Problem with Bottle Gourds (kaddu)

[cyberkings]

I have grown for the first time several vegetables in my garden. Having no experience or knowledge about kitchen gardening, I have have making mistakes but I am learning from them too. I have been in need to advice and have finally found this forum and I am very hopeful that all my experienced friends here would guide and teach me. I'll be sharing my problems here one by one and seek your advice.

My bottle gourd plants produce several small sized gourds (kaddus) but most of them just dry out and become brown after a few days. Only one out of 10 or 20 grows bigger and becomes ready to harvest in 8-10 days. I'll try to attach photos as well. Please tell me what's wrong with them and what should I do to save them.

[M Farooq]

Gourds have separate male and female flowers so not all flowers will turn into fruits. Only the flowers that get fertilized (by the pollen carried by insects/ bees etc) will turn into the gourd, the rest will drop. You can google hand pollination tricks for gourd vine to increase the yield.

PS. I guess bottle gourd is rather a lauki than a kaddu (= pumpkin ?) in Urdu. Correct me if there is a variation in the dialect.

Regards.

[Izhar]

Farooq is right.. you should try hand pollinating the flowers... it can be done in the evening as the bottle gourd flowers are night blooming..

[cyberkings]

Good advice

I was also thinking on same lines and wanted to ask the same question about 'manual pollination' if I could be possible. Thanks a lot for the advice. I'll try this out.

By the way, it seems like I am going to do a 'test tube baby' experiment

Farooq sb. we used to call it 'ghiyya kaddu' and 'halwa kaddu' to pumpkin being in Lahore but since I have been in Islamabad, everyone calls just 'kaddu' to the bottle gourd so I had also started calling the same without any intention. This happens when you start living at a new place in new people There are several vegetables which are named differently here.

Regards

[cyberkings]

What happened to this one? Please see the attached picture. It was healthy in the start and was about 2 inches long but suddenly squeezed out. Same thing happened to another one on a different plant. Is it due to lack of water? Please give advice.

P1210231.JPG (57.4 KiB) Viewed 449 times

Regards,

Shahid

[M Farooq]

The shape looks slightly abnormal. Make a slice and see what is inside. It could be a pest inside.

Regards,
Farooq