Pruning the Gourds

Removing the first fruits

Once your laterals begin to produce baby fruit, try pruning the first fruits that grow on your first laterals.  Based on a Japanese Gourd growing book, we found that pruning off the first gourds that grow from the knuckle, it will produce double gourds within the knuckles.  We do not know to what extent this can be done or how many and how far you can go before your gourd vine is stressing for growth.  We will look into this process further and update this as we learn more. Smaller gourds will obviously tolerate more gourds since they mature rapidly.

*We don know this, on last years crops we experimented with a few of our gourds on a trellis, and I pruned some of the baby gourds off, and we had several knuckles that were growing two and three gourds from one knuckle.

This we do know, the Japanese Horticulturalists, some of the leaders in the world on gourd growing, have been able to grow nearly 1,000 Sennari's on one vine, and more than 50 Hyakunari's, (an 11-14 pound bottle gourd) on one vine.  In fact the name Hyakunari means 50 gourd from the heart of one vine.

* Some of our efforts are experimental, we suggest proceeding with this process with caution.  Gourd vines will produce numerous gourds, so the pruning of a few gourds should be safe.  Our experience and observations suggest that perhaps pruning the babies early in the vines life may even tend to have a healthy effect on the later fruits.