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.

Winter sowing

 Some weather reports say this winter will be MUCH colder than the average of the last 5 years so I have to have some methods for expediting germination even in a cold weather.

 Today I sowed spinach and pak-choi. They can be sown through a year but some measures have to be installed for them in a cold winter. A vinyl tunnel is one of my favorite and effective ways, which is easy to set up.

 Setting up a vinyl tunnel is so easy that you don't need any instruction for it! We need just a rolled vinyl sheet, a set of 2 semi-sphere plastic poles and clothes-pegs.
 The vinyl tunnel can warm up the air inside effectively and I measured the temperature and found about 5゜C warmer than outside. In one of my tunnels I set up, spinach have germinated even in chilly days.

-- iPhone

Harvesting and cooking spinach, pak-chois and a cabbage

 It's a fine day with a clear sky and warm temperature in Osaka. How would I spend today doing nothing outside! Yes, I should go out, do gardening chores, seeding and harvesting in my garden and I did them today.

 As you can see the photos, my pak-chois and spinach have grown bigger enough to be harvested thanks to recent warm weather and proper amount of rain shower. But other keys to the successful growth are sowing less seeds in more spacious gardening ridge and proper thinning-out. I would like to refer to my old post about the keys.

Pak-chois

 I found many holes on my pak-chois! It's so shocking since I set up insect screens over the gardening ridge for my spinach and pak-chois!



 Judging from the shape of the damage on the leaves, I believed that some kinds of bugs had fed the leaves.



 After about 30min investigation, I found some slugs inside my pak-choi. My insect screen seems to be useless to protect my vegetables against bugs which can crawl through tiny space between the screen and soil.



 Fortunately, my spinach is intact and healthy with no holes by bugs although they've grown in the same gardening ridge with the bug-tainted pak-chois. Slugs might prefer pak-chois to spinach?

My spinach

 My cabbages are smaller than I expected but totally healthy with a good-shape heart. I wondered if I should glow them for another week but the outer leave have become hard, which shows it's the time to harvest so I decided to harvest them today.   

My cabbage

 Today's harvest:

1. 30 spinach
2. 25 pak-chois
3. 1 cabbage

Today's harvest

 I believe all vegetable gardeners, including me, feel it happy to cook their harvest just after we've harvest them and to eat them. My wife cooked stir-fried pak-choi with scrambled egg and grilled sausages. It's a simple recipe but the simpleness can make the best use of the pak-choi's flavor.






--from iPad

Seeking flowers in my garden

 Many people in Japan are enjoying viewing cherry-blossom in April but other beautiful flowers can be seen in my garden.

Flowers of brassica

Flowers of

Flowers of wild chrysanthemums, dandelion

and brassica in water, collected by my daughter.

 No matter how beautiful and attractive those flowers are, we never forget harvesting our vegetables. My spinach shown below are much bigger than last ones since I seeded them with keeping 10cm space between each other and thinned them out properly, I believe.

Today's harvest: spinach and a spring cabbage

--from iPad

Spring has come after a storm.

 We in Japan call a spring storm "春一番/ Haru-Ichiban", which shows spring is brought to Japan by a seasonal storm generated by warm sea water in the Eastern China sea. But the storm of yesterday was so strong that many people were injured and serious damages to all traffic schedules have been reported. One of those damages I could see today in our gardening plots are here. Other gardener's insect screens were blown by strong wind.

 Fortunately, no damage was found in my plot and what I and my daughter found there is my potato's germination! I've been waiting for their germination for 2 months after planting them! The colder temperature could delay their growth, I believe.

 After I found their germination, my gardening ridges for the potatoes should be expanded for securing more space for the growing potatoes. I bought some packs of gardening soil and added to the ridges.

Before adding soil.

After

 The storm has brought not only damage to us but spring with warm temperature and vegetables know it. They are growing faster as the temperature is getting warm.

spinach

cabbages

pak-chois

 My daughter is also waiting for a warm spring and she gets so enthusiastic for going to my garden  and watching the growth of vegetables in a warm day. She is also excited with the potato's germination.

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.

Cold days have come back.

 After warm days through last week, which could remind us of spring coming soon, severely cold days have come back to Osaka where I live. I expected my potatoes, which were planted 2 weeks ago, would have germinated but actually they have not yet.

 My spinach are also growing slowly due to the cold temperature with about 15cm leaves. They've grown enough to be harvested but I'm not satisfied with the size of them

 The growth of my onions are so remarkable that I can see their purple bulbs growing in soil. 

 The green leaves of my onions also look healthy and I expect we can harvest them in the beginning of May.

Recipe collection vol.5 / Pasta in cream sauce with spinach and sliced bacon

Ingredients for 4 people:

・Pasta / 300GR

・Spinach
・Sliced bacon
・Sliced onion / using a half of an onion
・Butter

・Milk / 150ml
・Cream / 100ml
・Consomme / 5GR
・flour / 2 spoons
・Salt and black pepper

1 Cut and slice spinach, bacon and onion.


2 Grill sliced onion, bacon with butter and brown them.


3 Add 2 spoons of flour and pour milk and cream slowly into a pan with stirring them to avoid lumps.

4 Add consomme into the sauce. Don't use it too much or the taste would be too salty.

5 Sprinkle salt and black pepper on the pan

6 Add spinach into the cream sauce


7 Add boiled pasta into the sauce and stir it well.


8 Serve a dish and enjoy it!


-- from iPod touch

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.