calabash (Dudhi) information with help of Images

Calabash (dudhi) images

A calabash, bottle gourd, or white-flowered gourd, Lagenaria siceraria, also known by many other names, including long melon, New Guinea bean and Tasmania bean, is a vine grown for its fruit, which can be either harvested young to be consumed as a vegetable, or harvested mature to be dried and used as a utensil. When it is fresh, the fruit has a light green smooth skin and white flesh.

Calabash fruits have a variety of shapes: they can be huge and rounded, small and bottle-shaped, or slim and serpentine, and they can grow to be over a meter long. Rounder varieties are typically called calabash gourds. The gourd was one of the world's first cultivated plants grown not primarily for food, but for use as containers. The bottle gourd may have been or by seeds floating across the oceans inside the gourd. It has been proven to have existed in the New World prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus.