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baragua
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Post by baragua »

Hey everyone, stumbled across this forum while doing some research on gardening in Japan. I've already gotten a ton of awesome tips and resources just from lurking for a few hours. I'm glad to have found this community!

My wife and I currently live in Southern California but we'll be moving to a small town near Mt. Daisen in Tottori this Fall. We currently have a small backyard plot where we manage to grow enough veg to feed us both for every meal (and even share with friends and neighbors) and we're very excited about getting more space. Also been learning a lot about Korean Natural Farming and JADAM and I'm personally looking forward to diving deep into that world and making our own amendments.

Anyway, sincere thanks for sharing your knowledge here. I look forward to starting our next chapter in Tottori!

--Miguel

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gonbechan
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Post by gonbechan »

Welcome to both you and your wife.
Daisen area is one of my favorite places in Japan.
Looking forward to learning from you guys too.

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Post by Zasso Nouka »

Welcome to Japan Simple Life Miguel and thank you for joining our little community. We really do appreciate you taking the time to sign up. I've not yet visited Tottori but if Gonbechan reckons it's good it must be.

Sounds like you've already got plenty of growing experience under your belt so hopefully you can easily adapt that to conditions where you are going to live. What kind of veg do you normally grow in California ?

I'm not familiar with the Korean style of organic farming but it's probably compatible with the Japanese climate given how close the two countries are so should work just fine.

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Post by baragua »

Thanks for the warm welcome, folks!

Zasso, we only started growing in earnest last fall--we lived in apartments prior to moving to our current place that has a yard. Been lucky to have success with it right of the bat (thanks to all the YouTube videos I watched in anticipation of moving here ;) ). In the fall through winter, we did a lot of root crops like carrots, beets, and radishes, in addition to leafy greens and herbs.

From spring onward, we've been doing a lot of tomatoes and peppers (currently drowning in the latter), as well as okra and other leafy greens that do well in the heat here. Been eating a ton of a pak choi variety that likes the heat and resembles a slightly heartier romaine lettuce (believe it's called Beijing Express) and an amaranth with red leaves that we basically treat like spinach.

We also grow microgreens indoors, which yields a ton of salads for when the leafy greens outside aren't quite ready. Incidentally, does anyone out there know of a good source for bulk seeds to grow as micros?

We'll have more space to do this in Tottori, so I'm hyped for that. We'll also be able to make compost, build a little greenhouse, and practice those Korean Natural Farming techniques I mentioned. BTW, here's a good primer on KNF/JADAM if you're curious: Revolutionizing Organic Farming | Youngsang Cho of JADAM.

Thanks again for the welcome!

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Post by Zasso Nouka »

Ah Youtube, it has certainly been massively helpful to me learning how to farm. It's so much easier to watch a short video than have to wade through heaps of text.

Sounds like you have a natural talent for growing things if you've managed to keep yourself in veg in your first year :clap:. I'm not familiar with the Californian climate but maybe the only difference is the humidity here so adapting to that shouldn't be too difficult.

I was reading up on the JADAM website last night after reading your post and they have some really good ideas. It's great all that information is shared freely. Have you tried any of their recipes ? Technically you can't use anything that isn't registered as a pesticide for that purpose over here on food but the workaround is to use it as a leaf cleaner or tonic instead where the pesticide nature of the product is an unintended bonus. We used to import neem from India and the customs guys always used to roll their eyes and laugh when we said it's intended purpose was as a leaf cleaner for our veg.

Seeds come in ridiculously small packets over here, the biggest I've managed to find for salad are 1 litre packs from Nakahara Seeds in Kyushu. They sell the red leaved amaranth but it's $85 for a one litre pack :eek:

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Post by baragua »

Thanks for the tip on Nakahara Seeds--looks like they stock all our micro standbys for more or less the same prices that we're used to here. Awesome :)

Haven't tried any of the JADAM inputs yet, but we did make a batch of fermented plant juice sort of inadvertently--Korean Natural Farming by accident? My wife was hanging the laundry out to dry next to one of our tomato trellises, and the wind knocked the rack over onto one of our plants, taking a couple of large branches down with it. The plant survived, and we chopped all the unripe fruit along with the stems and leaves on the busted branches and mixed them with brown sugar as shown in that video.

It seemed to work out OK. Once it was done fermenting, I used the FPJ in place of our regular fertilizing routine for a month or so, and the plants seemed pretty happy. Not very scientific, I know!

