Bottle Gourd

Our hometown, Ranchi, is an agricultural town. The town is dotted with nurseries and roadside plant and seedling sellers. Not only plants are cheap but other farming and gardening utilities are also readily available. Needless to say, it’s one more reason why I love my hometown.

Amidst all the corona chaos, we are still heartily thankful that we are getting this precious time to spend with our family which otherwise wouldn’t have ever been possible. And, while we are at it, my husband and I are doing a good amount of gardening experiments on our terrace.

One of them is Bottle Gourd. We started it with seeds in mid-March and transplanted them at the beginning of April in 12-inch pots and deep recycled buckets. My husband fixed up wires around the terrace walls and trained the vines to climb up on them. It took a month from transplant for vines to start reaching out and flowering.

But here we faced our roadblock. Our flowers were consistently wilting and dropping. Now being new to gourd growing business, we did a bit of reading about the botany of gourds to find out why. The bottle gourd has separate male and female flowers. Both the flowers are white, but the female has a miniature gourd attached to it. This much we knew from our plant. However, in the plant world, the white flowers predominantly bloom at night to attract nocturnal pollinators, such as moths, bats, and such. This was new info to us as we knew about pollination by bees, butterflies, or wind only. Now, the much-needed insect may not be found around our region, so we were facing the flower drop since the pollination had failed. To solve the issue, we hand-pollinated each female flower – by transferring pollens using a small brush. And, after a couple of days, the gourd started growing and once it did, it grew rapidly. And, now we have several others growing at different paces.

After about 12 days, we harvested our first bottle gourd today – light green and sweet-smelling. And, such a satisfyingly sweet yield just had to be converted to a sweet dish, so we made delicious Kaddu ka Kheer in celebration. ?