activities in the forest.

We took part in a excursion tour to the Pinaisala falls with paddling in the river and trekking through the forest.

It was the first time for us to paddle canoes so we had difficulty in dealing with the canoe and strong wind. But we MANAGED to go up the river to the goal.

We found many kinds of tropical plants like Bruguiera gymnorhiza in the mangrove forest along the river.

Bruguiera gymnorhiza: Black mangrove

Bruguiera gymnorhiza: Black mangrove

Heritiera littoralis

Cyathea lepifera:Flying Spider-monkey Tree Fern

The scenery from the top of the Pinaisala falls

I

My family and the Pinaisala falls

t was still cool to swim in the basin of the falls but we had a craving for doing it and at last we dared to dive into the water and swim! Look at a middle aged man diving into the water with joy! It's me! 

diving with yelling "Yeaaaaha!!"

It's not a drowned body but he is my son relaxing himself on the water.

Working in a cold day

 I hate a cold weather. I'm sensitive to cold temperature so I wear wool socks when I sleep. How about outside? Do you think I wear a shaggy fur coat when I work in my garden? If you think so, the idea could be a little exaggerated. I always bring some portable body warmers in a cold day but today was much colder than I expected! Look at the ice in a bucket! It's about 1cm-thick ice! I had to bear with the severely cold temperature with only 2 body warmers.

 I wondered if my vegetables, especially my spinach, were growing well while the cold days but I felt relief when they grew well in a vinyl tunnel. The tunnel is very effective to keep the air inside warm judging from the growth of the spinach, which are as sensitive to cold temperature as me.

 While I worked in my garden suffering the cold weather, my daughter was so brisk with vim and vigor that she cultivated the gardening ridges for the next seeding.  Today's harvest: 1 Chinese cabbage

Today's dinner: A hot pot dish with the Chinese cabbage, sliced pork and tofu boiled in miso-based soup.

The Fruits Hunters.

 It's very regrettable that I've been absent from blogging for the last one month and a half since I was so busy in my business. Now I can managed to have spare time to blog so I hope many blogging friends will visit my blog again.

 As the weather getting cold, around the end of November, my family visit my father in law living in Nara, the city famous as an ancient capital of Japan, for helping him with harvesting persimmon fruits and kiwi fruits. There are many persimmon trees in the backyard and kiwi trees in his garden. He can't harvest them since his right size is paralyzed due to a stroke. That's why we help him every year and we have another reason. My kids are excited with the Fruits Hunting.

 When we saw the persimmon trees, we were shocked with less fruits on the trees than in last year. You can see easily how less the fruits is. But my kids were so helpful that they cooperated with us and my sister in law. You know why? Because they worked for "the sweet fruits of labor".
 Persimmon fruits are located on high branches and twigs so a tool called "a long-handled lopper" (one of my blogging friends taught the English name.)  is so convenient that we can harvest persimmon fruits efficiently. Even my daughter can prune and catch the fruits on the ground as the photo shown below.

My kids cooperated in harvesting the fruits.

 The total amount of the persimmon fruits was less than 1/3 of last year's harvest. My father in law said there is some kind of cycle in the amount of fruits. We don't know what works on the cycle but temperature, weather, and precipitation might affect the cycle.
 We love sweet persimmon fruits and wild birds love them, too! They seem to be able to pick sweet ones instinctively!
 After harvesting them, we peeled and serve them with hot green tea. The tea's bitter taste go well with the sweet fruits.

--from iPad

Harvesting sweet potatoes with my daughter

 After autumn rainy days, it was so fine today without any crowds in Osaka and was the best time to harvest my sweet potatoes, which planted about 4 months ago. My daughter was more cooperative in helping me harvest them than usual since she loves sweet potatoes and was looking forward to harvesting and tasting them for long time! Look at her digging out the potatoes with a shovel. She looks like a treasure hunter, doesn't she? 

When she found "one of her treasures", she screamed "Yeaaaaah!!!, got it!!"

 Eventually, we dug about 30 sweat potatoes and most of them were about 20 cm long or longer. This was the first time for me to grow sweet potatoes and I believe it was successful.

