helenjp

I think lighting systems for hydroponics are at least as expensive as the AeroGarden, but if you just want to supplement natural light from a window, rather than grow plants in pitch black conditions, surely you could work out a light and reflector system without too much pain?

That fried octopus looks pretty good, actually!

It would make a difference to me, because I love junsai, but it's main contribution is adding sourness. I forgot to say that the original recipe includes shreds of fresh ginger, which pick up the flavor wonderfully too.

I made the "okra version" cold soup from your link yesterday - it was good, and everybody in the family liked it! (Strong katsuo dashi with finely chopped okra, junsai, and nameko). It needs quite a heavy hand with soy sauce and salt though. Hot miso on sweltering days = misery! Now to finish off the current batch of refrigerator pickles so I can put a batch of mul kimchi in there...

Gosh, I'm on a roll...you can also make quick pickles with some of the "furikake" products, as they are usually quite salty. Add a little more salt, and maybe a splash of vinegar or sake or lemon juice to get things moving, stick it in a bag and into the fridge for a few hours or overnight. One of my favorites is sakura-yukari - salted cherry blossoms and salted red shiso leaves. Great stuff!

Quick Pickles with Green Ume This worked out very well. I've never seen a recipe like it, but I surely can't be the first person to use green ume in pickles. Weigh vegetables and weigh out 2 or 3% of that weight in coarse pickling salt. I use finely sliced cucumbers and Japanese eggplants, and shreds of young ginger. I think myouga and shiso are too powerful for this, but other pale, mild vegetables would do... the key is to add shreds of green ume (about half a dozen ume, anything from a slightly pale green to faintly flushed with yellow). Mix salt or quick pickle mix into the vegetables and ume, and pickle overnight. The ume seems to keep the vegetable colors particularly bright, and the flavor is very fresh.

Sorry, I was sure somebody had answered this by now. It's either a type of "momi-zuke" (salt rubbed into vegetables, allowed to stand 10 minutes or so, squeezed, dressed, and served) or "asa-zuke" (salt or a shoyu mix mixed into vegetables and left half a day or overnight). Momi-zuke About 1 tsp coarse salt for 1/8 of a cabbage. Cut the cabbage into shreds or peices, as you like. Add other vegetables such as wakame or 1/2 a Japanese cucumber or a chunk of daikon, sliced finely (add a little more salt if using a fair amount). Add shreds of fresh ginger or green shiso leaves if you like. Rub in salt. Cut a lemon into quarters vertically and add 1/4 to 1/2 a lemon, finely sliced. Add to mix, put whole thing in a ziplock bag, and toss in fridge for 10 minutes...or half a day... Squeeze gently, toss, and serve. Dress with a little soy sauce or ponzu (soy/citrus juice mix) if desired. Asa-zuke mix: Buy a liquid pickle concentrate and pour into a baggie of prepared vegetables until about 1/3 of the veges are covered. Alternatively, make the home-made mixture below and use a teaspoonful with vegetables, put in a ziplock bag or a screw-type mini pickler, and store in the fridge for 1-3 days. This amount of mixture lasts a long time! 3 oz (90g) salt 1 tsp citric acid 2 tsp sugar 1 tsp red pepper or 1 shredded dried chili pod 1 tsp or so of dried yuzu (find in confectionery section) or any citrus zest. 1 tsp of kelp powder, or kelp-flavored MSG, or shreds of dried kelp. *When using with hard vegetables such as sliced goya (bitter melon), add a little water to speed up the pickling. Soy sauce or Noodle sauce pickles For about 2 cups of shredded vegetables, mix in 2 tab soy sauce, and 1 tab sake or mirin; or 2-3 tab men-tsuyu (noodle sauce) concentrate. Add a very few shreds of dried kelp if desired.

Did you see the pineapple calpis on sale recently? I'm not a fan of artificial pineapple flavor, but bought some for the kids to have over shaved ice. Will report presently!

Maryeats, mul kimchi sounds tasty! Korean soups do go well with Japanese food, and cold wakame soup is a summer favorite with us. Hiroyuki, I showed my husband your links. Predictably, he said "iranai" to the cold miso version, but looked considerably more interested in the cold okra soup, so I'll try that one. The combination of okra, junsai, and nameko looks good. Although he's from Hokkaido, Tohoku "hiya-jiru" is unfamiliar to him. He just doesn't like the combination of COLD and MISO. I do think those are more a north Japan thing, because I'm pretty sure that tororo-jiru was about the only cold soup I remember eating in Kansai. I don't remember hearing the word "hiya-jiru" in Kansai either, come to think of it!

Inspire me, please! When the temperatures are in triple figures, my husband still wants his steaming bowl of miso soup, but nobody else in my family is quite that crazy. We've tried the usual - the cold miso soup, or the chilled tororo-imo soup, but they don't inspire him. Gazpacho goes OK with Japanese food, and I could eat chilled chicken broth with tougan (winter melon) in it every day, but there must be MORE!!!

