Albert's Greenhouse

Spring has sprung and fall has fell. Winter is here and it's colder than ... usual.
So this week, Albert's greenhouse reviews a vacation to China and Japan last fall.

This is not your typical tourist visit, either. We went to exactly zero Japanese gardens, zero botanical gardens, and brought back zero seeds, plants, and cuttings ( thank you, US Department of Agriculture ). I counted them all. Twice.

Albert's family in Japan and Albert's wife's family in China were ( and in some cases still are ) farmers. And heavily domesticated though they may be, farmed plants are still interesting plants.

What we have here is a Japanese rice field, just about ready for harvest. This particular field is near the town of Wakinomachi in Niigata prefecture, an area famous for the quality of it's rice crop, and therefore also famous for its quality of sake ( rice wine ). Rice is the staple starch crop in much of the south part of Asia, at least where there's enough water and warmth to grow it. Japanese grow primarily short and medium grained rice which cooks up quite sticky. Nothing like Uncle Ben's.


In front of the rice field is a typical Japanese vegetable garden, where they grow familiar things like tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, cabbages and carrots. Somewhat less familiar items include a lot of taro ( seen on the left ) and soybeans. If you're interested in growing some asian vegetables, you might take a look at the Kitazawa Seed Company catalog. They've been selling seed since 1917, and if you're interested, they'll even sell you some rice.

Rice is grown in wet, marshy soil, and uses a lot of water. It's still planted by hand in many places, though most of the harvest appears to be mechanized these days. These days, the Japanese are trying to protect their rice industry from cheaper sources overseas, primarily the northern part of the central valley of California where huge mechanized farms produce excellent quality rice for very low prices. If you visit Willows, California in the summer and have cause to wonder why there are so many mosquitos - it's the rice paddies.

It is sad to think that the land which my family has farmed literally since before Colombus sailed to America might someday soon be planted with housing developments instead of rice and soybeans. The picture to the right is rice farming in the 1960's.