タグ: gardening

Two Lives are to be Eaten, NOT to be Disposed

Severe summer heat continues. Since I don’t have my vehicle, I have to walk to a supermarket. Go-and-back is a little less than two miles. I don’t walk this distance in the middle of the day. So, these days, I go shopping right after my supper in the evening.

Tonight, I found some horse mackerels were remaining in the refrigerated shelf of the supermarket. They were fresh fishes for Sashimi (raw fish). But the time was already past 7:30 p.m. There were not many customers in the store. It was highly likely that no customers would buy them until the closing time at 8:30 p.m. If it’s a small shop, those fishes would turn to be grilled fishes and appear on the shelves next day. But because it’s a supermarket, I thought they would be disposed as a waste after the store closed in one hour. I didn’t want them to be wasted. I bought one package in which two horse mackerels were packed.

When I got to my house, I quickly started processing. Now the main dishes of tomorrow supper have already decided. I hope that storing one day in the refrigerator could make the taste of fish meat better.

Horse Mackerels for Sashimi that I bought Tonight

Horse Mackerels that I processed at 8:30p.m.

Walking under Strong Sunshine, I had got a new Smartphone

It used to be called the City of Railway

Amid the heat of 35 Celsius, I walked more than 30 minutes. I had an appointment with a telecommunication company at 10a.m. Like other rural area, the shopping district is always located in remote area from the old town. All the customers are supposed to come by own vehicles to a shopping mall. So, people like me without a car have difficulties to buy a thing or get services which other people can get. I am a minority, and people having a car are majority in this society.

I bought a Samsung’s Galaxy. When I said this on the video call, my older sister seemed to laugh at me. Actually, I don’t understand why she looks down Samsung products. I just bought what a store clerk recommended me and I thought it had enough performance.

Vegetable Rahmen

When I got out of the store, the sunshine had become even stronger such that I could worry about heat stroke and damage on my skin. It would have taken another thirty minutes for way back to the JR station. I walked, but stopped frequently under the shades. I called my mother using the mobile phone that I had just bought, to say I could not get back home by noon. She told me not to hurry to come home, rather, to take a rest somewhere in the town.

So, I got into a Rahmen restaurant near the railway station. And ate “Vegetable Rahmen” of 880JPY there. Other than me, there was an old man in the restaurant, drinking alcohol in the middle of the day. It was around 12:30 on week day. But there were only two customers in the restaurant. I could hear only sound of cooking and voices from TV. It was very quiet. Clearly it showed to me the declining of a local town in Japan.

Observatory of Downtown Niigata; There are Three.

On a Platform of JR Niigata Train Station

Today I went to Niigata because I wanted my ID photo. Actually, I had tried to take my photo by myself with my digital camera. But it was so difficult to make my photo a good one with right lighting, straight direction of face, and good color contrast. I wasted more than two hours yesterday and I gave up the idea to take my photo by myself. So today, I went to a photo studio in Niigata. The studio told me to wait for 30 minutes for processing my photo.

The outside, under the summer sunshine, was too hot. But I walked to Bandai area of the downtown Niigata. An idea came to my mind and that was to go to the observatory in the nearby tall building. There is a 20-story building which is also an office of the famous local newspaper company. I remembered that there was an observatory at the top of the building. I thought it was good to kill thirty minutes.

Toki Messe Building Standing by Niigata West Port

There is a tall building in the photo above. That building also has an observatory. I have been there several times. The observatory has a good view from south-west to north. But you cannot get good view from North east to south.

Bandai Bridge on Shinano River and So-called Niigata Island

You see a tall building with sharp triangle roof on top. That building also has an observatory. But the view from there is limited only from north to South. You cannot see the west. That means you cannot enjoy the view of the sea and Sado island on the west. Actually, if you are male, you could see them by going to men’s restroom. I am a man, so I am not sure whether or not female people can see the west through toilet window. If they can’t, I think it is clearly one of sexual discrimination against women because man can get ocean view while women can’t.

Today’s my conclusion is that the best observatory in the downtown Niigata is where I went to today. It is on the 20th floor of the “Mediaship” building in Bandai area. The second best is of Toki Messe. If you want to take a good picture of Shinano River, Toki Messe is better than Mediaship.

Mr. Abe’s photo on a Newspaper came back in Japan with me

Mr. Shinzo Abe was a politician of Japan. And I should say I didn’t like him at all. Anything he did and said was against my belief and political preferences. But I think he should not have died in that way. He was shot dead by a handmade gun about three years ago.