I made the ginger spirits with young ginger this year, and it's looking good! It has a slightly floral nature, and the modest amount of lemon helps it along nicely. The dokudami is very effective on teen pimples and a second batch of ume-shu with black sugar is about to be put down, using the green ume left after harvesting all our ume for umeboshi today. Edited to say...forgot to mention that the dokudami shochu is a surprisingly successful taste - no stinky grassy smell, just an aromatic orangey tang. I'm glad I didn't add sugar, because it's much better dry. Edit much later: the slight sharpness of the black sugar was emphasized strongly by the sharpness of the ume - the result was rather harsh, and I won't use black sugar again.

Yep, yuzu and shoyu ponzu!

I was interested to hear about this too, thanks to Druckenbrodt for creating the thread! I guess what I like best about her recipes is that they almost always go well with rice.

Hiroyuki, we do call it "continuous cropping" in English, but we usually don't talk about avoiding continuous cropping. Instead we talk about "crop rotation" to avoid or cure problems. Nice site on crop rotation contains a lot of advice that you can use for SFG. Two more points for SFG that I found on the net: * Keep a bag of compost. When you remove a plant, take out a trowel-ful of soil and mix 1 trowel-ful of compost into the soil. * Write down your crop rotation plan - because you need to plant tall plants on the north side of your square, to gain maximum sunlight for your intensively-planted patch, crop rotation needs just a little more thought than in a big garden. The golden rule of crop rotation is to grow a nitrogen-fixing "green manure" crop before you grow root vegetables. YOu could give yourself a holiday by using a wildflower instead of legume vegetables - you could grow renge-sou (astragalus sinicus, chinese milk vetch) one season, then just dig it all under the soil before you plant root vegetables.

Hiroyuki, just in a bit of a rush at present, but do you mean "transplanting" (moving seedling from container into larger container or garden), or do you mean the problems which develop from growing the same crop many times in the same garden?

Don't knock this cherry tomato idea until you've tried it! I don't use cherry tomatoes much except for Japanese food, actually. . They're great for dishes like hijiki salad (dress with a mustard vinaigrette and a dash of soy sauce) too!

Now THAT is devotion to duty!

Hmm. Impossible to tell! Probably he wants to make a soil which retains moisture a little bit better than most container-garden mixes (which need to drain very well). However, I think that every season, you will want to add some more organic matter (leaf mold or manure) to replace what has rotted completely away, and what the plants have absorbed). You can just use it as mulch though, don't need to dig it in in most cases. I think that in the end, you may regret making bottoms for your boxes - the idea is that gradually, plant roots break up the ground underneath the boxes, and you get a deep layer of rich, soft soil that doesn't dry out or get waterlogged. Let us know how your garden grows! When I get my plum trees cut back (to about half their present height ), the sunlight will finally reach my garden, so next year I plan to plant vegetables. For this year, I'm concentrating on shade-loving flowers such as hydrangeas.

Two-way chuck? To this New Zealander, it sounds like something vaguely affiliated with Traveler's Tummy . At least I learned some English today!

Good luck! If your sansho are grown from seed, you've got a good chance. Most sansho in Japan are twigs put into the ground and left to develop roots - of course, these are never as robust as seedling-grown roots, and sansho is particularly prone to root-damage if conditions are too wet or too dry. That sansho seedling photo was beautiful!

Saints preserve us! Plant leaf or fruit crops first - root crops might go crazy with all that nutrition (seriously, they tend not to grow straight if there is a lot of fresh nutrition). Actually, I haven't seen so many types of animal manure at urban garden centers, so I was really interested to see your photo, thank you! I read today about "green curtain" window boxes with climbing plants trained up over the window, to cut down sunlight and heat - I've seen it done before, but the article recommended using goya, as it is super-easy to grow (not as prone to insects and fungus/virus as cucumber), and it uses more water (and therefore cools the air more) than morning glories. So I'm planning to try this on son1's room. If it keeps the local louts from throwing stones in his window as well, so much the better!

Hmm...if you make more than one bed, why don't you use bought compost on one bed, for immediate use. In your second bed, put some chicken manure or other animal manure (or fish waste or washed seaweed, if you lived closer to the sea), or spread out your own kitchen garbage, and cover it thickly with peat moss and vermiculite, and plant some short-term leaf crop with very shallow roots (lettuce, radish, green shiso, nira??). When that crop is ready, the manure and vegetable waste should have decomposed into compost, and you can mix all the soil up when you harvest the crop. If the roots of this first crop are too deep, they will be damaged by direct contact with the fermenting manure and compost. If you plant a crop such as soybeans or eggplants in peat/vermiculite only, there won't be enough nutrition for the fruit to develop.

Well, that's true, but it may too idealistic! Also, Japan doesn't usually sell compost, so there just aren't as many types available as in western garden centers. I see Japanese famers using old rotted tatami, or rice husks etc on their vegetable Home center page advertising compost products - you can see that they have some which include animal manure. I don't think you need bark if you already have peat moss, but as peat moss has no nutritional value, you do need something to provide nutrition and organic material.

Thanks - looks like a summer hiker would be better off hunting wild boar!

Looks like son2 (12) may be going on a survival camp (taking no food or fuel) in Fukushima over summer, with his school natural sciences club. I only know the edible wild plants that grow around towns and villages, and in the warmer parts of Japan - and most of the popular ones are spring foods anyway. So now I'm curious - what wild foods are available in summer?