Do you know about Licolita?　It is an NPO based in Akiba and they are behind the annual uchimizukko project among many others. In case you don't know, uchimizukko is an annual summer event where maids from various maid cafe gather to splash water on the ground to bring down the temperature in that area. You can check out how it went last year in this video report by Cherry here. (Sorry Japanese only ><) Recently, Licolita came up with a plan to make Akiba greener with the "Akihabara Garden" Project. The idea was to plant rice in buckets on a rooftop and then throw a harvest party when the crops are ready to be eaten! The seeds were sown on June 5, 2009 by maids from the maid cafes in Akihabara. The Japan Agricultural Newspaper headquartered in Akihabara generously loaned their rooftop for the gardening and even provided the seeds for the rooftop rice plantation. Here is the opening ceremony:

I wasn't in town at that time but I joined them a few weeks later in their second round of gardening activities~ Actually, don't really know what I was doing and what it was for but anyhows, here was what we did...

Simply put, we removed the plants from the buckets and then put them back into another bucket! Sounds easy but that task took ten people or so and hours to complete. To remove the seeds from the soil without damaging the roots, you'd have to massage the soil until it is soft and then break up bigger particles until they crumble off. Be prepared to get muddy and work those arm muscles!

The plants removed from the buckets and the mess we made!

After that we massaged the soil until its soft.

Our hands also became soft and smooth after all that clay massaging~

Then we put back the plants again~

We started around 4pm I think and we ended when it got dark...

Here's the view of Akiba from the garden rooftop~

After that, we all took turns to visit this garden to water it everyday. The water level has to be five centimeters above the soil!

I was out of town for the following week so my turn came a few weeks later, this is how the Akihabara Garden looks like!

If you come to Akihabara nowadays, you can find a few buckets of rice plants outside some maid cafes because they are helping to take care of the garden too! For a few months we have to water the plants everyday and in the end we could only harvest enough grains to make about 30 bowls of rice... Can you imagine how much work goes to a bowl of rice? Thanks to licolita, I learned to treasure every grain of rice from now and I'll never forget to say "itadakimasu"!^^