I’m looking forward to the results of your gourd experiment! My mother accidentally did something similar with her garden, resulting in what we’ve been calling the ‘zumpkin’
It’s hard enough that we haven’t managed to cut it open to look at the insides, and although it has been almost a year since it was picked it shows no signs of leaving this world.
ooohhhh! 1. obsessed with the little artistic speckles and the fact this is just a long eternal pumpkin. it’s so pretty. my only question would be what it tastes like and how on earth it lasted this long
2. this reminds me of something that I never considered until I started this project, which is that one reason people also love gourds and squashes is because they come pre-contained in a hard rind (if it’s a winter squash) and therefore you can store and eat them over the winter (thus the name ‘winter squash’) so long as you cure them in the sun right and store them in a well-ventilated cool (but not cold) cellar space. the book ive been reading on this notes taste, color, what the squash is used for, and notes if people grow them because of how long they can be stored. i read on one website that if you cure pumpkins correctly they can store up to 3-6 months in a cellar. some varieties can store longer than others, and some soft-rinded summer squashes can mature into hard winter squashes if you leave them for long enough on the vine.
i knew about the history of native americans using bottle gourds as containers for food and water thousands of years ago, and i knew about the three sisters and native mexican tribes and how to this day squashes are considered an essential crop if youre going to live off the land, but somehow i had never put two and two together about this, but I don’t know what I expected, honestly? like how to use squashes long-term for food was probably just common knowledge from when they were domesticated right up to industrialization when grocery stores became The Place Where Food Comes From and storage of produce several months in advance straight from the vine was no longer the 'normal' thing to do in urban and suburban areas (in america). like, apparently some of these bad boys are so devoted to the long-term cellar cause that putting them in the refrigerator can SHORTEN their shelf life, and somehow this delights me? like to this day, thousands of years later, the ideal gourd storage unit requires only the right information about how to cure it in the sun and a cellar constructed in the ground for insulation. that's how long people have been doing this for.
i want to know everything about this now. i have so many questions and nearly all of them are based on my understanding of How Food Works as a suburban white guy coming from a background where Food Comes From The Store And Is Instantly There In Any Amount When I Want It As Long As I Have Money. how many squashes do people grow to feed a family? what happens if a harvest fails, or something happens in storage and you lose some squashes? what is/was the optimal squash size portion-wise, like what if you're cooking and you have a squash that's way more than you need? does the 'bigger is better' rule of american agribusiness/capitalist plant breeding still apply, or do you want a range of sizes or even smaller gourds? how many kinds of squashes do you grow? etc. it seems like so much planning ahead and logistics, and that's not even the only food that gets stored for winter... i would panic constantly starting in like, july. i can see why harvest time gets so many festivals in so many cultures looking at it from that perspective. holy shit. (book recommendations about these sorts of things would be appreciated!)
im becoming increasingly convinced that squashes and gourds are the pinnacle of human plant domestication tbh, like that’s just like…. a perfect crop. sure beans and grains and corn are important and whatever but food in a colorful biologically produced hard orb you can put in your Orb Cellar for eating over the long winter..... definitely an apex vegetable on so many levels. absolutely at the top of the ladder in terms of things humans have domesticated. you cannot beat that.
