I cannot adjust to the growing cycle in Okinawa. Now is harvest time for stuff like potatoes and cabbage, also for sugar cane. There seems to be two ways of harvesting sugar cane, the easy way and the hard way. The hard way is to chop it down with  a sugar cane hatchet, strip of foliage with same tool and chop it into lengths. The next fitness craze?

Choose your hatchet

The easy way is to buy a sugar cane combine harvester. It munches the cane in at the front and excretes it bagged through the posterior.

It sort of sits back when it excretes

Anyway, in my secret garden I had the most beautiful display of Busy Lizzies – huge globes of red, pink, white er, red and white and er pink and white. I have rarely seen such healthy plants. The ground display was matched by a roof of Brugsmansia trumpets. All in all very pleasing but strange because it was February.

Happy days

Over the last few days the Busy Lizzies have suddenly fallen sick and withered. I of course thought frost but then reminded myself not to be silly. It does however look very much like frost damage.

I think an enemy came to my garden and sowed tares

Off to the local gardening shop to get new plants. This place is one of my favorites.  I love the strange tools.

The Okinawans do not have scythes but cut hay and undergrowth with tiny hand sickles.

Now is the time to plant Goya.

Goya is almost the only vegetable that can resist the Summer heat

The Peasant’s Revolt

De rigeur when gardening

I have a good clean up in the garden and do some replanting. Nothing so becomes a man as horticulture.

Geraniums, petunia, lobelia. Not very exotic.