Agricultural Manual, Volume 3

Page 3

After the plants sprout, select four of the thickest and healthiest stems. Take two of these strong stems and place them side-by-side. At the point where they touch, use a bamboo knife to scrape away half of the outer skin. Press the scraped areas against each other and bind them tightly with hemp fiber. Seal the joint with yellow mud, exactly following the method for grafting trees Known as approach grafting, this allows two living plants to fuse while both are still attached to their own roots..

Wait for the stems to fuse together and show signs of healthy growth. Once they are joined, remove the top of one of the stems. Then, take the two resulting combined stems and repeat the process: scrape the skin where they meet and join them just as before. Once these have successfully fused, leave only one main stem. In this way, four original stems are merged into a single plant By merging four seedlings, the final plant benefits from four separate root systems, providing massive amounts of nutrients to the fruit..

When the fruit begins to set, select the two gourds that are most perfectly round and large. Gradually remove any other gourds that appear and eat them. By following this method, a seed that would normally produce a gourd holding only one dou A "peck" or Chinese decaliter, roughly 2 liters. can be transformed into a vessel large enough to hold one shi A larger unit of volume, roughly ten times the size of a "dou".. This is the method for the "Great Gourd" of King Hui of Wei mentioned by the philosopher Zhuangzi original: "Zhuangzi Wei Hui Wang da hu." This refers to a famous story in the "Enjoyment in Untroubled Ease" chapter of the Zhuangzi, where King Hui of Wei is given seeds for enormous gourds that were so large they were deemed useless until Zhuangzi suggested using them as floats for crossing rivers..