Hosted a student from Peru who kindly brought some purple corn for me all the way from the hinterland of Lake Titicaca...
He has since left for home but his kindness lingers on at our potager...
Edgar, thank you very much, if you are reading this...
Tried planting some seeds last summer...
The corn plants have this purple 'veins' in the stems and leaves...
Cute... I thought to myself...
They grew and grew... stopping at about almost 3 meters?
Happy and happy I was...
But, happiness was short-lived as the typhoons came by...
All the plants broke into two... except one...
And this is the lone, precious-precious fruit from the 'harvest'...
Luckily, I had saved some seeds for a second round of planting, which I did last July...
I had always believed that plants, like humans, have some kind of 'thinking' mechanism in them...
This second batch of purple corn plants 'decided' to start flowering at about 2 meters or less...
A response to the upcoming cold season, perhaps?
Happiness returns... as the ears begin to appear...
My
suweeto haato had not been very fond of eggplants...
Until one day, she came home with a bunch of long and lanky eggplants after visiting her youngest sister in Kyushu...
Somehow, her taste buds changed from then on... and eggplant dishes began to show up on my dinner plates...
Meanwhile, I had only grown eggplant once before and I was not very successful with it...
Why, for they are heavy feeders...
And I am not a very good feeder of fertilizers to my plants...
Now, late last summer, I accompanied my
suweeto haato on one of her daily (well, almost) walks in the hills...
There is this plot of land midway up the hill, that is being used as a landfill for some construction firm...
We often see a medium sized truck hauling all sorts of debris up there to be dumped as landfill...
The
unobstructed view of the Japan Inland Sea from there is really beautiful...
We imagine that after a certain amount of landfill, some big shot company president will come over and build his fifth summer holiday villa or something like that...
Anyway, while walking pass the landfill, a little plant caught my eye...
And I knew it was an eggplant seedling, growing 'wild' amongst the debris...
I dug it up and just then, I discovered a second seedling...
Took them home, knowing that it was a little too late to start planting eggplants...
Three months or so passed... and woah... it is harvest time for purple eggplants...
Ok, please allow me to dedicate this post to
Connie Nakamura...
She has just moved to Japan from Saipan and is planning to try her hand at vegetable gardening...
I am much humbled to be at the receiving end of what she had to say of me (or my potager blog?)... and it is indeed an honor to be requested by her to act as her 'mentor'...
For a 'student' of gardening, I still am...
Yet, it will be my pleasure to be part of this exciting adventure in life...
May your garden blooms a thousand blooms....
And fruits, a thousand fruits... :)
