2022-10-13T07:00:00Z
I know not everyone is a fan of Wikipedia, but I found this article interesting:
It says that the seeds are fat- and protein-rich, while the flesh is low in vitamins/minerals and moderately high in carbs. The mature fruits are sweet and can be kept for several years without decomposing if kept dry! Might be good as part of an emergency stockpile?
Hope someone will share seeds in the Fukuoka grab bag.
Thomas P
first year I cultivate them, so I still don’t know much about cooking, storing. and yes it is supposed to be long shelf. Once I cooked some with onions and spices, found the taste very good.
They took about 100 days to mature, some earlier, some later. Actually it likes water and as it was non-irrigated it suffered a lot more than Maximas and Mixtas who were right next to them. They eventually produced mature fruits, about 2kg per square meter
I will disclose that I have been working intensively on the Cucurbita ficifolia article on Wikipedia in anticipation of growing it next year for the first time. The text I found a few weeks ago was not inspiring my confidence, so I have checked the citations and added several new ones.
To the best of my knowledge, the article reflects the state of consensus in botany and ethobotany, but I would be glad to improve the article as long as there are citations that meet the guidelines. I have gotten some peer review on my work but not from folks with firsthand knowledge of the species.
I have periods of extensive “down time” due to medical issues, and I have lately gotten deep into checking and updating several of the squash and pumpkin articles. If anyone else edits Wikipedia or would like to learn how, please feel free to join the fun. For example, there is a lot of updating still to do for the plant species articles across Wikipedia to catch up with changes in biosystematics/taxonomy due to new molecular and genetic testing for plants.
I will derail this discussion no further, but I was a little proud to see the ficifolia article being used as a reference.
That’s so cool that I wanted to make a topic dedicated to this species. That is a very thorough wikipedia page, nice work.
I’ve been enjoying snacking on my black seeds, the hulls are thin enough that they taste almost hullless. The flesh I have yet to figure out how to enjoy. I have about 25 more of these to open for seed, so I do intend to figure out the cooking part.
Side note: Have you considered making a wikipedia page for landrace gardening?
I did not end up sending seeds to the Fukuoka grab bag, but I’m gonna have a lot of them to share. I just need to figure out how to streamline how people ask for my seeds and how I send them out. On my to do list as of now
I have not yet used squash for brewing alcohol, but it is on my list of plans for the upcoming year. I have seen more allusions to this species being used to ferment alcohol than I have yet incorporated into the article.
Maybe someone here has some experience with squash brewing. That would be cool.
Ah hah, that’s an idea for me. I have just looked over the Landrace article, and my initial thought based on Wikipedia policy and what we’re starting with is to update that existing text throughout the Landrace article (if/as necessary when I read it more closely) and add a new heading within the article to describe landrace gardening.
I will see what kind of citations I can find. I’m pretty interested in this writing project, thanks for suggesting it!
Thank you for looking it over! I’ll revisit that description and see if I can be more accurate and precise.
For what it’s worth, there is someone in New York State growing and selling Cucurbita ficifolia seeds on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334520116141
I ordered a packet from those folks once the Fukuoka mix arrived and I concluded from visual inspection that regardless if there were C. ficifolia seeds in there, I would like to have even more to play with
The article briefly mentioned day-length sensititity once. They flower very late in the season for me, which is the biggest trouble i have growing them in the north country.
I had no idea the shelf life was that long! That’s awesome! The longer the shelf life, the more flexibility I have to follow my food whims without worrying about my garden produce rotting.
The seeds sound tasty, too.
As for figuring out what to do with the flesh – challenge accepted! (Laugh.)
What is the texture like when it’s cooked? I’m wondering if it would work in a mixed vegetable stew. I really like having vegetables that are slightly sweet in a savory broth (for instance, carrots), so I’m thinking this might work the same way. I’m also fond of cooking vegetables with cheese and a bit of ground beef on top, sometimes with garlic on top of that, and I’m wondering if it would work for that, too. If it’s slightly sweet, it probably would – garlic and beef and cheese all taste very good with vegetables that are slightly sweet.
Oh, yeah, another thought. If it’s slightly sweet, what about juicing the flesh and boiling it down to make syrup? Might turn out to be tasty. Dong gua cha, which is made from winter melon, is delicious. It’s a juice that tastes like graham crackers!
I do not consider fig-leaved gourd as sweet. I haven’t measured, but I would estimate the brix at around 5%, about the same as a green zucchini. The pure white flesh means that it’s missing the flavanoids that I love. Flavor and texture is about like that of those pale white pattypan squash, or lagenaria, which I eat as summer squash, in a stir-fry with onions. Immature fig-leaved gourds could play the same role.
Image a roast, stew, or stir-fry, and you wanted something in it that was as bland, textureless, and tasteless as could be, so that the other ingredients could really shine. Shark-fin melon would play that role wonderfully.
I suppose that it could be candied with a ton of sugar and lemon juice.
It could be used as a bland interior to some sort of breading, similar to how eggplant is served.
If it’s helpful you could work on a first draft here and we can help contribute. Discourse let’s you create a ‘wiki page’ instead of a post, the only difference is that anyone in the forum can edit it. I think that would be a fun project!
One of my favorite ways to eat vegetables is to cook them with cheese and beef. Often with garlic on top. Even flavorless things tend to work well that way. Flavorful ones are better, though, naturally.
My Black Beauty zucchinis last year had very little flavor, which was fine because the beef and cheese both tasted good, and the zucchinis just provided quantity to fill me up with plenty of fiber and few calories. My spaghetti zucchinis this year were more flavorful, and there were some that really really tasty. They tasted creamy and buttery, all on their own. They also had yellow flesh, instead of white. That seems to support the idea that color = flavor.
I’ve heard about shark-fin melon being candied with a lot of sugar before. I think I heard that was common in South America. I’m sure it tastes good – anything tastes good with loads of sugar! But of course, that’s not exactly a healthy way to eat vegetables.
That makes sense! Anything where you might otherwise use white bread (like a hamburger bun) would work. Flavorless fiber is much healthier than flavorless starch.
@julia.dakin I like the idea! I see how it would overlap with and enhance efforts to identify books, courses, and other resources that are already going on.
I will try for a concise follow up now, and in time the next follow up could be in a new thread or PM. I believe that the Landrace article (particularly within the Development subheading) and the Plant breeding article (particularly within the existing Participatory plant breeding subheading and in a new Evolutionary plant breeding subheading I am drafting to add) can both be a better resource. I see immediate steps I can take as an editor with a relatively long history to lay a better groundwork for a community effort.
Once I dug a little into the existing Landrace article content and the editor ‘talk page’, I discovered that there was a heated dispute between editors in 2014-15 which in my estimation has held back the development of the article. After familiarizing myself, I decided to make some significant editorial and structural decisions to pick up where progress stalled at that time.
Possibly, those editors are still tracking the article and I’m going to rekindle the debate, otherwise I will call your attention back once I am done with what I can do in both places. I appreciate you pointing towards an interesting project. I think I’ve already been able to make the articles more useful with just a couple of hours.
Thank you @markwkidd . I sense that a lot of predjudice has dropped away since those early fights on wikipedia about the definition of landrace. Peer reviewed journal articles have been written since then that embrace my definition.
I tackled my harvest/cleaned seeds of these Chilacoyotas that I got from Joseph at a seed exchange. Harvest was great. From about 10 seeds I harvested maybe 60 lbs of squash, even in a cool climate. The flesh is not of interest to me at least, but the black seeds are delicious. Husks are paper thin and very digestible. I’ll grow them next year just for eating the seeds.
