STRAWBERRIES

So it's been a crazy month or so.

First of all, I finished school.  This led me to job hunting, studying, and doing not much else.

The plan was to find a job and then find a new place to live.

After a few weeks of searching I found a job.  I'm making choose your own adventure style games (they have less freedom than that, but the same principle) for mobile phones.

The first game I've worked on is being checked over by the production team, and after feedback I'll fix it up and hopefully it'll be ready for release.

In the meantime we have started house hunting.

The market is fierce here, as you might expect of a city of 25 million people.

We found an awesome place that was within budget, was within commuting distance for both of us, and was first floor in a small apartment complex, so it even had a garden.  Frankly, beyond all expectations.

I was refreshing the page every few minutes on the train to the real estate agents, because we've had a few cases where we've found a place, sent a link across and had it be taken before we've even managed to look at it properly.

I joked that there must be a reason that it was so cheap (i.e. Within our budget) with everything going for it.

Turns out - I was right.  There was a reason.

The owner is a psychopath who demands quarterly inspections of the property.

Apparently they were supervised inspections, meaning we would be there the whole time, but would you trust someone like that to not just let themselves in and wander around whenever you weren't there?  Someone with that much time, with such a dark soul (might be projecting about the dark soul part, but it was such a nice looking place that I'll forever be annoyed at the bastard) probably has spy cameras set up around the place to do his weird perving.  Bastard.

Anyway, we stayed on at the real estate agents to search for other places nearby, and for once they weren't completely shit.  Our guy found us four places that fit the bill, and we checked them all over that day.

The first was an honest to goodness house.  Something I never thought I would be able to live in, while here in Japan.  It was obviously tiny, with a living/dining area, small square kitchen and three upstairs bedrooms.  One of the bedroom is for us, the other is for all our crap/guest room and the last one is my one selfish desire from this whole moving thing - I was a room to call my own.  Colloquially known as a man-cave, I prefer the term 'home office.'

Anyway, it was yet to be cleaned and the bathroom was in a dingy state.  This put the misses off, and the walk to the station put me off a bit.  It did have a patch of land at the front (a few square metres at most) that they called a garden, but it wasn't enough to tip the scales.  The back had a thin strip of land that I could have grown something along, but it was off-limits for some reason.

Way, way more than I was ever expecting to live in - but with problems.

The next house was essentially a brand new apartment, with brand new fittings and features that made it by far and away the most presentable house I've ever seen in a showing situation.  It was showroom quality.  It even had a pull-out dishwasher built into the cupboards in the kitchen, which is something you just don't see here.  Every wall was shelves hidden behind posh sliding doors and fancy cupboards with push-button doors were everywhere.  It even had a bath with a Jacuzzi mode.  Internally it was perfect.

Externally, I had a few concerns.  It was part of an enormous dystopian complex in the middle of the town, home to probably a thousand people (there were easily 250 apartments in this place).  All of them were young families.  The flat was on the second or third floor.  It was difficult to tell, but the south facing balcony didn't look like it would get any sunlight in summer, due to the sheer height of the building and the overhang from the building above.  The back rooms were utterly dark.  The walkway that connects all the front doors to all the apartments was at the front of the apartment, where the bedrooms were.  Not ideal, considering it was all families who would be up at god knows what time on a Sunday running around and being annoying, right next to the bedrooms.  The reason those rooms were so dark is because the windows were obviously heavily shielded from prying eyes.

If you could transplant this apartment and put it almost anywhere else, it would have been the perfect place.  Rent would have probably also been four times more.

At this point we hadn't seen all the places, so we didn't have much to compare to, but there were a couple of problems with each.

House number three was a fair amount older, but allowed cats.  The vast majority of places in Japan don't allow pets for obvious reasons.  The ones that do are much more expensive, again for obvious reasons.  This meant that for the same money we would get less apartment, but would get a cat or two.

(I really want a cat)

But there was just something a little bit off about the place, and I wasn't really thrilled with it.  I can't describe it, but luckily the wife felt the same way so we passed that one over.

At this point, we've been looking at pieces of paper with flats on them, and walking around to a few places for around 6 hours.

We went back to the estate agents to mull over our choices, and see if the last of our shortlisted options was view able.

Turns out it was, so we piled into the car again and drove to see it.

This is an odd thing to be enthused about when talking about a house, but it I absolutely love how weird the shape and layout are.  It is truly bizarre.  The living/dining area is square.  The spare room is square (and styled in the traditional Japanese manner, with tatami floors and sliding Japanese paper doors, IN FRONT OF GLASS WINDOWS?!?!) but only half as long.  Every other room in the house is triangular, or has weird lumpy squares poking out.  It has three verandas.  Admittedly, one is barely a sliver, designed to hold an external air-con unit, but still large enough to hold some pots and plants.  (Accessed by climbing out of a window.)

