Garden Appreciation Thread

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This technically happened in my garden, so this seems as good a place as any to post about it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a look at my new plants to see how they were getting on while waiting for my tea to brew, when I noticed this tiny chap:

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He is, I believe, a house mouse: はつかねずみ
(ねずみ is the generic term for rat / mouse)

the rest of the story!

As you can see, it was the middle of the day, he was tiny, barely able to open his eyes, and stumbling sadly around our garden path.

He headed straight for the emergency sunflower (向日葵ひまわり) seeds as soon as I put them out (the lid was an attempt to provide water) and oh my days it took him so long just to eat one seed (実み) because he was SO SMOL.

Anyway, long story short, after making certain for myself that he was definitely in dire straits (including setting alarms every few hours throughout the night in order to refresh the hot water bottle in the shoe box I’d set up to shelter him a little while still giving the option of escape), I caved and brought him in. He was clearly somewhat hypothermic and totally on his own.

I was very hopeful that he was a house mouse, because they don’t carry hantaviruses :grin:

Within a couple of days his eyes had opened fully, and he’d stopped being completely glued to the hot water bottle. After about a week he was much more actively scampering around his box, and had stopped being completely oblivious to my presence. Here is a very fuzzy picture of an escape attempt after I had the nerve to clean his box (which always thoroughly woke him up):

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I placed the shoe box in a larger surrounding plastic box after this :sweat_smile:

And so on a sunny Saturday morning, a week and a half after he came into our lives, Mouse-san* was released back into the wild. I took him to a large country park a kilometre or so from our house, found a sheltered spot, and set up his shoe box with a mouse-sized access hole. I assume he will have rapidly moved on, but I thought it would give him some shelter to start out, and a small stock of food.

Farewell, Mouse-san. You will be missed.

…so, does anybody need a mostly full bag of hamster food? :sweat_smile:

*yes, we called him mouse-san, in what started out as an effort not to name him

he briefly carried the nickname “hanta-san”

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Omg this is the cutest thing I’ve ever read. The only small mammals I see around my garden have been thoroughly eviscerated by the lettuce protection agency

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(I won’t post a pic of him dragging round a dead bunny)

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I’ll get back to you with a full report! ^>^ But, perhaps not today (whereverandtimeyouare), but when I can get some photos of my Balcony Garden of Treats! :grin: (my iPhone just want’s more light than twilight).

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I felt pretty silly saving a mouse, to be honest, but he was so tiny and alone and oh gosh how could I abandon him??

Before he became appropriately afraid of me he would take sunflower seeds out of my fingers :scream: (I tried not to interact more than necessary, but it calmed him down to be given a seed while he was in The Plastic Box of Fear during shoe box cleanings)

I’m very sad that all of my photos are really blurry because the light was so bad. It was kind of an exciting experience in that I was always envious of those kids in books who seem to rescue animals left, right and centre :joy: why did I never find anything in need of aid?! The only thing I ever stumbled across was a sparrow with a totally messed up wing that my dad dropped a rock on to end its suffering :cold_sweat:

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ピーマンとねぎの植物を生えた。

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I wish! I love mushrooms, but I do not have the knowledge to hunt them or grow them myself.

I have memories of the day, years ago, when a friend brought buckets of mushrooms that her mother had collected. So yummy! Things that I had only ever seen in pictures.

I read the newsletter. Thank you!

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Hahaha yessssss I rescued a 3 week old kitten who had been left in a box at the side of the road to die and had the exact same thought!

And I don’t think it’s silly to rescue a mouse. The other day while weeding my peas I noticed a fly struggling in the beer trap that’s left for slugs. On instinct I scooped it out and then afterwards was like “why did I do that?”. I used to save worms on the playground in primary school.

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Woah, you were living my dream, haha :star_struck:

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ALRIGHT

I never posted any kind of update to my cardboard-covered garden, so here we go - part 2 :wink:

This is the apocalyptic wasteland we created, some time back in March:

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(That is our neighbour’s ladder - 梯子はしご - on the right… we should probably give that back at some point…)

The cardboard worked really well, although ideally you would leave it on for a year to thoroughly kill off all the grass roots (there’s a specific word for this?! 草根そうこん). I was not about to wait a year before I got to do anything constructive though. The green you can just see at the foot of the raised bed is some bluebells - ブルーベル - valiantly struggling through the edges of the cardboard. I think they might be English, but I’m not an expert at distinguishing.

