That Picture In The Header Does Not Look Like New Jersey

The picture in the header was taken in Japan during the summer of 2008 in Osaka prefecture. We were going to go swimming in a river and along the way we passed many small farms and rice fields such as the one in the picture. This was the first time I had ever been out of the city in Japan and shows an aspect of the country that many people might not be as familiar with as those of the crowded streets of Tokyo.

While the picture itself is of an actual farm and this is supposed to be a blog about backyard gardens, it is still a nice, green picture and I think it works well in the header.

In Japan, you see a lot of backyard gardens brimming with eggplants, tomatoes, and cucumbers. It gets very hot and humid early on and by June they are already where we wouldn't be until early August here in the North Eastern United States.

A close up picture of a rice field:

About This Blog

When we finally moved out of an apartment and into a house, the house came with a 16' X 16' raised bed railroad tie garden complete with an in ground sprinkler.  This could not have made it any easier to get started with a garden except for the fact that it had been used for nothing more than a dumping ground by the previous owners.  It was filled with broken flower pots, big sticks and other debris which were not going to rot away no matter how long and the first season was largely spent cleaning out and disposing of the garbage.

The second season went much better in spite of much of it being figured out as we went along.  With a combination of nursery stock and seed packets, we managed to get a nice return of tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and beans with plenty to give away.  Miracle-Gro was the norm back then and not too much thought went into the methods being used.  Everything tasted much better than the supermarket and expectations for success had been low to begin with, so all in all it can be considered a success with seasons two and three being very similar.

Sometime around season four, I happened to read An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.), and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.  The three of these taught a lot about where food comes from and sustainability and seasons five and six now took a different direction. 

I replaced the Miracle-Gro with new ideas like concepts of cover crops, compost, and organic seeds.  The results with the natural methods were just as good as the results using other methods and encouraged by those successes, I’ve continued to read and experiment with different techniques to have a productive garden in a limited space with a minimal impact. 

This blog is a collection of information, experiments, and thoughts on simple techniques in organic gardening, recycling, and beekeeping collected together as you would normally find in a gardener's notebook which would hopefully also be useful to someone else who is starting a new home garden.