Life In Japan: City Boy Gardener

Yes, we’re at it again. Playing in the dirt, stocking our shelves and fridge with fresh, healthy vegetables.

Actually, as many Japanese do who are not officially farmers, we do this every year.

Mind you, growing up I didn’t have a garden. I lived in a mobile home park and our yard was about the size of a throw rug. And it was suburban Detroit. Detroit was not exactly famous for its farms at the time. It was the Motown sound and automobiles, i.e. groups like the Four Tops and Supremes providing the rhythms for tearing up the dance floor, and gigantic factories belching smoke to provide the world with family transportation. The population then was over 2,000,000. Now it’s less than 750,000 and I’ve heard — have not confirmed this with a personal visit — now there are actually huge tracts of abandoned property and Detroiters are growing all sorts of organic veggies. Right in the city! Amazing how things can change!

Anyway, so far we’ve already harvested more onions and potatoes than we can possibly use. We give a lot away.

The garden pictured above is at the early stages of producing the next round. We’re raising tomatoes, green peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, butternut squash. And of course, we planted a nice amount — fifty-five plants, to be exact — of black beans.

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Life In Japan: City Boy Gardener | John Rachel

Life In Japan: Building a Catio | John Rachel

A catio is a cat patio. It offers an outdoor space for kitties that are mostly kept indoors.

Frankly, it breaks my heart that our three cats can’t run “in the wild”, doing things that are quite natural for them to do: chase butterflies and birds, crawl through undergrowth, roll in the grass, smell flowers. But our house backs up on a forest. There simply are too many predators. We have foxes, raccoon dogs, Japanese badgers, huge hawks which can pick up a full-size cat and fly away, snakes, occasional wild boars.

And then there’s the monkeys!

Yes, we have several large families of Japanese macaques living all around us. Sometimes they just look for food, sometimes they are aggressive, as when one jumped on the hood of my step-daughter’s car and ripped off her windshield wiper.

The catio will let them enjoy the outdoors without fear of being attacked or otherwise terrorized.

I can’t say that building it was a simple, straightforward process. Without blueprints or any model to work off of, the only option was to make it up as I went along. So I did. Aside from creating an enclosure which kept the kitties in and predators out, I had to make it typhoon proof. Even though we’re pretty far inland, two or three times a year we get serious typhoons with steady winds of up to 80 kmh (50 mph), gusts even higher. My catio is secured to a cement foundation. So in a worst case scenario, it might collapse but it certainly will not blow away.

Anyway, here are a few photos of putting the catio together, and finally the kitties enjoying it.

Next we’ll do some interior decorating: plants, ground covering, ladder, shelves, maybe a hammock. Fountain? That would be nice!

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Life In Japan: Building a Catio | John Rachel