Interestingly, the birds loved the cardboard for nesting material, which I hadn’t anticipated. In particular the jackdaws - 西黒丸烏にしこくまるがらす. カラス is the generic term for crows / corvids generally, so I guess this is… a “Western black round crow” :grin:

And here you can see us starting to lightly dig the remaining scraps of cardboard in:

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With my shiny new digging fork! :star_struck: I only ever had hand tools before now :grin:

Does anybody know the word for a garden fork in Japanese? I got a bit lost in all the cutlery terms…

look at all dem plants on the patio waiting to be planted out!

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Very nice work! I have been intending to ask for an update.
I long for my row-home garden. With work, you can make it in to a real oasis.

Our first year here was an all-out war against poison ivy and other noxious foes. There was lots of pulling, but we did also resort to round up in some of the worst locations.

A few years later, Easter Lilies (テッポウユリ) emerged. Also 鈴蘭(スズラン), Lily of the Valley. These plants had survived successive years of round-up.

This year, the only thing that is getting through my cardboard is some crabgrass. I have been pulling it twice a day.

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Haha, nice work! I’m planning to rescue the bluebells into the raised bed (where there are more of them) next year, if any of them pop up again.

It really is incredible how resilient plants can be.

The only problem plant I’ve noticed so far is goosegrass (can’t find a Japanese term), but it’s not rampant enough to be a real problem if I’m vigilant about pulling I don’t think. I did take out a couple of plants from the new ‘bed’ that looked suspiciously like they might be bindweed, so I’ll have to keep an eye on that area.

I have a tendency to let unidentified weeds grow because I’m interested to see what they end up doing / being :grin: our lawn is currently covered in beautiful yellow flowers (not dandelions) which the bees seem to love. No idea what they are. I’ll report back next year on whether I regret my decision :wink:

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If the bees love them, they can’t be bad, right?

Is there a difference between a garden fork and a pitchfork? Because I could find the latter, but not the former.

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Do potted gardens count? :sweat_smile:

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  • じゃが芋 in grow bags that keep trying to grow after multiple heatwaves :sweat_smile:
  • a tiny レモンの木 that has a few flower buds just starting to open
  • a sad 苺植物 that is currently infested with tiny white 虫 (any ideas on how to get rid of them without chemical pesticide?)
  • two small window boxes of 二十日大根
  • two プチトマト and a mini 唐辛子 (is this the word for the non-spicy peppers?)
  • tiny pots of バジリコ, ローズマリー, タイム, and ラベンダー on the balcony rail

Is 多肉植物 the right word for succulents? I love the descriptive kanji in that word :sweat_smile:

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Maybe the bugs have a natural predator, like ladybug (テントウムシ) larvae. You could try to get those in there? Pretty sure ladybugs don’t damage the plants themselves, so no harm if that doesn’t work.

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Right??

I’m more than happy for my lawn to drift towards being more meadow-like, so bring on the flowers, I say.

Well, yes (pitchforks are longer and less substantial than garden forks, because you need a large scooping area and don’t want any more weight than necessary for pitching hay) - but they’re very similar and if Japan only has a word for one of the two I’ll take it :grin:

You could also try spraying with just water - if you have a strong enough spray it can knock them off manually.

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Didn’t even think about this! I haven’t seen any around, but maybe I can buy them in a gardening center or something…

I’ll try this first! Although they do look kind of stuck on the furry strawberry stems, so maybe I’ll try pulling them off manually if that doesn’t work :sweat_smile:

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Or a small brush or something if that’s too tedious / gross :laughing: but yeah, I often seem to see ‘manual removal’ as the most recommended approach for this kind of thing…

Also your balcony garden looks beautiful :blush: I’m sure mine would never look that neat…!

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I have only a few plants so I do it manually, but a bit of soap if it’s gonna get rinsed before you harvest helps them slide off more easily and they don’t like it. Natural soap is easy to find, you just grate a little and spray with that.

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Great tip thank you!

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Dish soap (or as we call it “washing up liquid”) is my go to, foamed up with water and applied as a foam around the bugs. I’ve used neem oil too, it’s a natural pesticide that won’t stick around and harm other things.

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