Category: Gardening

Not-Quite-Total War

April 6, 2015 / enroutetoawesome / 1 Comment

Our yard is seeing a lot of visitors right now, most welcome, others not so much. We’re currently winning the long-standing disagreement about who the bananas belong to (with protests from the rats) but I’m having unusual trouble in the leafy greens!

I’m not really into absolute destruction when it comes to garden nasties. My usual caterpillar control is largely laissez-faire, based on reasonable consumption, natural predation and a small amount of direct intervention. The main part of the strategy is just encouraging paper wasps to colonise the yard. These ladies carefully inspect the broccoli for grubs, then carry off what they find to chew into caterpillar pulp for their babies.

I had a reasonable deal going with the cabbage moth caterpillars; they keep their activities modest, I squish only those who make themselves impossible to ignore. Anyone else who evades the wasps is free to inhabit the vegetable beds (and is actually fairly welcome; I like their soft green colour and retiring nature). But these new horrors aren’t content to munch on a leaf or two; they gnaw their way down through the central bud and destroy any new leaves that try to form. They’ll even chew their way down through the bud into the stem and kill the plant completely!

Because these little beasts are safely embedded in the leaf buds, my wasps can’t find them. Even hand-squishing them is difficult, because at a touch, they wriggle backward in the most revolting way and drop further into the plant. No matter how much time Maddy and I spend crouched in the brassica bed with a pointy stick and a gumboot at the ready, it doesn’t seem to be enough. I’m reluctantly considering Dipel as a potential solution but…

The potential for collateral damage is just too high!

Dipel is an organic control method specific to caterpillars, so it won’t harm my other little visitors, like ladybeetles and bees. It also isn’t airborne, so if I put it on the vegie beds, it’s unlikely to escape. But Hawk Moth caterpillars (like that beauty above) are my favourite summer guests and the real reason why I grow grapes. They just aren’t something I’m willing to risk.

These lovelies inhabit the grape vines from about November on, and are almost at the end of their current munching season. While they may brandish a menacing spike on their back end, this is actually soft, floppy and entirely ornamental, as is the line of eyes along their patterned sides.

I love how fat and soft they are, the variety of colours they come in, and the way they pretend to be invisible, while plonking their podgy bodies on the slenderest of stems and dropping enormous, coffee-bean sized poos all over the back veranda. They’re one of my loveliest garden ornaments and as long as they need to use the backyard, I’m reluctant to do anything that might cause them harm.

That said, though, the cold weather is coming, and with it, my need to enlarge the brassica crops. I’m hoping that winter will solve some of this problem for me, but before then, I need my plants to grow! So, for now, I expect to spend a lot of time hunched over in the rain, digging out nasties to squash, with a damp dog as my reluctant company. Whether or not I will break remains to be seen.

What would you do?

Gem

November was….

December 8, 2014 / enroutetoawesome / 0 Comments

November was green, warm and quiet.

We’ve kept close to home (as our photos show!) but there have been plenty of visitors, human and otherwise and a new furry family member to keep us busy. The garden is green and productive, with even more promise for the coming months, work is steady and the house is clean (and almost organised!)

Restfully busy, November was exactly what we needed.

To active tranquillity.

Gem

March was…

April 3, 2014 / enroutetoawesome / 3 Comments

Spring! Finally, actual, no-more-wishful-thinking SPRING!

The return of old friends…

Including Shallow!

Rediscovering that Tokyo is insane.

Parties! Actual outdoor ones, after dark!

Hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) in Yoyogi Park. There were so many different parties going on that they all sort of made one BIG party!

The Indoor Refugees’ triumphant return to the Great Outdoors.

Gem’s birthday! These are my presents from Kin, including Kyoto courtyard gardening books and a gorgeous new (second hand) goldy-green kimono! My parents have a finger lime waiting for me back in Oz as well, so I have a pretty good haul this year. Thank you everyone! – Gem

March began chilly and still, but soon warmed up to be busy, busy, busy, with trips, events and new discoveries popping up every day! March was new blooms, night buses and near-nudity! Well….

Okay, no-one’s actually naked, but now that we’ve peeled off the layers of yeti-skins we’ve been wearing all winter and are walking around in actual human clothes, we feel a bit that way. It’s so lovely to be able to wear pretty clothes again and to just step outside whenever you feel like it! The ducks are back, the bats are back, insects are busy everywhere you look and we have survived our LAST EVER Northern Hemisphere winter! In four months, we’ll be back where the weather is sane!

February’s promise has definitely been met; the earth has warmed, nature is hard at work and it’s time for things to happen. And our countdown to Australia gets shorter every day…

It’s go-time!

