Yes, that sounds pretty close to the flavor, though pumpkin is clearly different. I don’t know anything that really tastes like rose hips. it’s unique.
That’s a LOT of pickles! 
Why type of pickling liquid are you using for them. Just vinegar, sugar, salt, water? Or something more Japanese style flavored?
The answer to this is more complicated than one might think. Spouse requested bread and butter pickles. So she had picked up a couple of packets of bread-and-butter spices from the スーパー.
(should I call these パンとバタ漬物?)
Also I was pickling some loads of beets. That also required a sugary broth. I usually like pickles at around 50% water, 50% vinegar. I also like to have left over brine instead of running out. So each day, I was carrying the broth over from the last and either adding no new spices (for the beets), or more new spices, (for the pickles).
I tend to prefer pickles without sugar, so on the final day I made dill pickles. I carried over brine from the day before, did not add any new sugar, then realized that there is no dill coming up in the garden so I just threw in some spices from the drawer!
Also I been slicing the pickles the night before and salting them and letting them sit in the fridge over night. The Japanese cukes are yummy, and I like the consistent size of the pickles they produce. But they just get thrown in with the other cukes.
I still plan on doing some fermenting soon.
An average two-day harvest, minus 6 big yellow squash that are already sliced and blanched and frozen, and a liter of blackberries.
The 関西 cucumber is the long one. The spiky green ones are the year’s first bitter melons. Garlic is on the napkin. I am still trying to identify some of the tomatoes. There are yellow and green and purple and pink and striped ones. They are all so yummy.
I am still comically desperate about the whole thing. I want so badly to prove that I can produce enough food to be worth while, to make an impact on our food budget. Plus, this is my trial for finding how much I need to scale up to have a vegetable stand. In the last two years, I have purchased two big dump-trucks of compost to expand the vegetable beds (total of $800), plus seeds, a tiny greenhouse for starting seeds, row covers, a small freezer, and a liter of bt. $1200 total. Plus some public water usage. This winter, I will be purchasing one more truck of compost for the final expansion. Also, I would like to make a couple of permanent steel trellises for tomatoes and vines, instead of needing to harvest bamboo each winter. But this is not intended to be a thing that I sink money into. The goal is to produce enough food to pay for everything I am doing.
Here is what is crazy. I work 50 hours a week at my job. For several years now, my spouse has taken much of the responsibility for cooking when I am in my busy season at work. So this is me proving that I can still help to put food on our table.
But, this is so much work, I would be better off just cooking supper. 
It probably won’t be, I mean, if one can buy a cucumber for pennies, why grow them. On the other hand, you know where the stuff comes from, what went into producing it, it’s certainly a lot fresher, it’s unusual varieties (most likely tastier, those popular in commerce are grown to do well on the shelves, not to taste amazing), you avoid packaging waste and transportation.
Unless you’re producing on industrial scale, you’re better off to see it as a hobby and hope you’ll get out of it more or less even.
Actually, I will nearly hit it even this year.
Food is very expensive here, and produce especially expensive. There has been significant inflation this last year.
I will preserve 100 quarts of tomatoes easily this year, plus be able to eat them fresh until October, plus give much away. We have a few gallons of berries in the freezer already. We harvested 50 kg of potatoes. I have winter squash started that will ripen in October and feed us all winter.
Long-term, this garden will require no money input. I don’t use fertilizer or pesticide. I produce about 2 cu meters of finished compost each year, which is fertilizer for the next.
I eat lots of weeds and wild berries too. I am content with no meat. I am confident that when I am very old I can live here, or anywhere with a tiny bit of land, without ever buying food, so long as I am capable of walking.
Wow, how large is your veggie garden operation, and is there any room left to move around without treading on veges?
We have currently something like 16sqm, and it’s a nice addition to the menu, but nowhere near enough to actually feed two people. The zucchini are doing their best at trying, but there’s a limit on the number of zucchini based dishes I want to eat…
Also dotted around are four or five fruit trees, but that’s more like the cherry on top (no pun intended, but welcome). The apricots were amazing, so much tastier and sweeter than the store bought meh fruits.
Tomatoes still need some time to ripen around here.
Thank you for humoring my garden fantasies.
We have half of a city block in a “new” (1920’s-1960’s) section of our city. There was an abandoned house under brush in the middle when we bought it. Whatever is not house is potentially garden. Right now, the vegetable area is maybe 10m x 25m. Next year it will be one step bigger, and that should be perfect for a year of vegetables, plus plenty to give away. If nothing else, we can produce most of our own food from July to November.
I fear disaster, yet things are going really well this year. There have been plenty of minor flaws, but overall we have an embarrassing wealth of food right now. I just carried a giant box of potatoes and tomatoes over to the neighbor’s house.
