There are melons, watermelons and pumpkins. Why not Beigua?

"Beigua" is a semi-wild plant. Because of its low yield, it is not as sweet as watermelon, sweet as wax gourd and high as pumpkin, so people don't know much about it.

Melons include watermelon, pumpkin, east melon (also known as wax gourd), and lack of north melon. Northerners don't know how to grow melons since ancient times? It doesn't make sense. Northerners not only grow watermelons and east melons, but also pumpkins. Is there any reason why they don't grow pumpkin alone?

The author of The Journey to the West invented a story about Emperor Taizong's gathering of strange people to offer melons and fruits to the underworld. A man named Liu Quan was willing to risk his life in order to find his beloved wife. Liu Quan committed suicide by taking medicine such as pumpkin on his head, and the ghost went to see the keeper with a gift. Terrified, he sent the couple back to the sun. The local storyteller felt that the story was not enough, so he changed it and changed the pumpkin into a pumpkin. The reason is: because the North Melon is dedicated to the terrifying, there is no North Melon in the world. The storyteller is limited to a small area, and obviously does not fully understand that pumpkin and melon are actually the same thing. If he understands this, the story of Journey to the West may have a new expansion-the clever Emperor Taizong only coaxed the old man Yan once, and his favor to hades was just a hollow name, and the real thing remained on earth.

Presumably, the most important melon species named after the southeast and northwest should be in the historical period when the national political and cultural center was located in the Central Plains, which was about the heyday of Han and Tang Dynasties centered on Luoyang, Chang 'an. This "center" itself is north, and the "north" melon has become its visual blind spot. I think this is the secret of missing Beigua. On the other hand, southerners can see clearly from a distance. They once called one or more melons "North Melons". According to some information today, northerners call pumpkins north melons, but I think it's just upside down. So where did "Beigua" go? In fact, it has always been with us, and its planting area is as broad as watermelon, pumpkin and pumpkin. In my opinion, pumpkin is a typical representative of north melon, and everyone should know the saying of "North Man" in history.

The "norm" of pumpkin needs to be carefully identified. In the past, China people used to call the varieties of fruits and vegetables imported from other places "Fan", such as pumpkin, tomato, sweet potato, guava, annona, papaya, etc., or "foreign", onion, ginger, potato, persimmon, cabbage, pumpkin, etc. People in my hometown, their ancestors are called gourd dolls or gourds. After entering Lanzhou, I found that people generally call it Cucurbitaceae, which puzzled me for a long time. What, is it foreign? After reading it, I slowly realized that it was the uneducated farmers in their hometown who were the most correct. Tiger and pumpkin are short for tiger and pumpkin. The names of tiger and pumpkin were established as early as the Zhou and Qin Dynasties. Cucumber people, just a common name of a region brought by immigrants, reflect their conceptual mistakes, and they make a mistake about the difference between China and overseas.

Pumpkin is only a member of the pumpkin family, so to truly identify pumpkins, we must first understand pumpkins. I'm afraid no vegetable can get along as well as people mention pumpkins. Face the same thing, pumpkin, cucumber, lettuce, pumpkin, gourd, gourd, zucchini-stop! How can gourds and pumpkins be confused? Pumpkins are planted mainly for the flesh inside the shell, and gourds are planted mainly for the hard shell outside, which is completely different! Yes, however, all the above names of pumpkin are just "gourd", which is its cultural source; Even in the botanical sense, pumpkin belongs to Cucurbitaceae. Therefore, to understand pumpkins, we must start with gourds.

The book of songs "Qi Feng in July" says: "Eat melons in July and break the pot in August." The pot is a gourd, it is broken. It can be seen that at that time, the ancestors separated the gourd from the "melon", but the extension of "melon" was vague. With so many melons ripe in July, we naturally think of several summer fruits, but there are still many vegetables that can't be eaten raw, so our ancestors ignored them, right? How is that possible! Shennong tasted hundreds of herbs, and they chewed up all the poisonous plants. How to discard nutritious gourds and pumpkins? Therefore, at that time, "melons" and "pots" may contain pumpkins. "August breaks the pot", and autumn has arrived. Picked the ripe gourd, but found the ripe pumpkin. Pick the gourd and take the pumpkin back to supplement the scarcity of vegetables in winter for long-term storage in order to make various containers. The pumpkin shell is not enough to make a "pot", but the gourd is tender and eaten like a pumpkin. Isn't the tender gourd also called "melon"? Then, I will explain these two sentences in the Book of Songs without hesitation-melons that eat melons in July include small gourds, and pots that break in August include old pumpkins.

In the southern country of Zhuhai, I have been to the Pumpkin Festival organized by the Institute of Modern Agricultural Sciences several times. Pumpkin only shows its full charm in subtropical areas. I can imagine the strange shape of melon, and it can grow, but I can't imagine the colorful melon, and it can grow. This is a natural thing, and it is amazing.

Walking in the pumpkin garden, I remembered the song of Zhou people praising their own history recorded in the Book of Songs: "Silk is a melon, and people make a living." It means that there are large and small melons on the vine, which is a vivid portrayal of the prosperity of Zhou people! One explanation is that this sentence says that human beings were first born from gourd melons. I think it is better to understand it as a poem. When Zhou people sang this kind of ballad, they migrated from Longdong, my hometown, to Weibei, with the ambition of winning the world. Time flies for more than 3000 years, and the melons and vines above my head are still covered with large and small melons. As a "Zhou people", I am now on the coast of the South China Sea, why not let people sigh!