Vegetable Marrow

vegetable marrow: see gourd; pumpkin.

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vegetable marrow

1. a cucurbitaceous plant, Cucurbita pepo, probably native to America but widely cultivated for its oblong green striped fruit, which is eaten as a vegetable

2. the fruit of this plant

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Vegetable Marrow 

a bush variety of the hard-shelled pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo). They are annual monoecious plants with erect, slightly branching shoots, which usually are not long-running. The flowers are unisexual, solitary, and yellow. The fruit is a pepo, which is generally cylindrical; more rarely, it is slightly bent. Vegetable marrow is frost-tender and needs fertile soil. It is relatively drought resistant; however, when irrigated, its yield is increased significantly. The fruits ripen early; the growth from sprouts to mature plants takes between 40 and 50 days. Young fruits are used in the preparation of various dishes; they are also a foodstuff used in the canning industry (squash paste). The fruits contain on the average 4.9 percent dry matter, including 2.55 percent sugar, 0.55 percent proteins, and 0.13 percent fats. The young fruits are also used for fodder. Vegetable marrow is used year-round as green fodder. One hundred kilograms of the fruit contain 5.5 fodder units and 0.7 kg of digestible protein.

Varieties of vegetable marrow that have been cultivated in the USSR include Greek 100 (Middle Asia), Gribovskii 37 (RSFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, and the Baltic republics), Saute 38 and Kul’dzhin (Moldavian SSR), and Odessa 52 (Ukrainian SSR, Moldavian SSR, and Tadzhik SSR). In the south, vegetable marrow is cultivated by planting seeds in the soil. In the central part of the European USSR and in more northerly regions the plants are cultivated by transplanting. After the spring frosts the seedlings are transplanted at the age of 20-25 days.

In the south the area of planting is 1.4 × 0.7 m; in the central region, 0.8 × 0.8 m. The fruits are harvested every seven to ten days, when they have a soft skin and incompletely formed seeds. The fruits used for fodder are gathered less frequently, and, as a result, they are larger. However, they must be harvested before the shell becomes hard. The yield of vegetable marrows reaches 200-300 centners/hectare. In order to obtain an early harvest, vegetable marrow is raised in hotbeds.

REFERENCE

Markov, V. M. Ovoshchevodstvo. Moscow, 1966.

A. M. SEMENKO