Bottle Gourd-Kalbas

Bottle gourd or calbash gourd is grown on a vine and can be either harvested young to be consumed as a vegetable, or harvested mature to be dried and used as a water container. When it is young, the fruit has a light green smooth skin and white flesh. The bottle gourd 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 metre long.

Usually grown on a trellis around many Seychellois homes. However, in the old days, when many houses had thatched roofs, you could see the roofs covered with the gourd vines.The vine may at times , if not controlled, grow up to the top of trees.
The creole cook uses the gourd in fish soups, ladob and bouyon. It is firstly peeled, washed and diced and used as required.

The mature gourds are left to dry in the sun , emptied of their seeds and cleaned up. The skin becomes very hard. They were used to carry and store water. They were also often used to bail water out of pirogues and is still used as a resonator for the bom , a one string bow musical equipment. The smaller sizes were used as bowls to drink toddy.