I absolutely love cucurbits. They belong to the gourds, a plant family that has been cultivated for millennia and includes courgettes, cucumbers and winter squash – all crops I grow every season. Cucurbits show remarkable vigour, with their hairy palmate leaves and curling tendrils. And with any luck they will produce a bounty of fruit throughout the summer.
Most species hail from warmer climates, so when grown in the UK are cultivated as annuals. However, beyond the more familiar vegetables mentioned above, a wealth of more unusual (for the UK) cucurbits can be sown now.
Some friends got married last year and gave their guests a perfect wedding “favour” – packets of seeds for their favourite edible plants. Inside my little hessian bag was a packet of cucamelon seeds. Cucamelons (Melothria scabra) are also known as mouse melons and produce fruit the size of grapes and marked like watermelons, another cucurbit.
Being a modestly sized vine, the cucamelon can be grown in a containers, although you will need to give them netting or a trellis to climb up. They are best when eaten fresh – they taste like a tiny citrussy cucumber – and are delightful as a garnish for summer drinks.
Bitter melons (Momordica charantia) – also known as bitter gourd or karela – grow on delicate vines similar to the cucamelon’s but produce gnarly, bumpy-skinned fruit with a bitterness that can be an acquired taste. They made regular appearances in the Mauritian cooking that I grew up with and, although I loathed their taste as a child, I have come round to them. A few years ago, I successfully grew a few fruits and gave them to my parents with an apology for all the times I’d turned up my nose.
That same season was the first time I had a greenhouse of my own, so I made some space in it for a loofah plant (Luffa cylindrica, and other varieties). While their fruit are cooked as a vegetable throughout Asia, I was growing mine to fully ripen until its insides became fibrous.
Once I had removed the flesh, I was left with a natural scrubbing sponge, and enough seeds to share and grow again for future years.
Loofahs need a long summer season, so are best started early and grown under cover. The only way to grow them this year will be to buy nursery-raised plants.
Sow cucurbit seeds over the next few weeks somewhere warm and protected to help them germinate. As this family of plants are not hardy, wait until the nights start to warm and the risk of temperature drops has passed before planting out in their final position.