 Actually, I planted 3 types of sweet potatoes, Beniazuma, Annou and Naruto-Kintoki. Can you distinguish them? Beniazuma has a little red peel so it's easy to see them but other ones look almost same. 

 After harvesting them, I dried them in shade to sweeten them. The process can vaporize water in the potatoes and we can enjoy sweeter potatoes in a few days.

Pulling out cucumbers with my daughter

 Helping me in my garden in the mid of hot August shows my daughter's attitude toward gardening, I believe.

 Today's weather was so hot and humid that I sweated so much even when I just walked to my garden but my daughter, who is in her summer holiday, loves to work with me in my garden and pulled out my cucumbers and the plastic poles. Her good help could save my working time. My cucumber's leaves began turning brown since the mid of July and the fruits also grew halfway. That's is the sign saying the cucumber was close to death. So I decided to pull them out.

 I harvested about 50 cucumbers from the 3 trees. I believe they could give a bumper harvest and my vegetable space in my fridge was full of them. After pulling them out, I added fertilizer, cow manure and ash powder to the place for the cucumbers and mix them up for the next autumn vegetables like Chinese cabbages(Hakusai cabbages), which my daughter loves.

 As my summer vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes have gone, my eggplants have grown well and my daughter feels it joyful to harvesting some of the fruits. I planted different breed of eggplants which can have long fruits. You can see the difference of length between a long one and usual one.

The Sashimi Festival

 My family tripped to Shirahama, Wakayama pref. for enjoying swimming in the beautiful sea, taking a nap on the white-sand beach and having a gorgeous dinner in a local seafood restaurant.

The Shirarahama Beach

  I believe most of Japanese love to eat raw seafood especially Sashimi ( sliced raw seafood ). My family also love so much Sashimi and we visit a local seafood restaurant whenever we visit tourism spots near the ocean. Those restaurants have their own seawater pool for keeping fish and other seafood alive and fresh. We can pick up our favorite fish and the chef cook them into our favorite dish. At this dinner, we selected a Japanese spiny lobster, an abalone and a stripped beakfish for Sashimi and a snapper for a deep-fried fish.

A Japanese spiny lobster, a abalone and a snapper 

A stripped beakfish

 I think some bloggers could recognized yellow flowers besides sashimi. These are edible chrysanthemum, which are used not only for decoration but for condiment. At the bottom left of the sashimi dish, something green can be seen. It's a Wasabi or a  grated Japanese horse radish, the most popular condiment for sashimi in Japan. The spicy taste goes well with raw fish.

Assorted sashimi.

A deep-fried snapper

A Japanese spiny lobster boiled in miso-soup.

Today's harvests and my wife's birthday.

 It's been sunny in the last few days during a rainy season, which was the important opportunity to work in my garden. We have to watch the growth speed of summer vegetables like cucumbers since they can grow much faster in this season due to tons of rain and strong sunlight. One of my cucumbers became too big while a few days. Big cucumbers has a thick skin but less water inside so we can't use them for salads. Well, I'll have to pickled it in rice bran.

  The fruits of my black chili have also grown well and I harvested some of them with green peppers. They were moderately size to enjoy their taste so I'll stir-fly them with sliced beef in oyster sauce, which is my favorite recipe.

  My egg-plants' growth is slower than usual with fewer and smaller fruits. I think the slow growth might be caused by consecutive cropping.

 The tomato harvesting season has arrived! I found many tomato fruits have been mature turning red, whose size were as big as my fist. I'm very excited with this good results since I failed to grow bigger and delicious tomatoes many times. The success is due to Less fertilizer. Too much fertilizer could be consumed for their leave's growth not for their fruits. My tomatoes are "Momotaro/桃太郎" which is popular variety in Japan.

 My sweet corncobs were about 15cm/7inches. I've not found any damage by bugs yet.

 Today is my wife's birthday so I rushed to a flower shop after working in my garden and a floral designer made a flower bouquet for my wife.

Flowers, fruits and love for my wife

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