From A Farmer's Diary

Hisashiburi.. it's been a really long blogger's break this time! And the excuse is just as usual: I've been too busy or too lazy. Or just dead drunk.
For quite some time the weather was as it should be: wet, wet and wet. There were two weeks in July that I hadn't seen the sun. It was like this at 4 PM every day.

 Too bad that the rain started a bit too early - or the onions were a bit late - but for more than a week I was hired for the onion harvest and we did it almost all in the rain. It was hard to carry the onion bags from the muddy fields and I was swearing all the time, but, in retrospective, I'm glad I wasn't doing it under the blazing sun. And the wage was more than fair. Seriously. If you know an European country where seasonals can get 100 euros for an 8 hours working day with lots of alcohol and too much food (and two of the guys who hired me bought me also cigarettes), call me, I might go for a holiday to Europe. Yes, there were days when the work had to be done and we worked 12 hours, but in the evening (very late evening) the envelope with money was way thicker and it's customary to end such day with a big feast at some restaurant with streams of soju. The hell I will complain!
Anyway, two months ago I had to go to Japan again and I finally remembered to take a picture of this sign!

I always thought it was 300 C, but Japanese should know it. I trust it without checking the web. And, like every time, I took a picture as a proof I was in Japan. So I can brag about it. I've lost the count of how many times I went to Japan.

Few weeks ago I took a break and went to Seoul for five days. I was sick of working drunk every day, so I wanted to be drunk just doing drinking. It was a good idea.

By luck I came to Seoul for the weekend when a friend from France had his DJ gig and it was really refreshing to do some clubbing after a very long time. I also liked the club itself, they offer a challenge that if you can drink 10 shots of various spirits (ranging from vodka through curacao to whiskey) in flat 30 seconds, you don't have to pay for it. Don't ask me if I didn't try it.

I lost miserably. It took me 38 seconds, while the record is 24. I could say that I was drinking without sleeping or much eating the previous three days, but it would be another lame excuse. I'm a failure, that's what it is. Most important, I didn't drop dead after loosing my 20 000 won, I'm not that a sore looser, i ordered another beer and hit the floor for the next  four hours or so and I fell asleep on a chair only late in the morning. I know the pictures do like awful, but hey, it;s really how I saw the club! After the challenge.

And this is what I really saw (or, to put it better, what I was looking at at 6AM when I was going to sleep back to Gangnam).

The same day I went back home and was just a farmer again. Fight with pest... no, I'm a looser even at this. There's no way I can get rid of the buggers that keep eating my Vienna Blue rutabaga. Tried some natural repellents, like garlic, hot peppers, tobacco.. no use. It's like last year. Like this.

And to think that yesterday I saw a Blue Vienna the size of a volleyball - I just don;t want to know what or how many chemicals are used on that field. Be aware of Asian products, here farmers are still proud of how many industrial pesticides, fertilizers and weedkillers they use. As for me, I;m still the stubborn gaijin. That's why my tomatoes look like this.

And today I picked my first ones. Not good, not good.

The one on the left is a Cuore di bue cultivar, the others are Marmande. Same shit for the buggers who eat them. The cucumbers are doing well, I should plant more of them next year.

Just as a joke I planted some sugarcane I brought from Tokunoshima.It's far from being like there now, but it's alive and kicking. I don't hope for a sugarcane harvest, but if I can have enough sprouts for next year, who knows!

 The hot peppers and eggplants are way retarded, even if the pictures are one month old.

 Don't be fooled by the name, wintermelon is not a melon that grows in wintertime. It's just a sort of melon, Cucumis melo inodorus, the Korean cultivar. For now it looks nice, hope for some fruits.

Weeds grow faster than I can pull them out. Or maybe I'm just slower than the weeds. That's carrots somewhere between them.

But the origano and basil and rosemary are doing well. I eat a lot of spaghetti with pesto in these days.

Zynnia flowers also seem to like my field and I like them, so I plant them everywhere. I love flowers.

 I love every flower, even sunflowers. I don't grow them for the seeds. And I'm proud of this mutant with 40 flowers. It's not a Monsanto modified shit. It's from my seeds from last year. yes, 39 lateral flowers plus the big one on top.

But the best of my life now are Saturdays. I'm thrilled every time when we go to the church to see all of them little buggers. Their hapkido teacher told me that even the kids are really looking forward for Saturdays to have some fun with the weird teacher. On that line.. two weeks ago I was invited to their dojo where the kids (MY kids) were taking their belt exams. It was a mistake. Most of the time I felt like I was watching a fighting game. Drop kicks, fly kicks, jump kicks, hi jump kicks..you name it, they did it. Kicking up to 2 meters high. With a vault. Now just tell me how can I make fun of or bully these kids?