Achocha / Caigua / Slipper gourd seeds
Cyclanthera pedata
This is such an amazing plant! Resilient and adaptable plants with abundant and versatile harvest. It's a tropical herbaceous vine but it's quite happy in temperate gardens too!
A wild climber, make sure you give this a chook house, fence or trellis to scramble over!
Beware if you live in frost free regions, this could get weedy when mature fruits drop by themselves. (See the last photo for a view of the plant, scrambling over our chook house with it's companion Choko)
Small fruits can be eaten as a cucumber substitute and the mature fruits can be stuffed and baked. Every size fruit can be used in soups, stews and stir fries, as a kind-of alternative to green capsicum or zucchini. They keep their texture better than zucchini. We've just started experimenting with fermenting them too.
These plants can tolerate cooler temps and ours kept going deep into autumn, when all other cucurbits had long finished.
Another bonus is that they won't cross pollinate with other cucurbits that you're growing!
5 seeds
