Bounty by the barrowload

There is something deeply satisfying and fulfilling bringing back barrowloads of food from the garden. I am led to believe that shopping is a source of fulfillment to some, but I don't believe that any feelings coming from shopping can even come close.

This year was the best ever sweet potatoe harvest I've had. Not just lots of them, but big ones.

Both sweet potatoes and taro grow easily. Just put em in the ground and wait!! My kind of gardening.

Busy, busy, busy...

Millet hung up to dry.

Been very busy this past month. I don't grow any rice, so I haven't needed to harvest that like everyone else round here. Have been receiving bags of really fresh rice from friends and neighbors though.

I've been busy dealing with the surplus of tomatoes, peppers etc, so been doing a lot of canning.

And now the matsuri season begins. Harvesting mostly done all the village shrines will be having their annual matsuri this month. Tomorrow, saturday, we have eight matsuris going on within a ten minute drive of our place.

Busy, busy, busy......

Scarcity and surplus.

Every year the garden is different. Some veggies grow better some years than others. It depends somewhat on timing, but more importantly on that enormous set of environmental factors that we call the weather.

This year has seen some unusual weather in this area. July was the wettest July in over 50 years. It was also the July with the least amount of sunshine.

The word is that many types of vegetables are going to be pricier this year. I expect to see lots of cheap Chinese veggies relabelled as expensive domestic produce.

Compared to our neighbors we have done well for pumpkins/squash this year. We will end up with more than 50 of them, and they store well through the winter. These are a cross between the Japanese kabucha and a butternut squash. The butternut is tastier ( to my palate) and the kabucha is bigger, so they are a nice balance. They make great soup, and of course pumpkin pie.

The other crop that finally came on recently were the tomatoes. I plant a lot of plants and let them run wild. A lot of fruit gets damaged by the rain, and the crows take some, but still we have enough to need to process them every few days. These are jars of home-made ketchup. Incomparable to factory-made stuff. We also can a lot of pizza sauce.

The strange weather was good for one crop this year... zuccini! usuall the zuccini plants are eaten and killed by a little orange bug by the end of June, but this year the bugs didn't arrive until just recently, so I had my best ever zuccini harvest. Now if only the damn eggplants will fruit I will be able to can gallons of ratatoille.

Umeboshi,... an acquired taste

Umeboshi, pickled plums, can most often be found in bentos, where a single plum is placed in the center of the rice to look like the Japanese flag.

After picking when ripe in June, the plums are mixed with salt and shiso leaves (to give the color) and packed with a weight on top.

Later the pickled plums are sun dried, like these of my neighbors in the photo above.

Actually Ume are not true plums, being closer to apricots.

Not fond of umeboshi myself, though umeboshi-flavored candy is OK.

Here we go round the mulberry bush..

Mulberry trees used to be a lot more common in the old days, and most farmhouses had some planted around them. There are a few of them near my riverside garden, and now the fruits are turning black and ripe and so with stained fingers we gather as much as we can. Mostly we make jam with them, or sauce that we add to yoghurt.

Called kuwa in Japan, they were of course not raised for the fruit but because their leaves are the only food eaten by silkworms, kaiko. Almost no-one raises silkworms anymore, but in the living room of our farmhouse there are still attachments around the edge of the ceiling that supported the racks that held the leaves and silkworms (which are actually caterpillars)

A few years ago the lady who sold us our house gave us some kaiko and leaves for us to watch. She no longer raised them as a crop, just as a hobby.

The wasteland next to our house and roadsides have also been giving us a good crop of noichigo, which the Japanese refer to as wild strawberries, but seem to be more like rasberries. They are also real good in Yoghurt, and freeze well.

The rainy season is officially started, but to be honest it is often hard to tell the difference between the rainy season and any other time of the year. As usual I am late with all the jobs that need doing in the garden, but have managed to get a good layer of mulch down so I should have less weeding to do later. As well as all the planting and planting out I've started to pick the onions and potatoes and finished picking all the Lima Beans

April harvest. Takenoko, bamboo shoots

It's takenoko season!! The shoots of new Giant Bamboo are now poking up from the ground and free food is to be had for the taking.

The best time to harvest is early morning following a rain. Look for shoots no more than a few centimetres in height. Any bigger and they are too tough.

Dig out the soil around the shoots down about 10 cms and cut. Most Japanese use a Japanese pick which has a sharp blade on one side, but I used a small hatchet with no trouble. The above photo is about 20 minutes worth of work.

Strip away the outer layers and trim the base and tips.

Preparation should be done as soon after harvesting as possible as the shoots quickly become tough and bitter. Before cooking the shoots need some preparation. Most people boil the shoots in water with nuka (rice bran) and a few red peppers, though if you can't easily get rice bran then boiling the shoots and changing the water twice works as well to remove the acridity.

Once drained and washed the shoot can now be cooked. Takenoko can be made into pickles, takenoko gohan, rice cooked with bamboo shoots, is also popular, but a good way is to boil the shoots in a mixture of water, soy sauce, sake, and fish stock.

My favorite way to use them is in Thai curry,.... a little to spicy for most japanese. Tonights supper.... made with eggplants, tomatoes and peppers out of the freezer from last years garden. There is no doubt that the tastiest food is free food!!!

November Harvest Persimmons

November Harvest Persimmons

Been picking what's left of the persimmons. The monkeys took most of them. I don't begrudge them their food,... so much of the Japanese forests have been replaced with sterile tree farms that have no food for any species.

The rounder shaped species of persimmon is called amagaki in Japanese, and these can be eaten straight from the tree. I'll peel them and slice them then dehydrate them for later use.