Kin and Gem

Welcome, Spring!

March 13, 2014 / enroutetoawesome / 0 Comments

By Gem

…or maybe not. That is my school this morning. What the hell, man?

To an East-coast Australian, ice is NOT a substance that occurs in nature. Ice is produced by machinery and found in drinks. There is no good reason for it to just appear all over the place and even less reason for it to hang around for months at a time, getting thicker and meaner-looking every night. And there is absolutely NO possible excuse for it to roar back again NOW, when both the plum blossoms and my spirit were just starting to unfurl some tentative blooms.

Still…

…plum blossoms are tough and there have been some signs today that I may soon get my spring; like the honest-to-goodness waterfall tumbling off the roof of the gym. This morning, it was just beginning to trickle, but it was cascading by lunchtime and now it resembles alpine thaw in a nature documentary, just before the music turns to woodwinds and a time-lapsed field of edelweiss blooms.

I can only hope.

During the relatively snow-free weekend, though, Kin and I both popped on our coats (and hats and gloves and boots and scarves and mufflers and three layers of thermal underwear) and went to meet Gecko Sensei, my Tea Ceremony teacher in a watery little town to the south of Nagahama, called Gokasho.

To Grandmother’s House

Gokasho is one of Shiga’s Omi merchant towns from the Edo Period. The Omi merchants’ business took them all over Japan, but their families and their valuables remained safely installed in exquisite (not to mention highly secure) mansions in Shiga. Omihachiman is probably the most famous of these towns, but I find Gokasho with its spectacularly laid-out gardens and population of fat, friendly carp in the canals beside the roads, far, far more charming.

In theory, we were there to see the town’s Hinamatsuri displays. Sensei is the archetypal Yamato Nadeshiko, so a visit to a girl’s festival is exactly the sort of outing she enjoys. Kin finds Hinamatsuri dolls as creepy as hell, but is fond of Sensei and doesn’t trust her wobbling around unaccompanied when she’s wearing zori (which is pretty much all of the time). I find the displays fairly interesting, but mostly want any excuse to poke around in the magnificent gardens and old family homes (not to mention tickle a carp or two, should the opportunity arise).

For all of this meticulously planned magnificence, Gokasho isn’t imposing in the way that, say, Kakunodate or Nara can be. For one thing, it’s very obviously a little country village, even if it IS a little country village built and maintained by fabulously wealthy businesspeople. For another, any family home which has lasted for more than two generations develops a really awesome “Nan’s place” vibe ESPECIALLY if that home has since been making an effort to hang onto any item of potential historical value. That means that every old box that every Omi Mum has packed away for the last several hundred years has been unpacked and displayed, including the recent ones, so that next to each other are centuries-old teakettles, exquisitely lacquered furniture, plastic elephants on wheels and shelves of things like combs, old toys and tacky seaside ornaments made from shells, glue and googly eyes.

It’s an incredibly relaxing place for somewhere so interesting. And just look at this kitchen!

I’m always drawn to kitchens, but this was a particularly beautiful example of its breed. A person could really work in a kitchen like that.

The Gokasho gardens are surrounded by high walls and each one is different from all of the others.

I’m certain that the houses and gardens were planned simultaneously, as they complement each other so perfectly and each household seems to have chosen their own aesthetic. One family constructed a fascinatingly erratic landscape with hills, cliffs and a boulder-filled river. Another produced one that was peacefully flat, rambling and flower-filled, except where it rose around the lake (which the house was constructed to showcase).

My favourite garden looks like a small, dry forest with uneven stone paths winding through it. It’s kind of hard to explain what exactly is so breathtaking about that, but somehow this garden manages to feel completely peaceful and separate from the world outside its walls.

And any way, any town where the fish follow you around has to be pretty cool.

(A more complete album of Kin’s pictures can be found on our Facebook page.)

Keeping it cool (unfortunately).

Gem

EDIT: Ugh, I’ve just seen some of the photos of Gokasho available online and they give COMPLETELY the wrong idea of the place. It may be time to buy Kin that 32mm Prime lens and let him do it right.

The Horror: Repairing A Devastated Garden

September 2, 2013 / enroutetoawesome / 3 Comments

By Gem

Those who’ve been Enroute for a while know that I have a decent collection of herbs and vegies potted up on the balcony to help supply our little kitchen. You’ll also know that we recently went away for five days during the peak of summer. This is what greeted me when I returned:

Yikes! Time for a repair job!

Making a Speedy Recovery

Speed is important right now for two reasons. Firstly, I want to get us eating our own produce again ASAP. Secondly, Shiga might be warm right now, but within a few months the cold will return. To fix your garden or start a new garden at a time like this, you need to think fast and make the right decisions about what to plant.

