Probably this is the wrong place to ask this– I should really visit some horticulture forum or something — but what the hey, it’s more fun to do this here, and see what kind of secret green thumbs we have reading this blog.
When I moved to my new place in Fukuoka, Japan, I was all excited because I actually had a real back garden. Not a huge one, but considering I was right smack dab in the town center, it was a pretty lucky coup. I had these grand ideas of starting a vegetable garden in there, despite the fact that I have exactly zero experience with gardening.
My apartment is on the ground floor of an apartment building with 11 floors. Only the three ground floor apartments have a back lawn, and most apartment buildings don’t have lawns, period, so again, I stress my crazy luck. I was warned before I moved in that the previous tenant didn’t take care of the garden, but they offered to clean it up for me once before I arrived. And they did that.
In April, I finally saw the garden with my own eyes. I was a bit disappointed to discover that the lawn area was surrounded on all sides by multilevel apartment buildings. Whatever grew there would probably be sick for sunlight. But still, it was my own little patch. The lawn was mainly clover, with a couple of little patches of some kind of green stalky plant with thick roots that had recently been cut, and which had grown to 2 or 3 feet high. I was also secretly pleased to see that both of my neighbor’s lawns were untended and overgrown. My perfect little veggie garden was going to kick their ass!
(I wish I had taken a picture when I first arrived, but I did not.)
As any of my real life friends could have predicted, knowing what a lazy cretin I am, I did not immediately do what was necessary to plant a vegetable garden. For one thing, I had no idea what to do. So I decided I must research. Yes, research was key. No internet yet? Oh well. Off the hook.
This is what the garden looked like a month later. You can see that the green stalky thingies had grown a bit. Evidently my fears about lack of sunlight were overrated. I estimate they were 4 or 5 feet tall here.
Here it is from another angle.
Now, from roughly the same angle, but taken just this afternoon. As you can see, they’ve grown a bit more.
I shit you not, that tallest green stalky thingy is nearly 8 feet tall!
I actually kind of like looking out my windows and seeing so much green out there. Especially because the view, otherwise, is drab apartment high rises. But for one thing, I kind of do still have this fantasy of growing vegetables out there. And for another, the mosquitos are unbearable out there. To go hang up my laundry, I need to put on a hooded sweatshirt and long jeans. And it’s getting HOT now. Mind you, maybe the mosquitos are just as much from my neighbors’ untended lawns, or from some standing water just around the corner or something. But can I just say how maddeningly clear of giant green monster stalky things my neighbors’ lawns are? Obviously this is just something indigenous to my own garden.
So, consider this a plea for help. Anybody out there know anything about this stuff? What do you recommend? Giant pruning shears? A flamethrower? Prayer? Will it tear up the soil in some detrimental way if I just put on some work gloves and buy a shovel and try to dig out the roots? What, dear gardening hobbyists, would YOU do if you inherited this situation?
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