The more oval-shaped persimmons are called shibugaki, and they are too astringent to eat without first hanging and drying. Then they become similar to dried figs. Strings of them hanging are a common sight in the countryside now.

Giant Radish

The Daikon are now big enough to start being harvested. Daikon literally means "big root", but it is commonly called Giant Radish in English. Originally introduced from Asia, I remember seeing it in Asian shops in England when I was a kid where it was known as Mooli.

When I first came to Japan I really didn't like daikon, but once we moved to the country, and received daikon from neighbors on an almost daily basis, I came to love it. It grows easily, and quickly, and is used in an astonishing number of dishes in Japan.

Dakon hanging in the sun to dry is a common site now anywhere in the countryside. After a couple of weeks they are then turned into takuan, the yellow daikon pickle in just about every bento.

The young leaves are used as greens, and the older leaves turned into another kind of pickle.

Raw, grated daikon is the bed on which sashimi is served, and is also added to the dipping sauce for tempura. There are also a variety of salads using daikon.

Big chunks of daikon are found in Nabe and Oden, the 2 types of winter stew.

Our surplus we peel, slice, and then dry until rock-hard. Stored in airtight containers it stays usable for years. My neighbor dries them, then reconstitutes and cooks them in a mix of sake and soy sauce, and then dries them again.

October Harvest

Started to harvest some edamame this week. Edamame means "twig beans" as the pods grow in clusters from short twigs attached to the main stem. Edamame is the name used in English nowadays, but in fact edamame are just immature soy beans. They are boiled lightly in the pods and then eaten mostly as a type of "bar snack", though I read that in the West they are served at expensive Japanese restaurants. I prefer to let the beans grow full term when they become Kuramame, black beans. The crows took most of the beans I planted, so I tried starting some in pots and they succsessfully transplanted, so that's the way I'll do it next year.

Still picking tons of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. Eggplants grow so easily and are so prolific that people don't know how to use them all and many just rot in the gardens. The best way I have found to preserve them is with this Sri Lankan Eggplant Pickle recipe. It's a lot of work, but well worth the effort.

Rice Harvest

The rice harvest has been underway for a few weeks now. Mostly it's done on weekends or holidays, as most rice farmers have full time jobs doing something else. Some people use combine harvesters that cut the rice and strip the grain in one operation, and some just cut the rice and let it dry.

Temporary drying racks made from Giant Bamboo are a common sight now.

In a village up in the mountains near Iwami Ginzan, the farmers build an unusual support to hold the drying rice. people come from all over to photograph it.

The rice is taken to the mill building that every settlement has. The motors hum non-stop for weeks as the rice is hulled. Behind the shed the rice husks collect into piles. The husks are used as mulch in our vegetable gardens.

It is often said that Japan's grossly ineffecient rice harvest is funded by the LDP as a way of wooing the rural vote - a rural vote can be worth 3 or 4 city votes-, but I think there is another reason. The money the farmers receive doesnt stay with the farmers, it ends up in the coffers of the zaibatsu. Rice farming is completely mechanized, with every farmer owning many pieces of equipment, often only used once a year. As well as the equipment manufacturers, the chemical companies also make a fortune as Japanese farmers use a LOT of chemicals.

Mountain Whale

Looking into the eye of a whale..... a Mountain Whale,..... which is also known as inoshishi,.... a wild boar. It was called mountain whale as a way to circumvent the proscription against eating meat. A whale is a fish and therefore exempt. Rabbits are classified as birds for the same reason.
Monks and buddhist priests, and devout buddhists, ate no meat, but most Japanese ate any meat they could get,... frog, snake, badger,.... dog was popular in Edo.

Inoshishi are classified as a pest as they destroy many gardens. My own gardens have been raided several times. Last autumn my neighbor set a trap next to one of the tracks that the boar were coming out of the forest on. In 3 months he caught 3 full-size boar.

We no longer have a hunter in our village, so a friend from another village was called and he dispatched the beast with one shot.

The tail is cut off so a small bounty can be gotten from the town council.

I have read that in parts of Japan many boars are killed as pests but the carcasses just burnt.

Round here inoshishi meat is prized, and from each one caught I got a leg and the ribs. Fresh boar meat is tender and very tasty.

I caught these little guys on the road a few years ago. They were just standing, waiting for their mom who was down in the rice paddy. Maybe one of these little cuties, a few years older, was what we ate :)

Millet harvest

Harvesting pearl millet right now.

When I was a kid, millet was what you gave to the budgie! Later I discovered a health-food cookbook from the 1930's that had a recipe for millet souffle that I made often, so I was pleased to try and grow some millet.

It grows easily, and very quickly, reaching a height of 3 metres in a couple of months.

Once its cut and dried, then the hard work of threshing must be done.

For all the pseudo-religious waffle one hears in Japan about rice, its worth noting that for most of Japanese history most Japanese ate little rice. A porridge made of 5 grains, rice, wheat, 2 types of millet, and "beans" was the staple, and of these millet has the longest history in Japan. It was grown by the Jomon a thousand years before the Japanese came to these islands.

We use it added into bread, and it also makes an excellent broom!! This one is still good after a years use.

Shiso

This plant is a volunteer in my garden every summer. Known sometimes as Beefsteak Plant in English, but also by its Japanese name of Shiso, it is a member of the mint family. There are 2 species of shiso, green, and red. Anyone who has had sashimi will know green shiso as its leaves are the bed on which the sashimi lays. It is also used in salads, cooked as tempura etc. Red Shiso, pictured above, is used to give umeboshi and pickled ginger its distinctive purple color. It also makes a fragrant, tasty lemonade.
Boil the leaves for about 5 minutes, strain, add sugar to taste and then let cool. Add citric acid (lemon juice) and store in the fridge.