NATORI, Miyagi Prefecture--With business in full bloom, carnation growers in this tsunami-stricken city are once again busy shipping their flowers prior to Mother’s Day on May 13.
NATORI, Miyagi Prefecture--With business in full bloom, carnation growers in this tsunami-stricken city are once again busy shipping their flowers prior to Mother’s Day on May 13.
Yoetsu Miura, a 62-year-old flower grower in the city’s Kozukahara district, was sorting through a variety of colorful carnations on May 10. Miura had his house and five plastic greenhouses destroyed in the tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake in March last year. The remaining five greenhouses were covered in debris and sludge.
Miura was resigned to giving up his flower-growing business before Yutaka Hasegawa, a professor at Rakuno Gakuen University in Hokkaido, came to the rescue. With Hasegawa’s help, Miura began improving the quality of his soil by applying fertilizing microbes a year ago.
Now, the number of carnations to be harvested by the end of this month is expected to total 100,000.
“These flowers are of an equivalent level to those harvested before the disaster,” Miura said proudly. “I can ship them with confidence.”