Notes From the Farm Vol. 1

We arrived here at Chieko's parent's house in Niigata without incident on Tuesday evening. The only hiccup was a bit of traffic on the highway. As you may have heard there was a pretty serious earthquake here last week. While the loss of human life was minor, there was still quite a bit of damage to roads and houses. Thus, the highway was limited to one lane for a good part of the drive. I was impressed with how quickly crews had started repairs though, and how much work they had gotten done in just over a week. I suppose you get the hang earthquake repairs pretty quickly here though.

Yesterday was our first day harvesting watermelons. We were initially going to get a free pass on work for the day, but the threat of crappy weather today prompted Chieko's dad to issue us a quota of 300 melons, which he had gone out and cut free of their vines in the wee hours of the morning. We finished them up right around noon time, ate lunch, and surprise surprise, headed to the beach, which is about an hours drive away.

I was a bit excited to see what the watermelon patches would look like in full bloom, so to speak. When we came here at the beginning of May and planted the seedlings, the fields were still pretty barren.



Quite a different scene this time of year though, with nothing but vibrant green to be seen. This is the same watermelon patch, surrounded by rice paddies and green mountains.



The first order of business in watermelon harvesting, so I've learned, is to clean off the melons. They tend to get dead leaves dried on their skin, along with some dirt. It's not a very precise practice, more of a surface cleaning to get the obvious muck off.



As one person cleans, one or two others take a motorized wagon thing up and down the patch and collect the cleaned melons, then load them into the truck.



From there, it's back to the house, where the melons are unloaded into the barn to be sold, I think...I haven't learned what happens next though.



We entertained ourselves last night with a barbecue, which was delicious. While the adults among us enjoyed cold Asahi beer, the youngsters had their own version of kiddie beer. This is something I wasn't aware of until recently that they sell here in Japan. It really doesn't taste like beer at all, but the kids seem pretty psyched to be swilling along with the adults.



It's also high season for cicadas to be molting from horrid little beetles into horrid big loud flying monsters. They seem to enjoy the trees around Chieko's house for this process. The trees are full of the hollow beetle shells that adult cicadas have emerged from. They climb into the trees, latch on to a leaf or branch, and proceed to spend the night very slowly extricating themselves. It was pretty cool to watch, for a little while at least. They do take their time though. Here's one of them.