It's on the second floor, and is an eight minute walk to the station according to google, which makes it about 5 or 6 minutes for humans.  The station is thirty minutes to work for both of us, and isn't the most insanely busy line - although rush hour everywhere here is bad.

It's situated at the top of a hill, so even though we're low-down in the building, you can see the sky from all the windows, and the surroundings are farms and greenery.  Generally much more pleasant than some of the other places.

It also has a front doorsman who can take in any parcels and packages and whatnot that are delivered during the day.  Weird.

As you can probably tell, this is my favourite place so far.

The downsides are twofold.  Firstly, it sits along a back entrance to the apartment complex (unlike some of the other places, there aren't that many flats, so there aren't that many people, and being a corner unit means we would be right on the end so less foot-traffic in front of the door) with the route passing in front of one of the bedrooms.  As such, a strong set of curtains and some kind of plant barrier will be needed to make that room voyeur-proof.  I would make that room my 'home office.'

The other downside is the initial move-in price.  Since the end of the war Japanese housing has tons of fees and codified bribes that are seemingly designed to stop people moving house often.  Why you would want to stop people doing that is beyond me, but I'm not an economist so who knows.  This place is particularly egregious on that front.

We have one more place to look at, and then we can make a decision about which to choose.  So far it's looking like the corner place - but never count your chickens.

In other news, the strawberry plants are really picking up pace.  This was todays haul.  There are four different varieties in the planter, and interestingly the plant that produced the enormous strawberry in the middle isn't throwing off any arms for me to grow new plants.  The others are throwing out baby plants left right and centre and despite their bizarre shape, are easily the best tasting ones.

Look at the size of this!

I'm interested to see how long they fruit for considering this is their second and potentially most prolific year.  I've already started growing more baby plants in pots in anticipation of moving, so hopefully I can get even more next year.  We'll see.

What's Up

 So we start with a sign I saw on the way to badminton.  I'm not entirely sure what it's trying to say, nor am I sure what the picture is of.  For reference this was taken outside a hairdressers.

 I've been growing strawberries for a while, and the harvest has really increased towards the end of Summer.  Apparently strawberries are at their best one year after planting, so year two will hopefully be even better.

 I've got 3 different types.  One is a great plant with amazing red flowers, that produces half a malformed strawberry ever 3 months.  One is a monster that creates great big thumb sized things, but once ever month or so.  The last type is what produced the above.  Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small, sometimes they even look like strawberries - but they're far more productive than the other types I have.

 I don't know about you, but I love playing happily to exhaustion.  Especially when I can do so at the popular spots of the metropolitan area.

There are so many native english speakers in tokyo and they couldn't find a single one to point out how weird this sounds.  Amazing.

(Foreign visitors only)

 I went to watch the sumo this week.  I'm not sure what this sign is trying to say, but I hope Will is okay.

It turns out that I'm not a big fan of sumo.  It's pretty dull, and the slowness isn't helped by the fact that each bout lasts less than 5 seconds with a 10 minute break between.  I'd like to think I'm fairly patient, but good lord a whole lot of nothing happens for a long time.

One weird thing I noticed is that even though I had less than zero interest in proceedings, when the crowd roared the hairs still raised as if I were watching something I cared about.  I found it pretty interesting that this is a human reaction seemingly regardless of situation.

Bonus - Wally of Where's Wally fame is somewhere in this picture.  Can you find him?

 After finding Wally, we found this burger in the local supermarket.

 It was less than a quid, and tasted bad.

 Really, really bad.

 My latest plant growing project is the mighty pineapple.  Pineapples are great because they're the only fruit/vegetable I know of that eat you, as you're eating them.  They also looking incredibly cool when they're growing in your house.

So the search was on for a system that would let me know one.

There are basically two techniques people use to grow them on.  Both start with buying a pineapple.  You rip the top off (or cut it off, making sure to get rid of as much flesh as possible) so you're left with the above.  Take off the bottom few leaves.  And this is where the techniques begin to diverge.  Do you take off a lot, or a few?  In the early stages there aren't many roots which means the plant will be losing a lot more water through evaporation than it will be pulling in through the roots.  I'm not sure how bad this is, but I bought 4(!!!!) pineapples and did a test.  I left a lot of leaves on two, and only a few on two.

The next step is another divider.  Do you leave the bottom of the this bundle of leaves to dry for a day before planting?  I did with this one, but the results were unfavourable, so I didn't with the others.

The last point is whether to plant these stems directly into soil, or start them in water first.  Those initial 4 were split 2 by 2, water/soil.  Unfortunately only one survived.  So I bought a couple more.  So far, of those two, only one is left.

For those interested, what keeps happening is the middle leaves keep rotting from the inside out, so I'm fairly sure that you have to stop water getting into the leaves before they're growing.  One has tons of tiny little roots sprouting and I'm hopeful it'll turn into a plant one day.

