Container Garden Love

I hadn’t known anyone who lived in Numazu until Davin ran into—at Baird Beer, of course—a fellow JET Programme employee that he’d met at orientation/training and learned that the guy and his wife work in Numazu high schools.

Davin and I went to visit Will and Chrissy for a weekend, and went to Baird of course, but also finally saw more of Numazu, checking out an ultra-fresh sushi bar and Will’s school’s music program concert, featuring some extremely talented students. The piano duets were amazing!

Before returning to Shizuoka City on Sunday, the four of us ate tacos for brunch in the backyard sunshine. Yes, Will and Chrissy have a yard—albeit tiny—but a piece of grass nevertheless, so hard to come by in Shizuoka. They’d converted part of it into a great garden, inspiring Davin and I to get some garden ingredients to arrange on our balcony in hopes for our own herbs and veggies.

In this place where it’s hard to say how long I’ll be, I’ve resisted investing in much stuff, at least the sort of stuff that I can’t take with me, or that would be a pain to take with me, or that I’ve have to find some way to get rid of when leaving. Generally, I’ve not been an extraordinary help to the ailing Japanese economy. But when I thought about it, a garden is one creature comfort completely worth the startup costs. I can’t believe we didn’t start one earlier.

We bought four large planters, a huge bag of organic soil, and some seeds and starts, and scored some additional pots and a trowel from a friend moving from Shizuoka to the Tokyo area. Thus far, we have some good-looking greenage!
Planters lined up on the a/c unitGreen pepper with a viewTwo types of tomatoes
Cute baby spinach
Happy mint, basil, and lettuceDavin's pal "Aloe-fonso"...with strawberry, parsley, and hot peppers

As I type and sip my mint lemonade, I'm just waiting for the mystery pepper seeds from Thailand to sprout in one of the four long planters to declare a complete success!