About ten years ago, I was lucky to buy a piece of land 30 km north from my house. Since then, growing vegetables has become my intense hobby in the weekend. I do not know why vegetables have become my favorites, but perhaps my childhood experience to help my mother’s work to grow vegetable in the garden of house we lived in Tokyo has some relationship. That time, everybody was hungry and serious vegetable grower. By this experience, I intuitively knew how to grow vegetables. There was no psychological difficulty for me to start growing vegetables. Tomato, cucumber, egg plant, pumpkin and radish, I started to grow in this land were the same vegetables I saw in the garden when I was five years old.
At my age, I understood life is repetitious.
I also understand that people try to repeat the same thing but under different situations.
In my case, it was clear that I wanted to grow vegetables as many as possible by my own ability and efficiency. I was ambitious as a weekend farmer. Sometimes too ambitious. One day in one week is my maximum time to work for growing vegetables so that I would only smile if my attempt turned out to be a failure.
I now understand that growing vegetables and trees for me is to realize myself.
Fortunately, my wife also likes growing vegetables. Since all of our children left the house, growing vegetables for us has become the work to do together.
The first photo shows the land one year after we bought it.
The second photo was taken after our weekend house was made. Our land is adjacent to rice fields.
The third photo is our recent harvest.