here, there, everywhere

Today, I taught a class of pre-schoolers who kept shouting unko! (poo!) every time I tried to make them say hello. More excitingly, in the stretch of downtime before our morning and evening shifts at work, Iain and I tore up our backyard and started working in earnest on our garden. I love my twice-weekly nursery school shifts, but even a roomful of cute little kids shouting bathroom words is no competition for the awesomeness that is digging giant holes and getting covered in dirt in the first backyard I've ever had in my adult life.

To clarify, when I say garden, I'm referring to the extremely finite little patch of dirt that makes up most of our patio, which we share with the rest of the building (if you look at the first photo, 'our' patch of garden extends to the decaying wooden mystery platform, whose purpose remains unclear) which doesn't get very much sunlight. But, the last teachers who lived here were able to grow tomatoes and rosemary, and the marigolds I haphazardly planted last week in a fit of new-garden-inspired glee seem to be doing okay, so I'm hopeful.

Unfortunately, because the planting instructions are all in kanji, and we're still not entirely familiar with the conditions of the backyard, we both had to admit that this first batch of plants is very much a test run. Any plants that seem to be thriving, we'll plant more of, particularly if we need to replace ones that don't do so well. 

Above: Mmm... mojitos. 

When we moved in, the garden as a large tangle of rocks and weeds. While I haven't been able to sucessfully convince Iain that weeds are pretty and should be allowed to make the garden at least look green (since everything we well-meaningly planted could very well die), we did agree to reroute the rocky areas so that they make nice little borders around the plants, instead of remaining in random rocky patches. Jury's still out on the fate of the weeds in the un-gardened portions of the yard.