Home garden in Japan

Nancy Reading wrote:There are some self fertile kiwis. Mine was 'Jenny'. It fruited well (took a few years to start flowering) the flowers are really pretty - like large pale apricot apple blossom- so would make a nice bower for a few weeks. I gather the fruit are slightly smaller in self fertile varieties - smaller than a  chicken egg.
Lots of other edible climbers for your climate. I've tried a few, but really need more warmth, even in the tunnel: passionflower, Akebia, five flavour berries. Diascorea might be another option for you - would grow in a large planter perhaps. Hablitizia has very nice edible leaves, doesn't want it too hot and dry.

I need to go forage for some akebi so I can decide if I like them or not. I have Japanese yam volunteers, so if I go tuber hunting I could cultivate then.

Passion flower and hablitizia are new for me, I'll have to investigate...

I see. I didn't know passion fruit was a vine.

And I do hablitizia is Caucasian spinach, which I've heard of but not yet tried.

Another popular I've eaten one around here is malabar spinach. Which my wife and I like alright.

Spring winds are blowing in. The ume trees have been blooming for a couple weeks now. The cherry blossoms will come soon.

This year I'm determined to use our ume (Japanese apricots/plums) for SOMETHING. Last year I was waiting for them to turn yellow, as I assumed was their color of ripeness... but they all fell off the tree without turning yellow, so I now believe this variety does not turn yellow but more of a green/purple. I think they're not suited for pickled plums, but perhaps I can make ume juice. Plum wine is not exciting for me, but it's certainly the most suitable product from this tree's fruit.

My polyculture beds are growing nicely! It's fascinating seeing the different plants growing at different paces in different places. I think this method of broadcasting a wide diversity into a single bed has a lot to offer. We'll see how hard harvesting is, and if some of the lower growing plants get lost in the canopy of the faster growing foliage. Today I spot planted a few okra seeds around different spots of the polyculture, and broadcast another handful in the same bed. Okra seeds are super easy to save and very easy to grow too. Learning to like okra wasn't hard either! I'm not sure if I can distinguish all of the brassicas and mustards that I mixed, but I'm not sure that it really matters! You can eat broccoli leaves and cabbage stems right? If the taste is good it doesn't really matter what variety you're eating.

I'm having a little bit of trouble visualizing succession planting in the other beds. I don't know for example, how long the komatsuna is going to keep putting out leaves. It could stop next week, or it could keep leafing out through the spring. So until I know those aspects of growing in this garden I can't really plan when to sow the next generation of plants... Thus, my observations continue.

I'm finally... finally, getting some motivation back. I've been in a general slump for a month or so. Hopefully the upward trend continues through the spring.

Today I got some compost work done.

Sifted out my carefully selected compost (no seeds) and used it to fill up some modules and pots, and put the rest in an old store compost bag.

homemade potting mix

The remnants went back into the compost pile.

compost for potting

I then chopped down three banana stalks and chopped them up and re-filled the compost. I tried composting these in my big indiscriminate slow compost to wonderful success, so hopefully it will work as well here in the smaller scale. Huge amount of organic material.

bananas make a lot of organic matter

banana stalks are full of water and very heavy

chopped for compost

The bananas are an example of The Problem is the Solution. These things are vigorous like crazy. I can't kill them, but they are pushing over our property rock border onto our neighbors, and expanding out to the neighbors property. I decided last year to try using them as a major source of compost material, and it works well. Yay for permaculture principles.

Working on my plant IDs again this spring.

Looks like in my raised beds I've got the following volunteers:

henbit deadnettle - seems largely harmless, apparently good early nectar plant for bees
veronica persica - spreads and covers quite a lot of surface, might hedge out some vegetable seeds/seedlings, but has a really pretty little blue flower.
some kind of wild geranium - mostly harmless
oxalis - mostly harmless but can get big
narrow leaved vetch - nice legume nitrogen fixer, can get big enough to outcrowd and tangle some crop plants though, so best to keep an eye on it.

a few others I can't identify for sure.

The bindweed hasn't made much of a comeback yet, though I expect it will later in the year.

Some of the annoying grasses and bulb-grown perennials are trying to get established again. I am selecting them out.

Hey L, (sorry, I couldn't find your fuller name!)

It's super helpful and interesting hearing people's growing stories from different parts of the world, thanks!

I'm really curious about permaculture and growing in Japan, and especially the colder climates, like Hokkaido. A lot of cooler weather Japanese plants seem to do well for us in Latvia.

Do you have contacts in Hokkaido, or perhaps know of Japanese growing forums where I could share information and ask some questions?

Thanks so much, I intend to publish information on growing in different climates based on my research within the next year!

Charlie
forestgardenplants.blogspot.com

Kārlis Taurenis wrote:Hey L, (sorry, I couldn't find your fuller name!)

L is fine.

Kārlis Taurenis wrote:It's super helpful and interesting hearing people's growing stories from different parts of the world, thanks!

I'm happy to share. Writing things down helps me to remember. It's also pretty easy to search my own posts to organize my own endeavors here.

