Growing Pains: A vegetable patch in Japan!

All the tenants of the government housing in Namiki, Tuskuba city are entitled to have their own small strip of land allocated for cultivating. When this came in our way, we did not have a clue of what to do with this! Then someone suggested why not grow some vegitables. In panic, I checked the web -- our unfailing savior these days for some suggestions. There were no specifics on how to grow vegitables in Tsukuba city!, but there were a number of sites with good suggestions on how to start.

We decided that we need fast results with least efforts; don't want to spend too much time tending crops and want to have something that is a bit difficult to buy at green grocers. We went for the following:

1. Lettuce: Though not really expensive, it comes in large quantities and half goes to waste after buying. Further, there are real horror stories about pesticide use!
2. Basil: We love Pesto Genovese, but it's hard to find large quantities of basil for reasonable prices in Japan.
3. Tomatos: Simply they are said to grow well with Basil.
4. Habarino peppers: Hard to find.

Starting off

Cow duning composte.

We bought 40 litres of cow dung composte based mixture and used almost all of it on roughly 2 sq.m plot. Simply mixed with exisisting soil after removing the weeds.

We bought seeds that come in small packets. (several ml of seed of each type.) Lettuce and Basil seeds were mixed together and spread over the soil. Peppers and tomatos were covered about 1cm deep.

Results: Phase I

Lettuce grew fast. Within ten days there were small seedlings all over the patch and after three weeks they were easily recognizable as different lettuce types. Within five-six weeks we were eating the first salads.

Presently we harvest lettuce leaves almost every day and there seems to be more than enough for that.

<type?>