Two weeks ago, I found his photo on an old newspaper dated on July 11, 2019. Since I was going to quit my job and come back Japan, I was cleaning my room. At that time, I had already finished grading my students for the semester and had registered the scores on the university system. In order to leave the residence, I needed to throw many things as much as I could so that I could pack my stuff into two suitcases and one bag.

Old newspaper is sometime useful to wrap a fragile stuff. But there were many newspaper. I just thought throwing them as trash. And then found Mr. Abe’s photo between the pages. At first, I thought I would throw the page with other pages, but I changed my mind. Even though I didn’t like him, I wanted to take his photo back to Japan with me. Just one page of newspaper wouldn’t increase weight of my suitcase; it’s just a few gram. So, I folded the page and put it into one of my suitcases.

Since two suitcases are too heavy to carry by myself from Narita Airport to my house in Niigata, I asked a shipping company “Kuroneko Yamato” to deliver them. I received them three days ago. I opened one, and found Mr. Abe’s photo again.

Two years have changed my garden to bush

There is a small field to cultivate vegetables in the back of my house. Since I had been working abroad in these two years, now the field is covered with weeds. I need to pull them out and cultivate soil by my hand in order to plant vegetables in autumn.

Now it’s the end of July, and summer continues in August. When I came back here two days ago, I quickly realized that there had not been rainfall for long. Everything was dried. Probably three weeks or even one month, my area hasn’t got precipitation. Many leaves became yellow, some trees were withered and died.

Another problem is heat. In addition to drying weather, temperature is high in this summer. It gets 35 Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) every day. I don’t think it is good for my health and safety if I work in my field in the middle of scorching heat and under strong sunshine.

So, I got up 4:30 a.m. in this morning, went to my field, pulled weeds, and gave water to trees. When I approached to grape trees and gripped weeds with my hand, I was stung by two bees. I felt sharp pain on my left hand. Luckily enough, my left hand hasn’t got much aching nor red swelling after that.

Anyway, I know I have to work a lot on my field to make it again well managed vegetable field.

What to do about Damage to a Fig Tree by Long-horn Beetles.

My another photo blog “LQ Laoshi’s Photo Gallery”(outside wordpress)


A fig tree is vulnerable to damage by long-horn beetles. Since the trunk of a fig tree is relatively soft, the insects make holes and go into the inside. In that case, the trunk of the tree becomes houses and also food. And then there will be so many holes on the surface and the trunk will have void inside. It quite often results in the death of the fig tree.

If it is in early stage with a little number of holes, injecting insecticide would be one of solutions. However, it means that the injected chemical could go up in the tree and reach to the fruits. So I don’t think injecting insecticide could be a solution as a countermeasure against long-horn beetles in a fig tree.

A practical solution is as follows. You need to accept the damage caused by long-horn beetles on a fig tree. In other words, you admit that a fig tree is short-lived. But it does not mean you need to give up the fruits. What you need to do is renewing your “main” fig tree in relatively short term. You make young trees using a branch and/or shoot that are taken from the existing fig tree. By keeping several young trees as the spares, and planting them every three or four years, you will get the fruits, even though some times the damage happens.

So, this year, I made three young fig trees using the existing fig tree’s shoot.

Photo taken in Niigata JAPAN


They were taken from a native Japanese fig tree. So those fruits are not so sweet because the species has not been improved like some western fig trees. But this kind is hardy and can stands for winter cold. Although its sweetness is not perfect, eating fresh is actually good. And a good thing is that I can make a lot of jam (jelly) and compote in autumn.

Photo taken in Niigata JAPAN

Took a Walk to the River, though Rainy Season is still going on

The spring semester was over. Summer break has started. But there is no time for me to take a rest. I have already started preparation for the next semester. Since the day before yesterday, I have been scanning the pictures on textbook so that I can use them on PPT slides. Since today is not rainy (though it’s dark), I took a walk in the afternoon. 

Bridge for Farmers’ Vehicles

Mountains whose heights were about 1000 meter were seen from the bridge.

View from the Bridge

A farmer and her husband were working to harvest onions.

Farmers are Working Hard on the Ground

Oh, by the way, this wordpress writing system is quite inconvenient. It is hard for me to operate. Now I regret starting writing this post. This is terrible.

Growing Rice in the Paddy Fields

I can see five peaks of Gozu Mountain. “Gozu” uses two Chinese Characters for “Five” and “Heads”.

Mountain Gozu behind the Paddy Fields

It is a kind of agony just to write sentences and insert images. I hope someone will change and enhance to make it easy to write and post a blog.

The board is saying “Let us make the river clean”, “You will be punished if throwing trashes and/or dirty matters in the river area”.