The other has a few roots but is much younger than the other so it's still early days.

The plants take 3 or 4 years to mature and develop fruit, and require another plant to fertilise the fruit (which is why I've bought so many). 

In Vietnam we saw loads, and they look like they've been glued onto an entirely unrelated plant by a vandal.  Seriously, check them out on google.

This is my mint plant.  It's growing like mint, which is to say like a weed.  What I didn't know was that the mint flowers are absolutely miniscule and incredibly dainty.  Totally at odds to the plant itself.

I'm including this picture because it made me laugh.  It's an ad call for engineers, but if you make them look like utter idiots why would they join your recruitment company?

Anyway, that's it for now.  I've finished some more exams, but I have some more important ones coming up (nearly finished with it all!) which is why I've not updated in a while.

I'll keep taking pictures of engrish wherever I see it though, so next update hopefully I'll have some more pics.

I Caught Another Fish!

So I went fishing again, and caught another fish.  I didn't lose any equipment either, so that means I got another one over the fish gods.  5-2 to Poseidon, as it currently stands.

My planted strawberry pot is also coming along nicely.  I've had a few strawberries off it so far, and although I'm not really expecting a bumper crop it's nice to go out there and find something nice to nibble occasionally.

There are four different varieties in there, each fruiting at different times.  The ones that are out now are the least prolific, but fruit right through until October (supposedly).  The others will hopefully start up next month, and go for about 3 months non-stop (again, supposedly).  They're pretty tasty, although I've never really liked strawberries.  I just like the colour and their ease of growing.

One of them has red flowers which I've never seen before.  The strawberries on that one are coming in now, so we'll see whether they taste any different.  I'm interested to see what the difference in fruit will be between the different varieties, and whether the distinctions are the growing seasons and colour alone.

We had an entire week off last week, which afforded me the opportunity to take a couple of fishing days.  Honestly, I spent way too long outside instead of studying, but I got a fish, so it was (maybe) worth it.  I spent one day, during the day, catching nothing but a sunburn.  As I was heading home I noticed an absolute ton of activity in the water, so made a note to come back the next day around that time.  It really picks up around 6PM here, to the point where I was constantly getting nibbles from around 6.30 onwards.  I suspect I was seeing a lot of smaller fish picking at the bait, because the float would never fully submerge, it would just bobble a little.  As before, the fish I caught monstered the bait.  In doing so it must have scared something else because there was a lot of fuss at the surface when the float disappeared.  It was a good fight, with a couple of dives at the end to try and keep away from the edge.

my shoes are around 30-35cm long, for comparison.  Caught with some kind of shellfish innards, maybe a cockle or something.

It was some kind of catfish, but which kind is still up for debate.  I'm going to take proper pictures next time, to try and get a verifiable identification.  I'm also going to buy a net and mat, or something to act as a mat.  The netting here was as good as anything to rest the fish on, but I got very wet pulling it out.  Also, look how fat this thing is. 

Last thing for this update - mystery plant.  The scale is off in this picture, but this plant is in an enormous pot, around 50 or 60 litres I think.  If I reveal any of the particulars of how I've prepared it, you'd probably guess what it is, so all I'm giving you is this picture.  I'm pretty excited, although I honestly have no idea how it will do.

I've got about 6 or 7 completely different plants on the go, with a couple of insect attracting varieties, so I'm really, really hoping there will be enough insectoid competition to keep the stuff that killed my melons at bay. 

There really isn't much chance of that, but I can hope.

Strawbicide

Jesus Christ it's happening again!

I looked in on my Strawberries on Sunday, then again today, five days later.  It's been raining a lot lately and what with the unlikelihood of them ever sprouting, I just forgot about them for a while.

And then this:

Symptoms include leaf death, wilting and a generally blurred outline.

One of the weaker ones is completely dead.  Like, dead as a door nail.

In five days!

It's the melonpocalypse all over again.

The other four plants seem to be completely fine, with just the two being affected.  After the melonpocalpyse I bit the bullet and bought some pesticide, so I've sprayed them all down and bought the sufferer indoors.  I have no idea whether it'll survive, but I'll keep an eye on it and hope for the best.  I wonder if I should feed it too?  We'll see how it goes.

I am death, eviscerator of flora.

Broken Nose Woes

So I recently broke my nose again.  It was on the left hand side, but now it's on the right.

NBD  (no big deal)

Stuff like this happens all the time, it can't be helped.  It does mean that I can't breathe out of the right hand nostril now, which is a bummer because I was fine on both sides before.

Oh well.  Life moves on.

