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