Quote:
Originally Posted by KC.Sun
You can actually eat bitter melon when it's ripe. I want the ripe fruits because I like the taste of them when cooked. We cook them in a pressure cooker with ribs and never have enough to eat. It's hard to come by the ripe ones because it can rot easily. The ripeness I'm after is when the colors changes from green to orange. But not orange and so ripe that it falls apart when picking it. We don't eat the seeds. We've always scooped them out and discarded them.
Also delicious in teas by itself or with some goji berries boiled with it.
How many bitter melon plants do you usually grow? I'm wondering if 4 plants will be enough. Usually we use about 15lbs of bitter melon to prepare the dish with ribs. It feeds about 5 people.
Is it a productive plant?
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Yes, very productive. I even let one fruit on each plant go for seed, and it does not appear to slow production.
I usually grow a 24-30' row, with plants spaced about 24" apart. The photo above is one picking, during peak production. .. so you can probably estimate from that how many plants you will need. In my climate, they are best started as transplants.
In my experience, productivity varies widely, depending upon variety. The Chinese cultivar above, and a
very bitter cultivar from Thailand with small, spiky fruit, are the most productive. Another Chinese cultivar I grew was less productive - but the top-shaped melons were up to one pound each!
Your comments on eating the ripe fruit are interesting. Most of the references I've seen - including advice from Filipino friends - says that the ripe fruit becomes toxic; perhaps pressure cooking neutralizes that. The stage of ripeness you mention is very short lived, they can literally turn to mush in 2-3 days.