Yard of gourds

Last year I grew bushel basket gourds again in spite of not really needing any more.  Actually I’m not sure anyone other than the Anasazi actually needed them (handy for storage of loose items like seeds and dried corn?), so I’ll admit that I just wanted to grow some more.

Really there were three reasons were behind this.
1. These vines have huge leaves and can grow 70 or 80 feet and are effective ground covers for slack gardeners tired of weed control in the far reaches of the garden.
2. I brought a couple of hog panels back from our mountain property and had built a massive trellis that looked pretty silly and useless without something on it.
and finally
3. In a rare sustained effort of creativity, I had made some nice gourd jack-o-lanterns the year before and this used up most of my good remaining gourds.

The rest of this gourd story is mostly in pictures.

The hog panel trellis in use

Hog Panel and bamboo trellis

Ground cover: among the ruins of the old hoop-house spot (and location of future permanent greenhouse)

Gourd vine ground cover

Do these gourds grow large?  Yes.

A big gourd

Green gourds ready for the long winter “dry”. (Note that there are at least 3″ or 4″ of stem on each gourd and that the stem is brown. Only cut green gourds from the vine after the stem has gone brown and leave a few inches of stem. Otherwise, you will have a rotten puddle of smelly mush and not an eventually dried hard sided gourd. )

End of season gourds moved to dry on the stepping stones for the winter

By February or March they were sufficiently cured or dried to be carved (one night my visiting daughter suggested these were creepy, like a field of skulls in the dark).

Winter dried gourds

And what do these become?

The final product

Shamelessly inspired by Jack Skellington

And this is pretty much the entirety of what has occurred over the last two years with gourds. 😉