Those are the best. All hail our zucchini overlords!
So basically, you turned your entire plot into a veggie field with a house in the middle? No more sad lawn and decorative plants?
Well, getting to eat fresh veggies, straight from the vine…there is nothing that beats that. And after a long day of working hard, yeah, going into the garden to enjoy what you have growing there is wonderful. 
Now this piqued my interest! I’m sure people would love to buy your delicious looking veggies! ^>^
京都茄子
We live in a mixed-use residential neighborhood, where I feel that a vegetable stand could catch on. It is interesting to consider growing veggies that must look good to be sellable. Plenty of mine are on the homely side.
That’s of course a special challenge. I have no idea how to achieve what people here in Sweden jokingly call “EU-standard”, as if a cucumber can’t be too bent out of shape to be sold. ^^;
Marketing something as organic should give you some leeway though, right? 
What a beautifu caterpillar 
Do you now what it turns into?
Olive Garden. When you’re here, you’re family.
It takes me 2 to 3 trips to harvest all of the food in the garden each day now.
On the one hand, embarrassing abundance. On the other a lesson in planning. Some food gets given away each day, and some gets put away for later.
The education right now is in how much of each type of thing to grow to feed us for the whole year, and how to preserve it efficiently. For example, I have 12 bags of 1 kg each of slices of黄色いスカッシュ put away in the freezer. If we eat that twice per month in soup or stir fries or whatever during the 8 months of the year when there are no fresh squash, that is 16 bags we need. I will have that by next week. I will aim for about 20 bags, and then I know I have all I need for the year. I have the blanching process down nicely now. It took me only a bit more than 1/2 hour yesterday to blanch and cool and bag and freeze 6 bags.
The amount I planted is plenty for that, plus for eating plus for giving the same amount away to neighbors each day. I have fence sections, about 6 meter row of 黄色いスカッシュplanted, and that seems to be just the right amount for us. Once I start with a vegetable stand in a few years, I should probably double that.
My next problem is these:
I have been good at motivating myself to do what is needed to keep up with the food that is coming in. I figure that if I really have aspirations of being a farmer, then I should act like one!
That, is pukka 
ゴーヤ
The flesh is really substantial. You must cook it for much longer than say, squash. Also, the centers pop out easy, and they must be popped out, because the seeds are substantial and woody. I will try cooking them another time.
I enjoyed eating it for lunch. It will become a new staple for us.
That’s that okinawan gourd thingy, right? That means you’re now officially living to at least 120!
What kind of soil does it need, anything noteworthy you noticed while growing it? Could I get that to fruit in a non-tropical climate?
It is known as bitter gourd. A Vietnamese client of mine gave me seeds last year. I planted it in a row with my cucumbers when I planted those seeds in May. It started fruiting a few weeks later than the きゅうり, but it seems more resistant to vine borers.
I live a temperate area, near Philadelphia. I would say for sure that this plant could produce further North than here. I would think that it would prefer the same type of soil as any gourd, very rich in organic matter.
In the game that my wife and I are currently playing through, the character is living in Okinawa. The translation keeps calling it a bitter melon. In-game, the locals refer to it as ゴーヤ.
There was a pretty interesting side-quest where a lady needed ingredients for her famous goya juice, but she only told us her ingredient list in the local dialect. She also called bananas “basanai,” and aloe “dugwai.”
But! That’s not actually why I bumbled into this thread. I want to ask a question on behalf of my wife.
She has gotten obsessed with indoor gardening (we lack options for outdoor stuff.) She has a small kumquat tree that was doing just stellar in terms of growth, but that now has a bad infection of mealy bugs.
Things she has tried after looking around online:
So far, the pests keep coming back in force after all these attempts, and she’s not quite sure what to do.
Also there seems to be quite the millipede population living on the top soil. We know they are beneficial to the plant rather than harmful, but with an indoor plant, she’s not thrilled at how quickly they are reproducing. If she gets the mealy bugs under control, she may opt for some diatomaceous earth. Also, I ask to please not jump down her throat as some other online places have done about daring to not be happy about bugs that are helping her plants.
She has been pondering getting rid of it, but she also quite sad about it, so I figured I’d throw a message in here in case any gardening 先輩 have words of wisdom. If any of you have any advise or insight, it’d be much appreciated. よろしくおねがいします ^^
If you look at the picture of my ゴーヤ, there is a small empty pimento jar, that says Goya on top. I noticed it in the photo and it made me chuckle.
Indoor bugs are tough. The neem oil is good stuff. Maybe try a weaker mix? Maybe the leaves falling of was coincidence, because the plants were already damaged by mealy bugs? Perhaps the bugs are just a symptom of something else the plants are unhappy about? Maybe the diatomaceous earth could solve both bug problems at once?