Good to know that neem oil is gettable! That's pretty much all we've used for pest control in our short time, apart from blasting our plants with a high pressure hose. I definitely plan to mess around with JADAM/KNF pest control solutions, though. Seems like all their processes involve commonly available materials, so I'm not sweating it. I don't anticipate selling at markets or anything like that in our immediate future, but if we end up doing it, I'll make sure to emphasize that these solutions are "foliar sprays" ;)

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Post by Zasso Nouka »

baragua wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:12 pm
Thanks for the tip on Nakahara Seeds--looks like they stock all our micro standbys for more or less the same prices that we're used to here. Awesome :)
We get all our salad seeds from Nakahara and they are good quality with reliable germination rates. We don't buy the 1 litre packs anymore as the humid summers here can adversely affect germination rates over several years of storage but if you are going to use them up quickly then it's a good buy.

baragua wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:12 pm
Haven't tried any of the JADAM inputs yet, but we did make a batch of fermented plant juice sort of inadvertently--Korean Natural Farming by accident? My wife was hanging the laundry out to dry next to one of our tomato trellises, and the wind knocked the rack over onto one of our plants, taking a couple of large branches down with it. The plant survived, and we chopped all the unripe fruit along with the stems and leaves on the busted branches and mixed them with brown sugar as shown in that video.

It seemed to work out OK. Once it was done fermenting, I used the FPJ in place of our regular fertilizing routine for a month or so, and the plants seemed pretty happy. Not very scientific, I know!
Well if it works then that's all that counts :thumbup:. You can get truckloads of composted animal manure for very low prices or even for free if you do the hauling yourself, often the farmer will loan you the dump truck for the day if you refill it with diesel. You can also get a good organic liquid fertiliser that is made out of the waste from the fish industry, smells awful but plants love it.
baragua wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:12 pm
Good to know that neem oil is gettable! That's pretty much all we've used for pest control in our short time, apart from blasting our plants with a high pressure hose. I definitely plan to mess around with JADAM/KNF pest control solutions, though. Seems like all their processes involve commonly available materials, so I'm not sweating it. I don't anticipate selling at markets or anything like that in our immediate future, but if we end up doing it, I'll make sure to emphasize that these solutions are "foliar sprays" ;)
You can buy neem oil here but it's pretty expensive, we used to import a pallet of 100 litre drums at a time but in the end found out it was more expensive than locally available organic pesticides like BT or Spinosad.

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Post by baragua »

Hey Zasso, once again, appreciate all this guidance! If it's OK, I may hit you up in private messages soon to learn more about how you get manure. My wife will be departing ahead of me to sort out my spouse visa in person, and it'd be great if she can kickstart our compost pile while we wait for all that.

I think 1 kg bags will work well for the microgreens. We get ours currently in 1 lb bags (or 5 lb for big seeds, like peas or sunflowers), and we go through about 2 per year if we grow weekly. One kilo sounds about right for a year's supply.

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Post by Zasso Nouka »

No worries at all,

Manure is easy enough to get hold of, once you are settled into your area start asking around local farms. Some will charge around 3,000円 for a two ton dump truck load delivered to your door or others will lend you a truck if you have a Japanese driving license and let you take as much as you like for the price of refilling the diesel tank. Around our way most of them store and compost the manure for around a year so it's nice and dry when you get it, I wouldn't take raw manure, especially chicken manure as it's too strong but well composted manure from egg layers has a lot of minerals and micro nutrients from all the oyster shell they get fed.

Once you've made 10 or 15 posts (can never remember how many) you'll get access to the messaging system here and the Free4All forum. It's an anti spam precaution to stop spammers joining up and sending us all exciting opportunities to join get rich quick schemes or score viagra at incredibly low prices :shock:

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Post by gonbechan »

baragua wrote:
Sat Aug 21, 2021 3:07 am
Hey Zasso, once again, appreciate all this guidance! If it's OK, I may hit you up in private messages soon to learn more about how you get manure. My wife will be departing ahead of me to sort out my spouse visa in person, and it'd be great if she can kickstart our compost pile while we wait for all that.
There are 2 riding clubs about 1/3 of the way up the main road to Daisen Cho (the village by Daisenji the Temple) and another one at the Gassatoda Castle ruins I am sure they will give you lots of horse poop. Also many, many dairy farms around the Daisen and Hiruzen areas.

https://goo.gl/maps/8xRW4wEVaecDoL5u7
https://goo.gl/maps/mhLCozBj7EMu8WxV9
https://goo.gl/maps/rmeNGkbZSJEXCDE46

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