allotment

Do you know What These are?

/ Mutsumi / 11 Comments

Last week I passed a house which spread a tiny organic vegetable shop in front of their front garden. It seems they have an allotment and they a grow great quantity of vegetables. I’m sure they eat their own vegetables but I guess they sometimes get too much crop so that they sell what they couldn’t consume to public. All the vegetables looked healthy so I decided to take some mini tomatoes, courgettes, green & purple beans, a marrow and … these round things that caught my eyes. I thought they were apples first but they weren’t. Can you guess what they are?

Apple Cucumber1

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Walking into the Queen’s Wood

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When you fly to or from London, where I live, you can see many greenery area from the sky. Although it is the capital city of England, even apart from the famous parks in the central area there are many great woods in London. The further out you go towards suburb, the more woodland there are. There are several woods quite close to where I live as well and I went to one of them at the last weekend for a short walk.

Queens Wood1One of my favourite woods near my house is Queen’s Wood. According to the council’s website ‘Queen’s Wood is one of the boroughs four Local Nature Reserves and one of four ancient woodland in Haringey. These woods are thought to be the direct descendants of the original “wildwood”, which covered most of Britain about five thousand years ago’. That sounds very impressive.

As it’s described as an ancient woodland as soon as you step your foot in the wood, most of the ground is covered thickly with tree canopies. They are all native trees such as English oak, beech, hornbeam, midland hawthorn, hazel, mountain ash, field maple, cherry and holly etc.

Queens Wood2

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The End of Summer and Okra

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Okra6

I am in Japan now. Because of some technical issue (I don’t mean Japan is technically behind though) I have not been able to post as often as I would want to do.

“Autumnal Equinox Day (秋分の日)”

The 23rd of September was our national holiday “Autumnal Equinox Day (秋分の日)”. After this day the length of the daytime gets shorter than the nighttime day by day so this was officially the end of summer.

Still it is quite hot and humid here. The daytime temperature now is just below 30°C so it is almost the same as the hottest summer day in London.

In the garden Okra is still flowering and we can harvest some. Okra is one of the vegetables I wanted to grow in London and gave up after trying for a few years. It does sprout and gets cotyledons – the first leaves but … never reaches to the point having true leaves. So, I am happy to see the plant growing here. It’s been a bit late but some Peanuts plants are also growing in the garden here. I am looking forward to harvesting home-grown Peanuts sometime soon.