Cucurbita ficifolia
Origin: Mexico via Leiderdorp, South Holland (Netherlands)
Improvement status: Cultivar
Seeds per packet: ~15
Germination tested 12/2025: 84%
Life cycle: Annual
Also known as figleaf gourd, chilacayote is an underutilized Mexican squash species known for its long-lasting fruit that put other squash species to shame for keeping quality: Cucurbita ficifolia fruit can keep unrefrigerated for up to four or five YEARS!
When fully grown, the fruit look more like watermelons than typical squash on the outside, but cutting hem open reveals nearly black seeds and somewhat stringy white flesh that resembles an Asian winter melon crossed with spaghetti squash. This flesh can be treated like a vegetable, and made into delicious soups and stews, but it is most often used in Mexico to make candy, which is also sometimes added to sweet beverages (candied chilacayote drink is pretty wonderful). The plant is a prolific viner, so it's a great source of delicious leaves, tendrils, and growing tips. Squash plants are both fruit and vegetable, and this species demonstrates that perfectly.
Despite being from Mexico, and being little-known north of the Rio Grande, chilacayote has traveled around the world. In China, it is called sharkfin melon, because the fruit flesh apparently makes a good substitute for the real thing in sharkfin soup. It's called Malabar gourd in some places, associating it with the coast of India. People in the Azores make a delicious jam from the fruit (calling it "Doce de Chila", indicating a linguistic link to Mexico), but on the mainland in southwestern Europe, including Portugal, Spain, and France, they call the same jam "angel hair" jam, and an old (but hard to verify) story holds that the fruit was introduced to the region in the 1800s when a pile of them were sent along on a ship as feed with a donation of two Asian elephants from the Thai royal court to the French govenrment.
I (this is Nate) had tried to grow chilacayote in NJ before, from seeds taken from an overripe fruit I found at a bodega in New Brunswick, but they didn't even start flowering before frost (the species often has strong day-length sensitivity, which means it doesn't get triggered to flower until days and nights are of roughly equal length). I had more or less given up on the crop until I was visiting my dear friend Renske just outside the city of Leiden in the Netherlands. She had a single chilacayote fruit in her garden and I asked her where it came from. This was in September of 2021, and she told me she had grown it in her garden the prior summer, then brought the fruit indoors, and when it still looked pristine the next spring, she brought it back out to her garden (see second photo) as something of an ornament! The strange thing about this mysterious appearance in the northwest corner of Europe is that she had never even heard of the plant: she thought she'd planted a butternut squash! In order to confirm that it was indeed a chilacayote, and not a strange watermelon, Renske consented to smashing it open on the pavement right then — and sure enough it had the characteristic white flesh and black seeds that marks this species of squash as unique. I used my USDA Small Lots of Seed import permit to send some back for inspection and temporary quarantine before they were released to me. It took a few years before I grew enough to offer them here (and we only have a limited supply), but I've found them to be early, productive, and delicious, though they are significantly smaller than other examples I've seen of the same species. As of this writing, my oldest chilacayote fruit from this population has just reached the ripe old age of 3!
These seeds were grown by me at the EFN flagship farm in Elmer, New Jersey. The first photo depicts processing them for seed and edible flesh with some of our friends at CATA (El Comite de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas, a.k.a. the Farmworkers Support Committee) in Bridgeton, NJ — a mutually beneficial arrangement, because I got help cleaning the seeds and good company, and they got seeds for their community garden plus fresh chilacayote for their members.
GROWING TIPS: Plant when you would any other squash, once the soil has warmed in spring. Direct-sow in place, or start indoors a couple weeks before last frost. Leave plenty of room for plans to sprawl out (even 8 to 10 feet on either side of the row may not prove quite wide enough). They really like to roam. They will appreciate a strong trellis as well, but also do just fine sprawling on the ground.
NOTE: The photo of "Doce de Chila", or candied chilacayote flesh, comes from author Chedlund808 and is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
