Do you Grow Gourds?

When we had our homestead, one of the seed catalogs had Birdhouse Gourd seeds and Luffa Sponge seeds.

These seeds sounded fun so  I grew luffas and birdhouse gourds on a barbed wire fence in full sun.  Both plants did well.

After these dried, our daughter had fun painting the birdhouse gourds.  She gave both the birdhouses and the luffa sponges as gifts to her friends.

What kind of gourds have you grown and how did you use the gourds?

I grow pepo gourds and lagenaria birdhouse gourds.

I use the birdhouse gourds as rattles, and sell them to an artist that makes musical instruments like thunderdrums.

I eat the birdhouse gourds as summer squash.

Some thread about using gourds:





https://permies.com/t/178367/shelters-habitat/Gourd-birdhouses#1426502




https://permies.com/t/2506/Growing-large-gourds-storage-containers

I've got a bunch of birdhouse gourds hanging as we speak...vine mostly dead now but gourds still green and slowly drying.  The vine did double duty on a rough trellice of sticks against the south wall of the house for shade, now late in the season largely replaced by moonflowers.  I'll soon be reading up on how to work with them and make them suitable for martins and treating them to last.  Bottle gourds of all sorts are a very ancient and very cool plant....I believe the latest research places their origin in Africa, but they found their way all over the world to whatever climate they could grow in, well before Columbus and his ilk and their "voyages of discovery".