Hi welcome to Asiangarden2table.
Today I am going to show you how to prune bottle gourd
When it grows the first batch of fruits.
The vines grow very vivid.
And I have some very good size of bottle gourd handing here
Three of them are about baseball size,
And I have four or five of them grow into Pingpong size.
All these bottle gourds will be able to make it.
And I still have a lot of branches with baby female flower growing.
Now I have to give some pruning.
because If I don't do that,
the chance is that many of these new female flowers
wont't be able to grow bigger and healthy.
And the plant will be overloaded by useless branches.
First we need to remove the branches that do not have any fruit or flower on it.
These branches I kept them earlier because they had female flowers.
And for some reason the fruits didn't make it.
Right now the branches are just hanging there,
and taking the sunshine and nutrients from the plant.
and we don't need this branch.
We will need to look all the way to the bottom.
Now it looks much cleaner at the bottom.
There is no extra branches
It helps ventilation.
It will prevent the plant getting sick from virus.
It will also help bugs problem.
This area is very good fruiting area for bottle gourd.
You will see that most of the fruits that successfully grow are in this area.
This one itself has five fruits that already grow into at least Pingong size.
So for sure it is doing very well and very productive.
In this area we need to remove first the slide vines.
Slide vine is the vine that doesn't have female flower.
We also look for the branch that failed fruiting.
This fruit has been there for a while.
It doesn't really grow bigger,
At the end of the flower, it looks like it turns brown and rotten.
So this one we don't keep it.
I do keep a leaf on this branch because it has a spout that is growing
Give it a little bit time it will grow into another vine may be a good fruiting vine.
so I keep this one leaf.
So now we need to look for the vines with female flowers
but the branch is weak.
These weak vines won't be able to grow bigger.
The flower won't even bloom.
It will just get withered and die later.
Here there is a bottle gourd growing.
But it is growing a new vine right at the same leaf.
It is very weak and the nutrients all concentrate in the fruit.
So I just remove it.
But you need to be careful to not remove the vines that
still going to grow bigger but it looks tiny just because it is very young.
Like this one here.
This one is very short but the stem is much thick.
This one has very good chance to grow bigger and become a strong vine that will fruit well in the future.
so I am going to keep this one.
So at the end we need to look into the branches that already grow long enough
and have more than two female flowers growing
Keep one..two.. two female flowers and two extra leaves and remove the tip.
So this will grow into fruiting vine.
Either this one or this one that will grow into fruit.
Now the plant looks neat. We don't have any unnecessary vines growing
Take up the nutrients and space from the plant.
Give it few more days it will have more fruits to come.
You may need to supplement some fertilizer for it
because when it fruits like this, if it doesn't has not enough nutrients
The fruits are growing now they may not be able to make it.
And also the vew baby flowers came out here.
They will not be able to grow bigger
That is it for today.
I will show you next time
how to continue to prune your bottle gourd.