Tomatoes: Sprouts

It's spring time here in Tokyo, but you wouldn't know it if you stepped outside. We've had a week-long cold snap here which has really put a damper on cherry blossom viewing. Usually the cherry trees are in full bloom, but due to the cold many are buds haven't opened yet.

Today is a bit warmer, but it still doesn't quite feel like spring has sprung.

The tomatoes I planted in the first week of March are sprouting. The cold hasn't affected them as much as I had expected, and all 16 pots have tiny little sprouts poking up through the soil.

As I mentioned before, each pot is planted with 3 seeds in the expectation that the majority of seeds will likely fail to germinate. That 16 sprouts have appeared is pretty astonishing to me, since I wasn't expecting so many to actually make it.

These plants will continue to grow in the pot until they are about 20cm or so. My notes show that the plants should be ready for transplant in late May.

Strawberries: First fruits of the season

This spring hasn't quite begun, it seems. The past couple days have been in the low teens (°C) and the forecast is rain and cold until mid-week. Although very cool, it hasn't dropped below freezing, so the plants in the veranda garden are pushing through.

It's been almost a week since I last blogged and there has been quite a bit of growth all around. The potatoes are growing like crazy, the broccoli is gaining height and new leaves are coming in, and most exciting is the tomato sprouts that have broken through the soil. I'll save those for another day when pictures are better.

Strawberries are looking great. There are lots of flowers this year, a stark contrast to last year when there were only a handful of flowers all season. I can't wait for fruiting season!

Speaking of fruiting...
Hid underneath a big leaf was a little strawberry just getting started! In this picture, the fruit is about 1cm from stem to tip. I've never measured how long it takes for my strawberries to ripen, but I'll definitely do it this time.

On another note, yesterday I bought some strawberry-specific fertilizer at the home center, but when I looked for it this morning it was nowhere to be found. I went back to the store to see if I might have left it at the register, but no one had turned it in to the lost & found. I'm bummed.

Watermelon: Weekend planting and seed preservation tips

Someone mentioned to me over the weekend that no one is interested in pictures of my garden. It's like pictures of peoples' cats. This person suggested that I add some educational information about gardening and the plants I'm growing so that people have a reason to keep coming back.

I gotta say, I tried that with the avocado blog, but people never really did come back. They never really came in the first place, so that might be a reason.

A couple weeks ago I planted tomatoes. I wrote about how I had preserved the seeds from last year for planting this year. I actually did the same thing for a particularly tasty watermelon, so instead of showing the final result, I'd like to share the whole process.

There are essentially two kinds of seeds, Wet and Dry. The difference being that wet seeds have juice or other organic matter attached to them, while dry seeds come out of the seed pod dry.

Dry seeds are typically found in flowers, nuts, grains, and herbs. When they are picked, they can simply be put into a paper envelope and preserved until the next planting season. I usually just fold some normal office-use paper into a small packet and use staples to seal it.

Wet seeds can be found in most fruits and vegetables. They need to be dried off before preservation. Mold and rot are major risks if the seed is not completely dry. In the wild, these plants would fall to the ground or get eaten by animals, but here on the veranda they will get put into pots. I don't want them sprouting early, so I devised a simple way to dry them out and preserve them at the same time.

Below is the final result. I'll be working backwards since the seeds are already preserved, but you can reverse these steps to figure out how I originally saved the seeds.

This is the packet of watermelon seeds. I used a sheet of tissue paper to hold the seeds. Tissue paper absorbs water and is biodegradable. Since it is likely that the seeds will stick to the paper after drying, it is important that the storage medium be able to go into the ground with the seeds.

That is Scotch tape holding the paper in a tight roll.

Unrolling the paper, you can see the seeds held in a fold in the middle of the tissue. I use an extra fold to add some strength to the paper and give the seeds an extra layer of protection. On the right, the paper is completely unfolded. You can see that some of the seeds have some whitish marks. This is tissue paper that has adhered to the seed. No big deal.

To start the seeds, I picked up a ten-pack of these starting trays at the home center. I think it cost about 200 yen for 10. Pretty expensive, and I think I could have gotten a better price if I shopped around, but I don't have a lot of seeds to start and I don't need 100 trays. This is the easiest choice for me.

Only 10 seeds were saved last year, so I only filled 10 pots. Not every seed is expected to sprout, but since the number of seeds is so low, I decided to give each seed its own pot. Also, with the strong winds we've been having lately the more weight, the better.

