Kudzu vs gourds

I have been impressed by the speed at which these seedlings have turned into an army of tentacles.
So, which grows faster, Kudzu or gourds?
Kudzu grows a foot a day, in Indiana at least, or as far as this guy who wrote about it invading Indiana is concerned: http://www.lib.niu.edu/2000/oi000208.html
Gourd aficionado Laurie says that her vines grow up to 3 feet per day http://laurie1_2.tripod.com/mygourds/growgourds.htm, and since this is my blog, I choose to declare Laurie a genius expert and therefore gourd vines can outgrow Kudzu by a 3 to 1 margin.

I’m glad this is settled.

Staying true to my normal methods, I set up the rig previously described but only began to research gourds over the last couple of weeks once the vines came to life.

There are some interesting gourd-heads out there on the interweb who obviously really love growing them; one common denominator among them is that they offer a wide variety of tips often directly contradicting those of other gourd aficionados.

What did I learn from my modest gourd browsing efforts?

• Gourds flowers open in the evening and close again in the morning.
• Gourds are primarily water and are quite heavy on the vine, something that escaped me since all I have ever handled have already been dried.
• To avoid rot over the curing/drying period, 2-3” of stem left must be left on the cut gourd.

Things vary considerably outside of the basics listed above.  For instance:

• Gourds have shallow roots / gourds have robust roots with significant tap roots.
• Night hawk moths are the primary pollinators and hand pollination is needed due to the delay in these moths’s arrival some seasons / beetles and bees pollinate gourds sufficiently to aid the moths.
• Gourd vines do not respond well to pruning to bring under control / gourd vines should be capped by cutting the main lead after 10 or 15 feet to induce female flowering.
• Gourds should be left on the vine to dry/gourds should be cut and brought in to dry
• Gourds should be trellised since pest and rot reduce yield if allowed to remain on the ground / yields are better if grown on the ground so they shouldn’t be trellised.

I found that Gourd Societies abound and most have pretty informative websites
Examples:
AGS: http://www.americangourdsociety.org/
NCGS: http://ncgourdsociety.org/
And the Alabama Gourd Society had a nice link page:
http://www.alabamagourdsociety.org/html/resources_links.html

The one the vines get moving, they start reaching for anything and everything for a climbing anchor. Once the tentacle curls around whatever it can find, it turns into a spring that lifts the vines a bit and appears to provide some shock absorption to keep the little grabber from breaking off. This is my theory, and unlike Laurie above I don’t carry the credentials to declare it as internet fact.

The picture in the previous post was taken May 8th.
On the 23rd, the vines were gathering steam:

The pictures below were taken the same day and are an attempt to show some of the tentacles (I can’t seem to locate the real name for these) grabbing/coiling.

So where were the vines two weeks later (last weekend)?

A makeshift additional trellis was installed / designed (kind of in that order), but I’m now concerned that the weight of just one or two green 98%-water-on-the-vine gourds will collapse it without reinforcement. Ah, a project for a future evening….

Enough about gourds for today…….