Planting summer vegetables.

 Every year in May, I plant summer vegetable sprouts like tomatoes, egg-plants, cucumbers and other and here is the list of my summer vegetables which were planted yesterday.

1.  6 tomatoes (Momotaro)
2.  4 cucumbers
3.  3 egg-plants
4.  2 green peppers (Manganji)
5.  1 black chili
6.  1 ginger

I sometimes had a problem in growing tomatoes. Some tomato fruits were cracked just before I harvested them. According to some books and my wife's aunt, my gardening teacher, tomato fruits should be protected against rain drops which might cause the crack. I know that some kits of vinyl tunnels specialized for tomato trees are sold at a local home center and that they are expensive so I don't feel it worth paying for them. Fortunately, I have many plastic poles like straight ones and curved ones so I decided to assemble them into "a canopy for tomato tree".



 After assembling a structure with plastic poles, I covered a vinyl sheet, which were used for a vinyl tunnel for winter vegetables, over the structure.

 After planting those sprouts, I placed some bunches of straws beside them. Straws are very useful for keeping soil moist even in a scorching summer day in Japan.

 I bought some chili's sprouts including black chili, and Manganji green peppers. You can see the difference between the colors of both sprouts. The black chili has a purple trunk.

 I planted a ginger for the first time but it's not so difficult even for beginners to grow it according to my wife's aunt. Ginger is very popular in Japan and especially during a hot summer, we use a grated ginger for a condiment for cold white and thin noodles (Somen) and buckwheat noodles (Soba).  I bought a large seed ginger this time.

 The large ginger is too big to be planted in a hole so I divided it into 3 pieces. It's ok to divide it but the cut sides should be dried for a few days for avoiding infection in the soil.

 The soil for ginger should be always moist and my straws serve as a blanket for keeping water in soil.