Behold the World's Ugliest Pumpkin!

[Nyboy]

Whats a OZ book ?

 

[Pulsegleaner]

As in "Wizard of Oz". After that one the author wrote 13 more books and his successors another 26 (plus hundreds of non official ones)

 

[bills]

Reminds me of the Lobster mushroom, which can be any mushroom that's infected with a parasitic fungus, that changes the original shape and color dramatically. Apparently many of them are considered a delicacy..

 

[Jared77]

@Pulsegleaner let us know how many seeds you get And how many you grow out I'm curious how it develops

 

[Hal]

This is a C.pepo button squash/patty pan type that has reached full maturity.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Well, it certainly has SOME button/patty in it (also probably some of the crown shaped one, given the finger shapes) But the HAS to be some gourd in there; it can't be pure squash, or there wouldn't be a hard, bony shell

 

[Rhodie Ranch]

I think its "interesting".

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Well last Tues I finally cracked the pumpkin open to retrieve it's seeds (I had wanted to keep it through thanksgiving, but it developed a large mold spot)

Based on the internal structure, it's pretty obvious that it HAS to be some sort of gourd/pumpkin hybrid. As I mentioned before, I knew it had to be at least PART gourd, since I could seed/fell it had a hard shell under the skin. And it indeed it did just as expected.

What I DIDN'T expect was that, unlike a typical gourd, there was quite a thick layer of flesh INSIDE of the shell, surrounding the seed cavity (normally, at least with all of the gourds I have seen, by the time the fruit is ripe most of the internal fleshy stuff has been consumed and the amount of material between the inside of the hard shell and the seed cavity is minimal to nonexistent (I'm fairly sure that is sort of why you can dry a gourd, if the gourd is ripe, there really isn't all that much flesh left to dry down, just the skin and the "goop" that's holding the seeds in place, which is little enough to dry out before the mold and rot takes over. So I assume THAT came from the pumpkin side, as probably did the size (while I am aware there are gourds that are big enough to be turned into things like dishes, water storage urns and even troughs* by and large the ornamental gourds commonly grown around here tend to be somewhat smaller, around apple sized (minus neck) down.

Seed is sort of middle sized, a bit small for a pumpkin, a bit large for a gourd. Haven't done a count yet but there is a good handful.

* Though to be truly comprehensive, I don't know how many of those larger gourds are pepo gourds and how many are langeneria (bottle) gourds. The Americas have both, and have since time immemorial (most scientists assume that every now and then, a bottle gourd with it's seeds managed to drift across the oceans to the coast of South America, which explains how the Old world gourds made it to the new world before Old World people did (or they were carried by the settlers across the Bering straight bridge, or the New world was visited by Old Worlders long before Columbus and Erickson, you can take your pick of theories.)