Thursday, January 04, 2007

Calabash Lane



A section of one of the trails I recently hiked on in Washington Park is littered with Calabash gourds. There are a couple trees on the hillsides and the gourds seem to gravitate down to the trail in the valley.


I did a little reading on the Calabash trees and found out that they are mainly pollinated by bats. The gourds are used to make maracas, and the pulp has been used to treat colds in humans and ticks in dogs. The seeds are used to make a sweet called "carabobo", which I don't think I've ever tried.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since you switched to the new format the pictures take a long time to load and sometimes never do. .....Rich

Brad said...

I've also noticed that the pictures seem slower to load now. I'll forward this to blogger and see if they have any words of wisdom.
There have been two changes recently, one to the new blogger and a second one to the new template.
I'm wondering if the new version handles pictures differently or something.