Unclear Board saying not to throw garbage

Flowers I saw on the way to the river

I am just wondering how other wordpress users feel about this very poor operability of writing system. I would like to say “This is a torture”.

Lily “Lollipop” in Bloom

The new writing system of wordpress has made difficult to write and edit a post. It seems a HTML geek is proud of building an automatic function to form “DIV” commands. But it is almost painful to me. I want someone to get the old simple writing system back.

By the way, I asked a neighbor to cultivate the land and grow vegetable so that the garden would not be an abandoned bush. On Monday the person was cutting weed for us but he mistakenly cut the lily that I planted several years ago (Because the lily was among the weed). He brought that lily to my house with some apology. My mom put it in a brown glass bottle of a cheap “energy drink”. Since the bud of lily was still young, we didn’t expect the lily would be able to bloom. To our surprise, the lily flower opened in the following day.

Lily “Lollipop” in the bottle of Lipovitan D

I bought bulbs of lily “Lolipop” several years ago in DIY shop “Komeri”. The bulbs were discounted because they were apparently unsold long time. I thought, if it were going to be a waste, I would buy and plant them in the garden. After that, Lollipop had been in bloom every year even though I didn’t take care of them. The neighbor didn’t cut them all, so some are still left on the ground.

Lily “Lolipop” on the Ground

Yesterday my mom went outside around the noon to get her lunch. It was so hot, so she gave up staying outside, just buying a lunch box, and then came back home. She told me to look at her lunch box that costed only 330 Japanese Yen. She wanted to show that there were a lot of things in a cheap lunch box that would be equivalent to three USD. But I have to say, I don’t think it is good to eat those cheap processed food. It should be bad for health.

330 Yen Lunch Box (=3USD)

Green beans that I planted are growing in the garden although it will take more than a month or so from now until the harvest.

Young Green Beans are Growing on the Ground

I found the gooseberry was turning to be red. Taste? of course anything from the garden is always sour. I have already confirmed it by the most reddest goose berry fruit.

Fruits of Gooseberry Now Turning to be Red

And this morning I found that flowers of hollyhock started blooming.

Rare Color of Hollyhock Flower

Uh,… I wasted my one hour to make this post. The blog that people hardly view is called “an isolated island on the continent” in Japanese. Mine is also like that.

Fruits and Vegetables are Growing in the Garden.

A fruit of silverberry (goumi) has turned to be red. Actually there were only three fruits on the silverberry tree. This is one of them.

I have already taken this one. Only two goumi(s) remain on the tree now. They are still green.

I don’t know whether this silverberry is edible or not. As was obvious for the case of strawberry, nothing from my garden can be sweet. They are always sour so that you would like to jump up when you put them in your mouth.

I left the silverberry like this on the table. Soon I found that this small tiny red fruit had disappeared. I asked my mom where the silverberry had gone. She answered that she offered it to the deceased my father. And then I saw this small red thing was put in front of my dad’s photo.

Flower of cucumber has already had the young cucumber .

This is a flower of egg plant.

This is a flower of pumpkin. If it was a female flower, it would be a pumpkin. But you know, the flowers are almost always male flowers. A female flower is very rare. There is no easy thing in this world.

This yellow flowers are not of pumpkin but zucchini.

These vegetables were not that I planted. Since I am very busy in days and nights for the online teaching things, I asked a neighbor to cultivate and grow vegetables in my family’s garden. I should be thankful to him.

But there is a one vegetable that I planted.

I planted some seeds of green beans. Seeds were sold by 200 JPY (tax exclusive) that was approximately equivalent to 2 dollars. The seeds were imported to Japan from the country where the authority used teargas to disperse the peaceful demonstrations in order to do a photo op in front of a church to show a man holding a book that he had actually never read at all (probably).

But anyway, it is not that big issue, I mean, where the seeds came from. Because they have germinated safely on the land of Japan. If I can harvest green beans, I will boil them just a little, dip into mayonnaise, and then eat them in hot summer night with chilled beer. I am looking forward to doing so.

How to Take Care of Your Tomato

This is to show you how to take care of your tomato in this time around.

You need to cut off the buds of branch so that the main stem can grow. The orange circle in the photograph shows a bud coming from between the main stem and a leaf. It should be removed.

This photograph shows, by a blue circle, that an unnecessary branch has been cut off. In this time of season, you need to check this very frequently like almost everyday. If you leave those branches to grow, your tomato will be terrible and chaotic with many stems and branches such that you want to start singing “Welcome to the jungle!”. Cut them off, or you will get small size tomato.