More real life

So a while back now, there were those posts about the vegetable patch, and the bounty, and the bottling, and the trying to find new ways of eating zucchini, and so on.

I've been feeling a bit bad about these posts for a while now, in case you were still under the impression that I was managing The Good Life while working full time. I am not. Not at all. And especially not now that I'm the sole gardener, with our neighbours having temporarily moved to the other side of the world.

Last year I tried, but rain. Which meant first, weeds. And second, slugs. I have never seen so many slugs. I'm not sure what happened - did their numbers build up in the previous years to a suddenly evident plague? Or was it because the field next door wasn't mown until very late in the year, meaning an extra quarter acre of prime slug breeding habitat? All I know is it was nightmare material. You'd walk out and there'd be giant crawling slugs everywhere, really, just everywhere.

I tried beer traps, I tried snipping all I saw in two. It made no difference to their numbers. It was very dispiriting, but I took heart in my species' track record with extinctions and moved it up a level.

That's a good half kilo there, and I collected several bags like this. I didn't manage an extinction, but it helped. But the rain also meant, third, not that many weekends where I could actually plant anything. And then fourth, tomato blight. Add in me not having much time to harvest what there was, and everyone else who forgot, and there was not much bounty last year.

But! 2014 was a new year and I was ever hopeful! I started well, I really did - for the first time ever, I cleared the entire area of weeds, and then only planted what I figured could reasonably manage.

Only then, rain again, and slugs. Bags and more bags of slugs. But still it was going well, until around mid-June, after which we were either away or had guests or were doing something every weekend until mid-September.

Of course, I was very happy to be away and have guests and have done something else than endlessly tend to the vegetable patch ... but still, it was a bit of a shock when we retuned from Japan to find: 

Well, OK, so it actually doesn't look so bad from a distance... but let's get a bit closer.

That's the onion section, overrun with strawberries. Can't see the onions? There's actually quite a lot of them...

There's one! 

Poor, poor overgrown then blighted tomatoes.

Broccoli gone to seed. Though to be honest, I did get one harvest - this was meant to be the second. 

This was perhaps the most cruel. A broccoli stump, in a slug protector, completely eaten by slugs. And to add further salt to the wound, overgrown with weeds. Dandelions, for the most part.

Did you know artichokes have pretty purple flowers? I certainly didn't. (Leeks have pretty purple flowers too, it turns out.)

Flowers long gone to seed, taking over the rocket.

And finally at the back, a raggedy sunflower forest.

So there you go, another not very successful year. Maybe 2016?

Japan -Day 3

After yesterday's rush, we had set the alarm to be sure of not missing breakfast today. Our kids took full advantage of the extra time and varied buffet. They started with pancakes and croissants, moved on to onigiri (rice wrapped in seaweed)... and then discovered that the soft-serve ice cream machine was operational. I have to admit, my initial response was a hearty parental no when they asked, but then I figured, why not? There were three very happy children that morning.

After breakfast we had a couple of hours' drive to our next destination, Niseko.

Not such a long drive, only our kids are not that good in a car. They - predictably - muck around and fight and make a lot of noise. We - predictably - hiss and yell for them to be quiet. Eventually we do get a sullen silence following the threat of a Very Nasty Consequence, but by then it's a bit of a Pyrrhic victory with misery all around. Not fun, not fun at all. Thankfully this trip was rendered bearable by Humphrey the Hamster! Audio books = bloody life saver, I tell you.

Niseko is a ski resort near Mount Yōtei. Mount Yōtei is big. Verrry big.

It didn't take so long to get there, but then we had to get around it to our hotel.

What a lovely welcome! We actually saw this at many of the hotels we stayed at, but this was by far the most prominent, being right as you walked in.

Apart from the hills being volcanoes and not, well, regular hills, Hokkaido looked disconcertingly like Switzerland a lot of the time. Including inside.  

After checking in, we asked for information on easy nearby hikes. The receptionist very helpfully got a map and pointed out a couple... that were 15 minutes long. C managed not to be too rude when he said we were looking for something a big longer and that we would figure it out ourselves.

But first, lunch. The hotel was out of town, so thought we'd head towards the start of the hike and hope to find something on the way. My stomach sank a little when the first place we saw was a little curry house - Japanese curry is not my favourite. But this turned out to be a real curry house with real curry - yum!

Yoko left us at the trail head. The rest of us set off into the forest, with the aim of ascending Mt. Niseko Annupuri, a few kilometers away and 500m up.

It was hot. We sweated. I sweated even more than normal, thanks to a bout of hot flashes triggered by coming off the pill a few weeks earlier. As an example of how hot these hot flashes are: normally on a long flight I am wearing at least 3 layers - the last one a fleece - and wrapped up in two blankets, and still a little cold. On the trip to Japan, I wore a tank top the entire way and was still uncomfortably hot a lot of the time. So, I was pretty hot on this walk.

Shabolz's parents, Micheline and Jean-Paul, were also hot and stopped about half-way up. The remaining hikers made it to the top in less than 1 hour 40 min - not too bad for the first walk!

The summit (1,308m) - we could just barely see Mount Yōtei in the afternoon haze. If you click on the picture and angle your screen the right way, you may be able to glimpse it too.

Looking along the old crater to the second peak. With every step along the path came a rustling from...

... grasshoppers! Lots of them!

What goes up must come down, so down we went and back to the hotel for, of course, a hot bath. (No picture, sorry.)

In the evening we met up with friends of Shabolz and Yoko, and went out for yakitori and okonomiyaki. Yum yum yum!

Well, yum, yum yum for us - our kids were less enthusiastic.

There wasn't even any edamame. Oh well.

Then it was back to the hotel for a nightcap...

Ume-shu, mmmmmm. And a cool bartop, no?

... and bed.