September 29, Tuesday — Cloudy, with some rain
Today I planted daikon radishes and red turnips.
I don't have anything fancy like a seed drill, so I planted them one seed at a time by hand.
For the daikon raddish, I planted two varieties. One is Fuyuto 88, a reliable winter daikon raddish that also works well for selling at the local farm stand.
The other is Karaina, a spicy variety that's especially good grated as a condiment.
Last year, I couldn't quite figure out the right time to plant them, so I never got around to sowing the seeds. This year, I watched the weather and checked the moisture in the soil, and decided that now was the time.
Then there were the red turnips.
For these, I used a pair of chopsticks to make shallow planting rows in the soil, then sowed the seeds along those lines.
If everything goes well, I should have some nice turnips to harvest during the coldest part of winter.
But these days, farming sometimes feels less like manufacturing and more like speculation.
Of course, farming has always had good years and bad years. There have always been crop failures. But in the past, it seemed that a bad harvest was still generally a matter of producing less than expected.
These days, though, it's not unusual to see crops suffer catastrophic damage—or even be wiped out completely.
At the same time, agricultural prices seem to swing more wildly than they used to.
The result is that it's becoming genuinely difficult to predict what kind of return I'll get from the work I put into a crop.
You plant the seeds.
You fertilize.
You pull weeds.
You fight insects and wildlife.
You watch the weather.
And finally, you harvest.
Only then do you find out what your investment was actually worth.
Sometimes I wonder if I'd be better off investing in stocks rather than investing in turnips.
At least with stocks, if the price goes down, I don't have to go out and weed them.
Still, today I planted those seeds one by one.
Now we'll see what kind of return this little turnip investment produces by the end of the year.
--------
Created with ChatGPT
日本語版はこちら
https://blog.kuma-farm-japan.jp/article/521682039.html?1790785584