Kārlis Taurenis wrote:I'm really curious about permaculture and growing in Japan, and especially the colder climates, like Hokkaido. A lot of cooler weather Japanese plants seem to do well for us in Latvia.

Fascinating. Apparently parts of Japan and parts of the UK are also similar. Where I am is much warmer than the average in Japan. Our seasons happen a month or so earlier than in Tokyo. We can grow lots of citrus here and it barely dips below freezing. Our coldest temperatures were -2 or -3 celsius this past winter.

Kārlis Taurenis wrote:Do you have contacts in Hokkaido, or perhaps know of Japanese growing forums where I could share information and ask some questions?

There are some folks in northern Japan on this forum. An interesting thread focused on building a rocket mass heater was started by one member: https://permies.com/t/560/122458/Advice-RMH-build-Hokkaido-Japan

You can browse through the Asia forum and see what comes up too: https://permies.com/f/34/asia

Kārlis Taurenis wrote:Thanks so much, I intend to publish information on growing in different climates based on my research within the next year!

Good luck with your research. Start a thread with a good title and share with us here if you don't mind!

I'm starting to get the hang of this gardening thing...

I sowed edamame between my komatsuna while I was still harvesting the greens. Now the komatsuna are flowering and the edamame are sprouting! The timing is starting to make sense.

I have a few different Br. Rapa plants flowering (chinese cabbage, komatsuna, bok choy) and I expect they will cross somewhat. But I'm going to save the seeds and use them and see what happens... because I got lucky with some pretty pest resistant plants among those, and I want those genes.

My beets are slowly coming back for their second season... They didn't make big tubers, so I didn't even try harvesting them. But I'm going to see them through their lifecycle and maybe grab some seeds from them too. The same was true of my burdock.

A lot of things bolted. I think part of it was a sudden heat wave in late February or early March. Some of it is probably because I didn't water them enough in the dry season. But I'm interested in the long-game, so I culled a lot of the bolting plants and let the better thriving ones continue.

Lettuce is slowly coming in where I broadcast it.

The hirsute raspberry canes that I left alone have begun flowering. More or less each flower turns into a berry, so I'm glad I waited a year and let them all grow. Looks like I will have at least a hundred berries this year, which is a great improvement on the 5 from last year.

I also have some extremely old seeds successfully germinating in the greenhouse. I think I got 4 eggplants to sprout from 12 year old seed. I also got some tomatoes from similarly old seeds. If I manage to grow them to fruit and save some seeds those are good genes for seed longevity.

Eggplant and Green pepper are germinating for me for the first time, and I'm really happy about both. We'll see what comes up and what thrives.

Updates.

Broadcast beds were overall a failure. The reason ties in with something else I've discovered and is more about ME than the garden or the plants.

That is - I am not very good at thinning and balancing weeds with crops.

I think going forward I'm going to do best by keeping my raised beds largely weed free and applying homemade compost, mulch, weed soak fertilizers, and the like.

My seed starting game is going well though and I've found I get pretty good results by raising fairly mature starts and then planting them out. This has helped beat the pest pressure and also helps me find my plants more easily amongst the weeds.

My seed saving game is also going well. I now have a fairly diverse stock of home saved seeds. Most are first generation, so it will be interesting to see how successful they are going forward, but my okra and lettuce are already second generation and serving me well. I do intend to add more diversity to the gene pool going forward and do a generation-successive diversity building project, saving the successful plants seeds and working towards the laziest garden I can make.

My compost game is improving somewhat. I finally decided on a better location for my primary pile - right beside my raised beds. Which makes both disposing of the waste and accessing the compost much much more convenient. We're still dumping all of our kitchen scraps into the old pile, but I'll periodically just move that pile to the new one. I realized a while ago that the japanese bananas (fruitless) that were troubling me really do make an amazing compost component. Harvesting nutrients is rewarding.

In other updates:
The peach pits didn't germinate.
My thornless blackberries fruited, they're big but a bit sour for me.
I got my first bag full of goat poop from my friend's goat and applied it here and there.
I've been making anaerobic liquid fertilizer with dandelion, thistle and such. It seems to have had an immediate and powerfully invigorating effect on everything I used it on.
I have self-seeded brassicas and lettuce growing EVERYWHERE. It's kind of cool, but I have no idea what most of them are, since I've been letting so many of my vegetables go to seed.

The kabocha winter squash that I started in pots and transplanted out are doing quite well! It's a relief because my first two years of trying to grow pumpkins were complete and total failures. I'm hoping this year at least one of the vines produces squash. I don't intend to do manual pollination, so I'm also hoping I've got enough pollinators coming into the garden to help me out.


I received 20 sweet potato slips from a friend who couldn't sell them, I managed to find some places to plant half in the garden, and put the rest in containers here and there. I've never grown sweet potatoes so it will be an experiment. I'm using about 6 of them to try to make a green curtain to shade one of our south-facing windows.

I successfully made a 1.5 month (fermented) ume syrup. It didn't go alcoholic, which is as hoped and smelled perfectly ume-ish. Tastes wonderful with club soda.