Weekend in the Garden
Yuko was working on Saturday, so I spent some of the day setting up stuff at home and getting stuff for the garden. It was a pretty hot day, so didn’t actually fancy doing any gardening though.
Ending up doing that on the Sunday, when it was a little bit cooler. Mind you, spent some time trying to mow the lawn, which was quite long when we moved in, and had naturally got longer since. Now that it’s done though, the aim is to mow every weekend. I’m probably going to get a manual push mower, which will be perfectly adequate for regular usage. The petrol mower will only be used if I end up not doing the lawn for a few weeks due to bad weather etc.
The gardening preparations continue… with composter purchased, some extra netting, and a big pile of seeds. I’ve brought some from a place called ‘Real Seeds’ that produces (and sources) non-hybrid type seeds. These are the ones you can create your own seed from, and breed a bit of genetic diversity into your own crop (booo-hiss to DNA mono-culturism). I was even happier when I found out that I can get seeds for a fair number of Japanese and Asian vegetables too. Fantastic!! If we can grow our own stuff, no need to buy stuff shipped in from Japan.
In the news
I loved this story about some DIY solar heating.
I found this site as well, which has been created for the impeding (in my humble opinion) property price crash (or decline at least).
It was interesting to see that a couple of the houses near where we are had to have their prices dropped to sell them (in fact, one of them is actually only under offer at the moment, and the sale is not complete yet).
In Japan news, there’s a lot of talk at the moment about retirement age, and measures to reduce the numbers of suicides.
2007 Jun 11 Gavin
What Japanese vegetables would you grow then? I’m curious – if it was easy to grow them in the UK, wouldn’t people generally do it anyway?
Right, let me see… (Digs up the list).
Mizuna, Giant Miike, Ishikura Bunching Onion and Shimonita leek.
Plus from China, we have Pe Tsai and Pak Choi.
Pak Choi is pretty common these days, and I believe is grown in reasonable quantities in the UK. No idea about Pe Tsai though.
I’ve seen Mizuna at the local farmer market a couple of times. Never seen any of the others though.
Reminds me actually. Seen ‘Daikon’ quite a lot at Chinese and Asian food places. Wonder if it’s UK grown or imported. I need to find some seeds for that, but it’s a bit big, so hard to grow in containers
Shiitake would be difficult to grow without specialist buildings I guess.
Well, you could argue that it’s easy to grow ‘normal’ veg, but people don’t
I guess there’s limited market for Japanese ones… not enough sushi places in Bath or Cardiff! (New one opened in Swansea, apparently very good).