Caring for your Bottle Gourd (Dudhi/Lauki) Plants
Choosing the Right Spot When choosing an area in your vegetable garden to plant your bottle gourd plants, it's best to select a sunny spot. Bottle gourd will thrive and produce maximum fruit in sunny, well nourished soil. Additionally, they are vines, very hearty ones, so they will need some place strong and sturdy to climb and latch their vines onto, therefore, it is best to have a strong trellis or fence adjacent to the plants so they can latch on to it.
Planting Your Bottle Gourd Keep in mind, when planting your bottle gourd, check the forecast. These plants are sensitive to temperature below freezing, and may die if exposed to extremely low temperatures. It is best to plant bottle gourd 3-4 inches apart since they are hearty plants. We like to mix 1 scoop of Osmocote fertilizer into the hole made for each plant so it has an initial boost of nutrients. Then make sure to water the plants once planted.
Daily Maintenance Once you've planted your bottle gourd in your vegetable garden, caring for them is very easy. Depending on how hot or how much sun they are exposed to everyday, you might need to water them 1-2 times per day. When the plants begin flowering, make sure to water directly to the lower part of the plants so you don't water off any flowers.
Pollinating Your Bottle Gourd Bottle gourd plants do not have many natural pollinators in the Northeast region of the US, making these plants more challenging ones to grow and bear fruit. For this reason, it is recommended that you manually pollinate your bottle gourd, and here's how....
As your plants begin to grow and produce flowers, there are a couple things you want to keep in mind and pay attention to. First, the flowers fully open up in the early morning hours and in the late evening times, which is your window for pollinating. You'll want to seek out male and female flowers during this window, which is when they're fully open, and be able to distinguish between the two. Once you've located and identified these flowers, you pluck off a male flower, and using either an earbud or just the flower itself, rub some pollen from the plucked male flower onto the intact female flower. This will surely yield fruit.
Harvesting Your Bottle Gourd There are a couple different varieties of bottle gourd, so depending on which variety you've planted, the size of the fruit when ready to be harvested will differ.