5 Momordica cardiospermoides Seeds - Bitter Gourd - South African Indigenous Climber - Global Ship

Momordica cardiospermoides Seeds

Bitter Gourd

This climber has a foetid smell, but makes up for it with showy orange-yellow flowers and large, fleshy, bulging orange-red ripe fruits that will attract birds to your garden. Herbaceous climber with a perennial tuberous rootstock, all parts foetid. Rootstock consisting of several tough spindle-shaped, thickened roots covered with a yellow bark. Stems annual, several, much-branched, hairless, angular, up to 10 m long. Leaves short-stalked, compound, up to 120 mm long, deeply cut to the main vein, with about 10-20 leaflets; membranous, hairless, dark green above, paler below. Tendrils very thin, simple or split in two. Flowers either male or female, but on the same plant (monoecious), all stalked and solitary. Male flowers supported by a prominent sessile bract which is 10-20 mm wide, almost semi-circular, hairless, light green, with a few distinct longitudinal veins; corolla yellow to orange with greenish, raised veins outside, a dirty green near the base inside, 15-25 mm long. Female flowers with bract rather small or absent, corolla very similar to, but somewhat smaller than in male flowers. Fruit fleshy with a pink, gelatinous mucilage, more or less egg-shaped to sausage-shaped, smooth, hairless, dark green with lighter blotches when unripe, orange-red to scarlet when ripe, warty or bulging irregularly, indehiscent, 50-100 x 25-50 mm. Seeds many, rose-red turning crimson or dark brown when ripe, each covered with whitish soft flesh, more or less ovate-elliptic in outline, much compressed with a few irregular rows of flat warts or irregularly twisting ridges, about 12 mm long, about 8 mm wide and about 4 mm thick.