So, just out of idle curiosity (and because we needed a new mosquito door thing) me and the girlfriend went to the local DIY store.  It happened to have a fish place, so we went and had a look around.  It turns out that they have the world most unimpressed fish for sale.  No, really, blow this picture up to full size and tell me that guy isn't just eyeing everyone and everything with contempt.

Ugh, they went with blue, really?

 On the way to the fish store we came across this.  In case you can't tell, this is a giant net covering someones back garden.  The purpose of this monstrosity?  To keep golf balls at bay.  Yes, someone has made a golf cage on the back of their house.  What in the world?

I can't imagine any of the neighbours are too happy.  Then again, if you have this kind of disposable income you're probably leader of their home owners association or something.

Fooooouuuuuuur!  ty thousand dollars worth of cage?

We also saw this cool little butterfly.  It was surprisingly cold that day so I managed to get up nice and close before it flittered away.  Not the most colourful, but it's nice nonetheless.

We bought a bread maker a while ago.  It was that, or a deep fat fryer.  A tough choice I'm sure you'll agree, but the bread won out on daily usage levels.  Normally it makes fantastic bread, but sometimes I'm left in charge of making it, and then this happens.

When someone else is in charge it can make some fantastic white bread, and some amazing raisin bread.

The melonpocalypse from last year has been shelved, and now I'm trying to grow some strawberries.  We had a small crop of beans in the growbags but the yields were disappointing.  The wind up here really messed everything up.

The strawberries were grown from seed, which is uncommon, apprently.  They've yet to fruit, they may yet decide not to, but if they do I'm interested in seeing what kind of size and taste we get out of them.  I wonder if they're like apples in that you never know what the taste of a new plant will be like unless you graft.  The random genetic lottery may not be kind to the tastebuds.  Only time will tell.

And that's it for this little update.  It's been a month since I wrote anything, so I just wanted to drop a few pics down and let the internet at large know that I'm still alive.

Bye for now!

Bumper Buggy Bugger Blamers?

So it's been a long time since I last wrote something for the blog. Partly (mostly) to do with laziness, but partly due to a lack of interesting things to write about. In order to remedy this situation I spent thirty minutes on Sunday getting sunburnt in order to bring you a picture of two of interest.

Firstly, I was in the sun with my shirt off for thirty to forty minutes. Secondly, it's not full blown Summer yet, in fact it's barely what one might graciously call the end of Spring (it's absolutely heaving down at the moment, and has done since the morning). As such I thought it might be safe to stand around outside for a while, but I was completely wrong as it turned out.

I think this lot looks pretty cool to be honest. If I had any amount of land whatsoever I'd set aside a percentage of it to see what happened. In this instance a bag of compost with two 5 centimetre squares cut out of the top was left outside over Winter. When I got back to it I found this lot.

I have no idea how many species are in there, but with those strange flowers I should imagine a fair few insects would like to rummage around – assuming an area large enough to sustain an ecosystem. Of course these two small bags are not big enough by a long shot, but the amount of plant stuff going on in there with zero care is preeeeetty coooooool.

In the meantime I'd been growing up some strawberries from seed. I found out the usual method for growing strawberries was from the runners they produce (kind of like the spider plant I assume) which are coerced into a nearby pot, then snipped once the new plant is growing. This umbilical system ensures a new plant sprouts very quickly, which is great, and it means that if you get in early in the year you can have a fruiting plant the same year, which is also great. The problem is I can't find anywhere around me that sells them. I also couldn't find anyone that sells the seeds (the aforementioned method being so much preferred that no one bothers with seeds). As such, I had my mum purchase some seeds for me, which ended up coming from China of all places, which she then sent to me.

Modern sustainable sourcing of plants at its finest.



Anyway, they were up and running, and needed a new place to live.

While growing these strawberries I was also doing this:

Which is to say taking very blurred pictures. Quality aside, these are beans. Or at leas they will be in the future. Hopefully. These went into the now empty bags of compost to create this:

If my melon disaster has told me anything it's that there's no way to tell how this will turn out, even if they grow twenty feet tall like the melons did. Just as things are flowering, fruiting and so on, there's sure to be a disaster of melon ending proportions.



I really, REALLY didn't want to use chemicals to control the insects last time (not because of holistic therapeutic arm wavey pseudo scientific hippy bullshit, but because it feels like cheating) but without a surrounding ecosystem to support the animals that could predate potential pests, there's really no way of getting around their use.

With the crowded strawberries replanted into individual pots we'll see how things turn out. With the amount of rain we've had today I don't think the dozen small holes I poked into the bags will be enough to allow all the water to drain away. Then again, a ten foot diameter pipe would probably have trouble draining all that rain away.


Anyway, that's all for the flowers at the moment. The strawberries grew quickly at first but slowed down. The beans come out guns blazing, with roots and leaves absolutely everywhere within a week. We'll see which one ends up being the winner by the end of Summer, if indeed either survive.