Bushel Basket Gourds at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

The Bottle gourds, bushel basket gourds, and powder horn or penguin gourds (Lagenaria sicemria) are all variations within one species. The flowers are large, sometimes up to 5 inches across, with white paper-thin petals. They are sweet-smelling, and bloom at night or on gloomy late afternoons. Vines can reach up to 25 feet in a good growing season. Leaves can measure a foot across. I have in the garden at this time a powder horn of light, pastel green that is hanging down 15 inches from the vine above its head, a Bottle gourd 8 inches wide at the bottom and 10 inches high, and a bushel basket gourd that is meant to be the size of its namesake and weigh about 100 pounds. With our climate and luck, the bushel basket will never make it to maturity. The snake gourd (Trichosanthes Anguina) is unusual. The flowers are small, little over an inch wide, with petals that are incredibly fringed. The fruit grows like a snake, long and coiled, and the warmer the climate the longer the serpent. In Handbook of Tropical Gardening (published in Ceylon), H. F. Macmillan writes:

Dry Measures.—The dry measures in general use in the United States bear no direct relation to the liquid measures of the United States or Great Britain. The ordinary units are the bushel, peck, dry quart, and dry pint, with the following relationship: 1 bushel = 4 pecks = 32 dry quarts r= 64 dry pints. The fundamental unit is the Winchester bushel, a unit abandoned by England in 1824. The Winchester bushel has a capacity of 2,150.42 cubic inches and is about 69 cubic inches or 3 percent smaller than the imperial bushel of Great Britain (2,219.36 cubic inches)—a proportionate difference existing in the subdivisions of the bushel. During the 19th century there was considerable confusion in the United States because of the variance in state laws giving special definitions of bushels for specific purposes. Most of these have been repealed.

But in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, and Oklahoma, the charcoal bushel is defined as 2,748 cubic inches, in Colorado it is defined as 2,500 cubic inches, and in Missouri and Oklahoma as 2,680 cubic inches. In Vermont the law reads that "one bushel and three-quarters of a peck shall be deemed a bushel of lime or ashes." Besides the usual "struck bushel" (one leveled off with a strickle) there is also the "heaped bushel," required in some states to be "as high as the article will admit," and elsewhere "as high as may be without special effort or design," but being specifically stated in Connecticut as 2,564 cubic inches.