Just fill each pot with soil and poke a hole in with your finger. Piece of cake!

After planting each seed, the whole kit gets a good dousing of water. Like the tomatoes, I'll give these guys a good watering once a week.


One thing to think about is how much water the plants are getting. Too much means that the seeds will get waterlogged and the sprouts may drown. Too little will dry them out completely. It's tough to get a good balance since we are not using a greenhouse, but giving them a thorough watering once a week ought to be just right this season.

Broccoli: Strong winds snap leaves in half

The other day I mentioned we had some strong winds that blew the plants all over. The vegetable that took the brunt of the wind was the broccoli. One of the larger leaves snapped right in half.

Luckily, most of the plant is still in good shape.

Maybe it's just me, but the plant looks bigger and bushier than last week.

Harvest is still a couple months away for this plant. Last weekend in Kamakura I saw an ornamental broccoli growing outside someone's house. It is actually a pretty nice looking plant, and much taller than I had expected. I wonder if this pot will be large enough...

Potatoes: Sprouts, shoots, and leaves

In just a week and half, the potatoes have really started to take off. In the picture below, you can see the two potatoes sending up shoots.

The potato on the top is the one that I circled last week. It is much closer to the soil surface so it is the first to break through with visible leaves. The other one is still under the soil, so only a couple leaves are visible.

Each potato will produce several plants, so even though the bushiness seems like a good sign, I will need to prune them both back to one main plant. This allows for each potato to maximize the soil nutrient usage as well as total soil volume for itself.

I'll let these grow a bit more, maybe a week or two, before pruning. I want to select the best sprouts.

Bell peppers: Alive or dead?

Last year I bought two bell pepper plants. A cheap green one from a farmer's market and an expensive red one from Del Monte at the home center. Only one green pepper was harvested last year. No red ones ever developed.

That was last year. This year, I'm hoping that they made it through the winter and will produce some fruit. However I'm not pinning my hopes too high since last year I was disappointed.

Starting from seed, the sprouting season is right now until the beginning of April. After that, the seedlings should go into the ground and the fruiting season lasts from late June through the end of October here in Tokyo.

Since I have plants still growing since last year, I expect that I will have a small headstart on production, but it all depends on the condition of the plants.

This is the green pepper. It has leaves and flower buds, but I'm not sure how healthy it actually is. It hasn't changed much since last November.

It was a bit bigger before winter, but I cut it back significantly since most of the growth was wild and uncontrolled. You can see the flower buds poking out here and there. These were also present before winter closed in.

This is the red pepper. It is in much worse shape than the green pepper. It lost all its leaves before winter and I had to prune it back quite a bit due to dying branches. If this is still alive, I'd actually be very surprised.

If I don't see any leaves develop by the middle of April, I'll probably uproot this one and plant something else.

Strawberries: The small green house

Strawberries are an incredibly hardy plant, and year after year they can fruit. Three years ago I bought a small strawberry plant on a whim and had several garden strawberries that season. Store-bought strawberries are picked early, so the fruit's sweetness and flavor is not fully developed. The difference between store-bought and ripe-picked is like night and day.

Another great thing about strawberries is that they can produce fruit a couple times a year. Typically strawberries will produce fruit in the warm summer months. However, if you can keep the temperatures right, a winter crop is also possible. In fact, this past February I was able to pick a winter strawberry. (only one, sadly)

To keep the strawberries warm in the winter, I bought a plastic greenhouse for them. The strawberries sit atop the air conditioner and the greenhouse fits right over the planter and A/C unit as you can see in the following picture.

Yesterday we had very strong winds which ended up breaking some leaves on the broccoli, but the strawberries were just fine inside the greenhouse.

I didn't expect it so soon, but the strawberries are flowering! Each flower can become a fruit with care. For such a delicious fruit, strawberry flowers are very plain.

The yellow area in the middle, if properly pollinated, will grow into the strawberry fruit. The small yellow parts sticking out are full of pollen and are waiting for some nice bee to spread the pollen around. Unfortunately we don't have bees here, so I use a soft makeup brush ("borrowed" from my wife) to manually pollinate each mature flower.

My experience with these strawberries has been that they are not very prolific and the fruits are quite small. I think this may be related to soil quality, so this season I'll be keeping a close eye on this particular aspect.