John_henry
Power Conserver
Hi all,
We recently moved to Japan from england with the plan to become more self sufficient. Last week we moved into our new house and began work on our new veg plot.
The plot is a little over 400 sq meters (just over 4,300 sq ft). When we took it over it over last Saturday it looked a little over run with weeds, as you can see in the photo. So the plan for this week was to weed the entire plot before rotovating early the following week. Needless to say, it's been a back braking week and we wont be rotovating till Tuesday at the earliest.
We plan to grow everything organically from open pollinated organic seed, hence all the hard work with weeding by hand, instead of using chemicals. We've grown veg on the scale before in England, but it ill be the first time in Japan. We intend on incorporating as much companion planting and green manure/mulch as possible, this is something we have a little experience in, but hope to gain more knowledge for use with this plot.
We're a little late starting on the plot due to our moving dates, but as it was covered by snow until early may we're only a few weeks behind even the most eager local farmers. According to the local people we've spoke to we should still be good to plant most things from seed, except tomatoes and a few others, which we would now have to buy in as plants. It gets pretty warm here in the summer and the snow doesn't come until December, so not the worst growing season.
We have a heap of questions that we hope you might be able to help us with, and I intend to keep this as a journal that might be able to give some advise to others. I'll keep things updated as often as possible and aim to get photos up at least once a week, or as necessary. A few burning things on our mind are: how to bring the soil back to being organic, how if possible to protect/get rid of any cross contamination from local chemical use, any organic weeding tips, and how to compost a huge heap of weeds.
I'm quite new to this forum, so sorry if this is in the wrong area and or inappropriate my apologies. Thanks in advance, and I hope we can offer some advice too.