Vegetable - Bottle Gourd

Bottle Gourd

Health Benefits Nutrition Facts Beauty tips Naming Convention Varieties Recipes Carvings & Art Beauty Allergies Other tips

About the Vegetable :Bottle Gourd is a vine grown for its fruit, which can either be harvested young and used as a vegetable, or harvested mature, dried, and used as a bottle, utensil, or pipe. The fresh fruit has a light green smooth skin and a white flesh. Rounder varieties are called calabash gourds. They come in a variety of shapes: they can be huge and rounded, small and bottle shaped, or slim and serpentine, more than a metre long.The gourd was one of the first cultivated plants in the world, grown not primarily for food, but for use as a water container. The bottle gourd may have been carried from Africa to Asia, Europe and the Americas in the course of human migration, or by seeds floating across the oceans inside the gourd.Nowadays bottle gourd is grown by direct sowing of seeds or transplanting 15 to 20 days old seedlings. Prefers a well-drained moist good rich soil. It requires plenty of moisture in the growing season and prefers a warm sunny position sheltered from the wind. If it is cultivated in a small place you can grow it in a pot, spread the vine on trellis or roof. In rural areas many houses with thatched roof are found covered with the gourd vines. Bottle gourds grow very rapidly.

Scientific / Binomial name : Lagenaria siceraria

Popularly Known as :Calabash,Opo squash, long melon

Usage :

• Chutney's, stir-fries or in a soup and making of Musical Instruments
• Calabash is used in many string instruments in India as a resonator. Instruments that look like guitars are made of wood but they can have a calabash resonator at the end of the strings table called toomba. The sitar, the surbahar, the tanpura (south of India, tambura north of India), may have a toomba. In some cases the toomba may not be functional but if the instrument is large it keeps its place because of its balance function.In Brazil, gourds also commonly used as the resonator for the berimbau, the signature instrument of capoeira, a martial art/dance developed in Brazilian plantations by African slaves. The calabash gourd is possibly mankind's oldest instrument resonator.Hollowed out and dried calabashes are a very typical utensil in households across West Africa.