Greetings from Toyama-shi!

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emptychurches
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Greetings from Toyama-shi!

Post by emptychurches »

Wow, never thought I'd be on a phpBB in 2019! But here I am. :) Haven't had to compress an avatar jpg down to under 9kb in nearly twenty years!
My husband and I are entering our second year in Japan. We're early thirties, originally from the US. I grew up in Massachusetts, and he grew up in California, but we've both spent the better part of the last decade on the West Coast, in Portland and Seattle.
I guess we're technically city dwellers, but definitely not city folk. We frequently drive around and daydream of a nice house out in the countryside. Being that this is a pretty small city, the countryside is close enough for now. Our favorite areas are Noto/Nanao, Yatsuo, and Hida/Takayama.
We don't have land like a lot of you seem to, but we have an apartment with some good light and some public areas that we use to garden with. We've been getting creative with containers and putting a lot of our knowledge of DIY to the test. Our home is slowly becoming more and more stacked with plants, and our balcony is currently a bit overrun with a greenhouse and seedlings growing strong enough to get into the ground. We grow mostly western style vegetables, but I'm exploring Japanese varietals of flowers more and more, and there's always some goya creeping into the mix, too.
Our previous home had over 200 plants crammed into a one bedroom apartment jungle, so I guess it's fair to say we need plants in our lives to feel at home.
Our future goals include getting some workable land, either in Japan or back home. Guess we'll see what opportunities come our way to help pick which one! We're currently living on an ALT salary, so that decision probably won't be happening any time soon.
I look forward to poking around more of the older threads here! :)

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Re: Greetings from Toyama-shi!

Post by gonbechan »

Heya and welcome.

I think it is such a tiny topic that it would just get lost on somewhere like Reddit and topics would get lost in the scroll of FaceBook, so here we are, a tiny bunch of us keeping the candle burning.

Your Jungle sounds fascinating. Maybe you could grace us with some photos as your year evolves :D
I am always up for plant porn.

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Re: Greetings from Toyama-shi!

Post by Ibaraki llama »

Welcome! Your apartment sounds like what I would have if we move back to the city.

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Re: Greetings from Toyama-shi!

Post by Zasso Nouka »

Welcome to Japan Simple Life EmptyChurches

And thank you very much for signing up, we really do appreciate you taking the time to join our little community.

emptychurches wrote:
Wed Apr 24, 2019 5:16 pm
Wow, never thought I'd be on a phpBB in 2019! But here I am. :) Haven't had to compress an avatar jpg down to under 9kb in nearly twenty years!
It's quite surprising to still see phpBB soldiering on after all of these years and it certainly has plenty of it's own little foibles :lol:
emptychurches wrote:
Wed Apr 24, 2019 5:16 pm
We don't have land like a lot of you seem to, but we have an apartment with some good light and some public areas that we use to garden with. We've been getting creative with containers and putting a lot of our knowledge of DIY to the test. Our home is slowly becoming more and more stacked with plants, and our balcony is currently a bit overrun with a greenhouse and seedlings growing strong enough to get into the ground. We grow mostly western style vegetables, but I'm exploring Japanese varietals of flowers more and more, and there's always some goya creeping into the mix, too.
Our previous home had over 200 plants crammed into a one bedroom apartment jungle, so I guess it's fair to say we need plants in our lives to feel at home.
Container growing is a great way to produce vegetables or get them started. Our garden back in London was full of all sorts of containers growing a host of different veggies and herbs.
emptychurches wrote:
Wed Apr 24, 2019 5:16 pm
Our future goals include getting some workable land, either in Japan or back home. Guess we'll see what opportunities come our way to help pick which one! We're currently living on an ALT salary, so that decision probably won't be happening any time soon.
You may be able to get a small plot of land by asking around, someone may have an aunt or uncle that has a small plot on the edge of town they are no longer using and would be happy to let you use. We had several plots like that before we bought our farm and folk seemed happy to just see the land being used again.

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Re: Greetings from Toyama-shi!

Post by Ibaraki llama »

Asking around might be a good idea. When we were asking around looking for a house, we didn’t find anything, but we did get people offering us their farmland to use.

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Re: Greetings from Toyama-shi!

Post by emptychurches »

Thanks for the welcome! :)
I'll get around to posting some photos, hopefully soon!
There are larger plots we can rent down by the water, but clocking in at a 6-10km+ roundtrip walk for me, would be a bit unfeasible in the August heat. And with living mere blocks from the large train station here, there just aren't homes with much land attached in my crew of neighbor friends. If I end up befriending people that live further out in the city, I'll definitely give a nudge to some land use! Until then, we've enjoyed the challenge of working with limited space here and there. Our landlord has actually been very supportive of that, and it looks like we might be expanding into a lot more space, taking up the ledges of eight floors of north-northwest facing stairwells. Hope everyone wants some imo...

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Re: Greetings from Toyama-shi!

Post by Zasso Nouka »

Urban farming is fantastic and it's a great way to utilise the space with planters and containers as well as bringing greenery into a space that otherwise might not see much. Hope you get some good results :thumbup: and would love to see how you get on.

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