Here are my selections:

I’ve picked some fast-growing options for the short term and medium-length options to keep us eating until the snow flies (stupid Northern Hemisphere and its stupid “actual winters”). It’s too late to replant any of the fruiting summer crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, or aubergines. Winter vegetables do exist, but I’m not used to snow OR to balcony gardening, so winter crops are probably beyond me as long as I’m in Japan.

My speedy selections are:

1- Supermarket Herb Pots

I bought basil, more flat-leaf parsley and two pots of salad herbs (lots of mizuna, not much lettuce from the looks. Bummer).

When money is no object, remember that the best seedlings always come from nurseries. The varieties are better-selected for home gardeners and the plants themselves are properly hardened, so they won’t curl up their little toes and die on you the second the sun touches them.

When you’re going cheap and nasty, though, supermarket herbs are a good option. These plants are intended for consumption rather than planting, so they are not even slightly hardened and will need a lot of cossetting from you. Generally, though, they cost half as much as proper plants and you usually get a lot per pot.

I gave my planters a very, very good soaking (seriously, the soil had gone badly hydrophobic, so I had to dig through every centimetre of soil and mix water through it. An easier way to do this is to simply purchase a soaking agent to help your soil absorb and retain water.) Then I planted the seedlings on an extremely overcast day and soaked them again. If the day had been sunny, I would have used pieces of cardboard to shield the plants.

2 – Asian Greens

Super cheap (because they grow from seed) and super-speedy, Asian greens are the shiznit. The seedlings will be established in just a few days and you can go from planting to cropping in just weeks. This speed and low cost also makes them a good option if you’re into microgreens.

These little guys are also TOUGH and will take some fairly serious abuse from you as seedlings (although you’ll want to start treating them nice when they get older, so that they’ll crop well for you). I chose Kokurakuten (or spinach mustard) as well as Pak Choi and direct-planted them. My favourites are usually Choy Sum and Tatsoi, but I didn’t find those here.

3 – Tomato Cuttings

“But Gem!” I hear you cry, “I thought you said it was too late to plant fruiting crops! Why are you recommending tomatoes at a time like this?”

It is too late to PLANT tomatoes, yes. But for a flush, late season crop, just when your tomato plants are getting a bit tired, tomato cuttings are brilliant (thank you, Jackie French!). The above picture is a cutting I took just a few weeks ago; it’s already flowering and even has a spray of fruit.

The best way to take a tomato cutting is to select one of your best performers of that season and then mulch it REALLY heavily, or bury the lower branches in soil. Then, once some roots have started to form, yank that branch off and replant it. Bingo, brand new tomato plant, eight times the size of any seedling you could buy and one hundred percent ready for some serious, tomato-growing action. If I hadn’t already taken cuttings of my cherry tomato, I would do my best to find a surviving bit and do it now. They really do grow that fast!

4 – Violas

Tough, colorful and fast growing violas are always a good flower when you’ve got a bare spot or two and you’re in a hurry. In Australia, my usual go-to options are huge pansy-faces and heartsease, but these look similar enough to get me by. You can plant violas almost any time at all, and as long as you take the most basic care of them, they will just keep on blooming for you. That includes the winter months of this stupid frozen hemisphere, although you’ll want to get them indoors before Christmas. The only better option I know is alyssum, but that is harder to put in a vase (also, I can’t find any).

5 – Mid-term vegies

These are still reasonably fast-growing options, just not up to the insane speed-levels of asian greens.

The speedier ones are lettuce and spinach (both for salads and for cooked dishes). I’ve planted these guys in seed-raising pots and will transplant them once they’re a reasonable size.

Slower-growing, are beans and chrysanthemum greens. In warm weather (which this still is), the beans will shoot within a few days of planting and should crop for at least a little while before the weather gets too cold. The chrysanthemum greens take a moderate amount of time to grow, but are very cold-resistant and should survive the first part of winter, even if they don’t get much bigger once the weather turns cold.

Luckily, despite heavy fatalities, there were some survivors, which means that my selections were probably a little different than if I had had no remaining assets in my garden. My tomato cutting, some herbs (thyme, oregano, rosemary, chives, flat leafed parsley, lemon balm and sage), some flowers (pink cosmos, morning glory and New Guinea impatien) and, surprisingly the zucchini, although the early crop has been sacrificed. All of these plants look like hell, but they’re already on the way to making a recovery.

I still weep for the fallen (especially the lettuce and my beautiful little miniature sunflowers!), but at least the damage has been repaired as far as I’m able and we won’t have to wait until spring to have fresh food!

What are your speedy go-to crops?

Gem