Lagenaria siceraria Seeds | Bottle Gourd
LATIN NAME: Lagenaria siceraria
COMMON NAME: Bottle Gourd
Plant Profile
The bottle gourd is a fast annual vine with large soft leaves, white flowers that open at night, and a fruit whose shell hardens into wood. The shape varies from a club to a dumbbell to a sphere, and the shape is heritable, which is why the calabash, the dipper and the flask are all the same species.
It is one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world, and also one of the most puzzling: bottle gourd fragments appear in Peruvian caves dated to eight thousand years ago, long before any plausible human crossing of the Pacific. The likely answer is that the fruit floated across the ocean and germinated on a beach. The flowers are white and fringed, open at dusk, and are pollinated by hawkmoths, which is why a vine in flower is worth sitting out for.
Science & Biotechnology
The hard shell is the point of the plant. The rind lignifies as the fruit ripens, forming a layer of sclerenchyma that is light, waterproof and tough enough to be used as a container for years. Unlike most cucurbits the fruit contains no cucurbitacins, so it is not bitter, and the flesh is edible when young.
The seeds sit in a fibrous matrix that dries to a loose mass, so a mature gourd rattles. That property made the dried fruit a natural rattle and a resonator, and it is the body of the berimbau and of the shekere in West Africa and Brazil, an instrument that crossed the Atlantic inside the same fruit.
Uses & Benefits
Young gourds are eaten in curries and stir-fries across Asia, and in China the fruit is sliced and dried. The mature shell becomes a water carrier, a bowl, a ladle, a float for fishing nets and a birdhouse, and in parts of Africa beer is fermented in a gourd that has been smoked inside.
The seed is edible and mildly purgative, and the oil is used in some districts for cooking. The vine tips are eaten as a green in India and in Southeast Asia, and the plant is grown on trellises over cattle sheds for shade as well as for fruit.
Growing from Seed
Soak the seed overnight and sow direct once the soil is warm, two seeds per station at two centimetres, and thin to the strongest. The vine needs a trellis if the fruit is to hang straight; on the ground a bottle gourd will curve and the neck will kink.
Water regularly while the fruit swells, then reduce as it ripens. Harvest when the stem turns brown and the shell resists a thumbnail, and cure the gourd in a dry airy place for a month before cutting. Seed is saved from the fruit with the best shape, since the shape breeds true more reliably than most gardeners expect. In a short season, start the seed indoors three weeks before the last frost and plant out the seedlings when they have two true leaves.
Our Take
A vine that gives a vegetable in summer and a vessel in winter, and one of the few plants whose usefulness survived the invention of plastic. Grow it on a strong frame.
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