Calabash, also known as bottle gourd is a vine grown for its fruit.
The calabash tree is a species of flowering plant that is grown in Africa, Central America, South America, the West Indies and extreme southern Florida.
Bottle gourds are grown by direct sowing of seeds or transplanting 15- to 20-day-old seedlings.
The fruits have a variety of shapes, they can be rounded, bottle-shaped and they can grow to be over a metre long.
The most popular are the rounder varieties which are typically called ‘Calabash gourds’.
Calabash gourds is one of the world’s first cultivated plants grown not primarily for food, but for use as containers, making the West African instruments like the Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀, sometimes large calabashes are simply hollowed, dried and used as percussion instruments.
