How many bottle gourds and ridge gourds per plant | Vegetable gardening | Commercial Hydroponics farming

Come on people!!! Somebody must have grown these gourds and know the answer.

Thanks Raghu. 15 fruits/plant. What is the duration of the plant and how long does it take from flower to fruit maturity?

Thanks for the information Raghu. I planted two bottle gourds one of which died and since replanted. I am growing it in DWC hydroponics.

Hi Amit,

It has been about 50 days since transplanting to a DWC setup. I am growing it in a 20 L paint bucket. The first month I there was hardly any water consumption. Now the plant drinks up to 5 L per day. There are a few female and male flowers about 10 each. I am not sure if they are pollinated or not. The problem I see is that the buds open up in the evening/night and get shrivelled by morning. I generally see one or two bees in the mornings. I am not sure if the bees pollinate in the evening/night as well.

BTW, this is the first time I am actually seeing bees in my garden. They are found only around the Bottle Gourd plant. I am not sure how my capsicum, tomato and brinjal were pollinated.

Hi Amit,

I have a post which details the process of Hydroponic nutrients in the Hydroponics section of the forum. Please look into it.

You can also search for Howard Resh's tomato nutrient solution formula on google. I have been using growth formula. Now that it started flowering I am using the fruiting formula.

Hi Madhavi,

Yes, I did get a decent yield. I think I got around 5 bottle gourds before I added some systemic insecticide to the water to control mites (over dosage and the plant died within 8 hours). They were very tender and long (around 20 ").

Hi Madhavi,

I am not sure about the cross pollination. For spider mites you can use wettable sulfur.

These days I am growing the following:

• Brinjals (currently yielding)
• Cherry Tomatoes (on their last legs)
• 1 Marmande Tomato (about 6 weeks old)
• 1 Long Beans (got the seeds from Singapore while I was there. They should grow up to 18" long. One plant should be enough)
• Around 10 Bush Beans (bought from gardenguru.in)
• Sown Chives seeds but they aren't doing good.
• Spring Onions (Grown from onions and currently sending out flowers)
• Onion seedlings in pro trays
• Few Pak Choys and Choi Sum (most of them already harvested and consumed. New seeds have been sown)
• Spinach
• Radishes (promising harvest)
• Corriander (Cilantro to be specific)
• Wheatgrass
• Methi
• Chukka Koora
• Potato (Harvested today but it was a flop show as the plants got infected by virus)

Hi Madhavi,

I stopped doing Hydroponics, even though the results were outstanding, as I had to go out of country for 3 months. There was no way my family could handle it especially with a truant digital timer. I had shifted to all organic for now. I might use hydroponics too at a later date.

I used to make solution for 2 months at a time at 1:100 concentration.

During last summer I had them under shade net. I will do it again around end of Feb.