I’m growing bottle gourds, Zucca gourds and Serpent gourds (last two are from @UnicornEmily – what do you use them for?). In a greenhouse the first year because of cold. I’d love to try the other ones like Luffa, but first I need to learn about gourd species and what crosses with what.
Also this year I’m going to be better about aging my chilacoyotas, and making some bowls.
What purchased material could you replace with gourds?
Very cool video, Julia! Someday I must try some of those waterbottle gourds. I wonder how well they would do in humid hot Pennsylvania summers, as opposed to the arid climate shown in the video
Would alos love to know what corn variety it is that he can eat in 40 days!?! That truly would be an emergency staple crop I would like to be able to grow and adapt to my climate. Do you know what it is and perhaps (do i dare to hope?) even where I could get some?
We’ve got some giant drum gourds growing (for a world music class to use for instrument making). The seeds are massive and unusual - they are rough like tree bark. We have grown luffa in the past (it’s needs are really no different from melons or squash), but aren’t this year due to space limitations.
The majority of “different” gourds seem to be varieties of Lagenaria siceraria, so those would all cross. Bottle gourds, serpent gourds, zucca gourds, giant drum gourds, etc. etc. etc.
Luffa is its own species. I believe there are two species of luffa, actually.
I’m sure there are more species I don’t know about.
Ooh, can you age fig-leaf gourds into hard wooden shells, like Lagenaria siceraria gourds? That may be interesting, especially if you prefer to eat the seeds than the fruit anyway.
I grew zucca gourds for the first time last year, and I mainly used them for food. The immature fruits taste like zucchini mixed with peanuts, which is quite neat. The peanut flavor surprised me! The leaves are edible, too (with much the same flavor), and they’re soooooooooooooo soft. I’m tempted to grow them every year just for the leaves, which are a pleasure to touch. I suspect that if you ever need to grow your own toilet paper, the huge velvety leaves of Lagenaria siceraria would be a very good option.
On top of that, of course, you can eat the whole plant, and it tastes pretty good.
For me yes, they got very hard shells. I cracked most of them open in January, very ungracefully with an ax and by dropping them on concrete, but next year I will use a hand saw.
Just checked on the shells in the compost pile, still intact, 1/4 thick, hard. Maybe a little thin for a salad bowl, but close.
@Lauren mentioned in some other thread that her mother would dig down a few feet to find the deep root of bindweed, then put a can on top of it, which would keep it from growing back. Ever since reading that, I’ve been wondering if a thick, hollow gourd would work just as well.
The question is, could it kill the bindweed root before it biodegraded, and only then start breaking down?
If so, that would be an awesome way to use gourds for getting rid of highly invasive weeds.
I’m also planning to grow Zucca from Emily and edible gourd from Lowell! Not sure what use to try and put the gourd itself to, but looking forward to thinking more about it
I just found out about mirliton (pronounced mel-a-tohne with a Cajun accent) aka chayote squash. Apparently south Louisiana has a tradition of growing it with family varieties passed down and recipes to cook it. If you’ve ever ate Louisiana food you already know it’s gonna be good. Supposedly can get 100 fruits off of a single plant, and it’s perennial unless you get frost. Sounds like an amazing plant.
My timing seems to be bad to be learning about this but if I can make a few hour drive this fall or next spring and collect some of these to grow maybe I can save these things from the anti cross pollination folks and start a Landrace. The huge cucurbit plants or melon plants are my favorite plants. They make gardening more like foraging than work.
I have a high interest in cucurbits too. I learned about this chayote you are referring to when I saw it available at Publix. I bought a few in 3 different periods of time. I didn’t notice a good taste on the ones that I tried. They also didn’t have viable seeds. I know very little about this other than my narrow experience that I’ve just shared. I worry that they harvest it too young to get a viable seed kind of like cucumber. I also noticed you only get 1 seed per fruit.
Maybe you will get a different experience in Louisiana.
It looks like the folks down south clone their plants by planting the fruit half way down in the dirt. Supposedly that imported grocery store fruit doesn’t do that well in the US. Maybe if you could grow a plant by cloning then get seeds from your plant and try then it might adapt. Maybe not too though. Who knows how inbred the grocery store fruit is. You might be closer to South Louisiana than me and could get some. If you look up Mirliton there’s a Facebook page.
I tried planting a chayote last year, and it didn’t take off, but I think that was just because the spot I put it in was shadier than I thought it would be. I could’ve tried again, but by that point, I’d eaten enough chayotes from the grocery store that I was tired of them, so I decided not to bother.
As a note, chayotes are weird. When you plant the fruit, you aren’t cloning anything. You’re planting a seed. The entire fruit is a seed with the cotyledons inside it. The species is fully viviparous. The only way to plant a seed is to plant the whole fruit.
Learning more about it, “It is a twining vine with fast-growing stems and grasping tendrils, able to blanket shrubs and buildings as ivy and kudzu do.”
“One popular preparation, these days called stuffed mirliton, involves slicing the fruit in half and then boiling the halves until the pulp is tender enough to scoop. Similar to making twice-baked-potatoes, cooks combine the pulp with shrimp, ground meats, and spices, and spoon the mixture back into the shell- shaped skins for a second cooking in the oven.”
“The program got a jump start in 1902 with the planting of two seeds in an abandoned sugarcane field on Cat Island, South Carolina. The two vines yielded 250 fruit by 1905, much to the amazement and delight of department officials.”
I grow cannonball gourds. The fruit get up to 30 cm across and are nicely rounded. I have processed a bunch into useful containers (but unfortunately the convenience of plastic trumps them most of the time while it lasts). I tried eating the seeds and found them to be inferior to pumpkin seeds from my mostly seminole strain. Watermelon seed are also nicer. But the gourd vines are very vigorous and pest resistant (and smelly when you brush into them).
Supposedly the people of the past would put up a trellis and let the vine grow over it, making a shady spot, and they’d sit in the shade under it. I got that from YouTube not the pdf so I thought I’d share that.
Something in particular that stood out to me in that pdf was the guy that had a lot of luck growing it as an annual rather than a perennial. Said it cut down on nematodes and instead of getting 200 fruits you could get 30-50 in the first year. Still a great harvest.
Gourd plants are smelly like an overturned bucket of gasoline. Probably explains why nothing touches the leaves. Isnt this a normal trait for gourds? Might just be me since I hate the smell from tomato leaves as well.
