Season calendar
Buttercup squash season by country
Buttercup squash season by country
New Zealand's buttercup squash window — the kabocha Japan buys through its own gap — month by month, and why it is a contract crop rather than a spot one.
Peak supply January–March from New Zealand. No origin on this page is at peak in April–December.
| Origin | January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand January–March peak · April, December shoulder | January: Peak | February: Peak | March: Peak | April: Shoulder | May: Not shipping | June: Not shipping | July: Not shipping | August: Not shipping | September: Not shipping | October: Not shipping | November: Not shipping | December: Shoulder |
Last reviewed August 2026. Windows are editorial ranges for a normal year, not a published schedule, and they are export weeks out of the origin rather than arrival weeks in your market.
Buttercup squash is one of the more characteristic things New Zealand ships and one of the least visible, because almost all of it goes to a single market. Japan calls it kabocha, grows its own through the second half of the year, and imports through the first — and New Zealand is what fills a large part of that gap, alongside Mexico and Tonga.
It is a contract crop rather than a traded one. Japanese buyers commit to volume and to a specification before the seed is in the ground, which means the window below is a delivery schedule rather than a market. Squash is also unusually forgiving cargo for something sold fresh: it is cured after harvest, it ships at an ambient rather than a chilled setpoint, and it keeps for months — the failure mode is rot from a bruise or from condensation, not the clock. Which makes it the opposite problem from everything else on this calendar. Nobody loses a squash programme to a slow voyage; they lose it to a wet box.
New Zealand
January–March peak · April, December shoulder Varieties: Delica Load ports: Tauranga, Napier, and Nelson
Harvest from about late December, shipping January to April into Japan. It is the shortest window New Zealand runs and the only one on this page sold almost entirely to a single country — Japanese kabocha supply runs out in the New Year, and this is what covers the gap until it comes back.
It is also the one New Zealand row where the fruit is not the fragile part. Squash is cured before loading, ships at an ambient setpoint rather than a chilled one, and keeps for months. What loses a container is moisture — condensation in a box that was closed warm, or a bruise taken in handling that rots on a three-week voyage.
Importing buttercup squash? Trackberry tracks those containers and reads the paperwork that arrives with them, in one place. Book a 20-minute chat.
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