hello friends in today's episode with a
look at a vegetable that's called Ivy gourd this incredible vegetable has so
many health benefits and is so delicious that you'll love growing this in your
home garden the scientific name for Ivy gourd is
coccina grandis and i hope i pronounced that right it's also called scarlet
gourd tindora, tondli, kawaii, kunduri and a lot of
different names so this is how a mature Ivy gourd plant looks like as you can
see here it's a vining creeper and it needs some kind of trellis or support to
grow and this is actually a weed the Ivy gourd grows like a weed and it's rather
hard to control once it starts growing invasively so just make sure that you
constrain the growth and you will get a beautiful plant that will yield a lot of
ivy gourd fruits for you this is how a mature Ivy gourd fruit looks like but
for the most part you will be consuming the fruits when they're raw and tender
and this is how the vines look like and let's try to find one fruit right
here this is exactly how the fruit looks like and it's a nice tender fruit that
you will be harvesting and using now let's talk about propagation you can
propagate the Ivy gourd plant by seeds by the mature fruit seeds but they take
a long time to fruit if you propagate it that way the best way to propagate this
plant is through cuttings now here you can see it's some stems that we cut from
the main plant and we're going to be using this to start our Ivy gourd plants
now the Ivy gourd plant has a lot of notches so you can bury those in the
soil as you can see here for some of these stems we have actually buried two
of these notches in the soil and that'll increase the chances of the plant
rooting so use a nice well training potting mix to start your Ivy gourds
stems and then once the stems or the cuttings have been planted you should be
able to see the plants taking off in about seven to ten days
and this is how the plant should look like once they have taken off from the
cuttings and if your temperatures are warm anywhere between 70 to 90 degrees
these plants grow very fast so you should be able to get a lot of your
cuttings propagated during the summer season so we are building a small
trellis here for this plant the few cuttings that are now growing into
bigger plants I'm using a Mason's line this is one of my favorite tools to use
when I'm building my trellis the Masons line is a nice thick thread that works
very well for gardening needs you can find Mason's line at any hardware store
and they're very strong and they do a very good job of holding up your plants
onto any kind of trellis now I prefer the braided Masons line and I'll provide
a link to that in the video description and the comments below so you can order
them from the links and the ivy gourd plant requires temperatures between 70
degrees and 90 degrees Fahrenheit to grow well so if you're living in areas
where you have severe winters I recommend planting them in containers
and then bringing them indoors during the winter season
the soil that we're using here is a pretty well draining potting mix and
we're going to be planting our first plant the first cutting that actually
emerged into a plant in a whiskey barrel sized container you can plant up to
three plants of this ivy gourd because they grow vertically you will
have a lot of space for these plants to grow provided you have a decent trellis
now if I was growing this in a raised bed I would have prepared a different
kind of trellis with probably some electrical conduit pipes and some strings
or mason line but since I'm growing this in this whiskey barrel container this
trellis should suffice for now and once the plant grows really big I can always
propagate more of this plant by taking
cuttings from this plant and then propagating it now as we are planting
the other plants let me talk a little bit about the flavor and the medicinal
benefits for this ivy gourd plant the ivy gourd is a very nutritious and a very
delicious vegetable as well it tastes like cucumber a little bit like cucumber
it has some small seeds inside which we'll soon see
and the taste is very similar to cucumber and it has a lot of medicinal
benefits as you can see on your screen here it's a great source of vitamin C
beta carotene and it also has some other health benefits that are listed on your
screen this is how the Ivy gourd flower looks like it's a white flower that
produces fruits very quickly so as you can see here within just a few weeks the
plant has produced fruits and this is the benefit of growing this plant from
cuttings and not seeds because seeds take a long time to germinate and
develop into fruits however by cuttings you can see that the
propagation is so easy and you're also getting fruits right away and you can
harvest the fruits when they are tender if you wait too long you're going to be
getting fruits that are not very delicious so you can start harvesting
your Ivy gourd fruits at this stage and you will soon see that as you plant
grows you will get more and more Ivy gourds that are produced on the plant and
it's a very vigorous growing plant you do not need to use any fertilizers or
any kind of soil amendments all I have done is I've used good quality potting
mix with a lot of manure and compost so that the nutritional requirements are
met and you can see here we are harvesting our ivy good fruits right
away within just a few weeks of planting and they look really nice tender fruits
and you should be harvesting them at this stage do not wait too long to
harvest your Ivy gourd fruits now try to grow your Ivy gourd plant in
full Sun and by full Sun I mean six to eight hours of sunlight and a lot of us
underestimate the sunlight requirements for these kind of plants just make sure
you're planting them in a nice sunny location and this is how the harvest
looks like it's beautiful and every day you can actually keep harvesting a lot
of these Ivy gourd fruits from your plant they look absolutely beautiful and let's
cut them open and see how they look like now the Ivy gourd or the cocina grandis
plant will have very tiny seeds as you can see here when you cut them open you
can see they look almost like a cucumber with small seeds and the seeds are
pretty well lined up against each other and that actually is a characteristic of
the cocina grandis or the Ivy gourd plant also known as tondli or tindora
in some of the South East Asian countries and the Ivy gourd is a very
popular item in a lot of Indian and Thai cuisines and I'm going to share a quick
recipe with you here so take a pan and add some oil and let it heat for some
time you're now going to be adding some cumin seeds and once you add the cumin
seeds let them heat up a little bit and once they start sputtering you can just
wait for a few minutes for it to happen and then once they're heated up you need
to start adding your Ivy gourd once you've added your ivy gourd you can
start mixing it in and just continue to stir-fry it for just a couple of minutes
we will now add the salt add some salt and mix it in well and we're also going
to be adding our tumeric powder and some chilli powder and then mix it in very
well and the ivy gourd does take some time to cook
and to help it cook faster we're gonna be adding some water here and the water
improves the consistency of the Ivy gourd while it cooks and let it cook for
a few minutes until it's tender it's best to just cover it and then cook
because it does take some time to cook the ivy gourd and after a few minutes you
can see that they're pretty soft and they're almost cooked and now what you
can do is just keep the pan open and then try to roast them a little bit on
the pan so that you get this kind of consistency that you see here so it
needs to look a little bit Brown and roasted and that gives you the best
flavor for your Ivy gourd and once ready this is how it looks like it looks
beautiful you can let it roast for a little more time and finally this is how
it looks like and you can serve this with rice or tortillas and it tastes
just amazing now as a part of this episode I also wanted to differentiate
the Ivy gourd from a very similar vegetable which is called the Trichosanthes
dioica or the pointed gourd also called potol or parwal and this is a
completely different vegetable and it has large seeds as you can see here and
it looks very different from the Ivy gourd or the tindora plant so there we have it folks
that was our episode on growing the ivy gourd or the tindora or
the tondli plant and I hope you liked this episode
and I hope this encourages you to grow your own plants at home if you like this
video do give us a thumbs up and if you have any thoughts please drop in a
comment below we'll see you again soon happy gardening