Chayote

Plant one fist-sized fruit, get a 40-foot vine and dozens of mild, crisp squash in the fall. Fruit, seed, shoots and root are all edible - the only catch is that it needs a long season.

Plant the whole sprouted fruit on its side, half-buried, after frost. Give it full sun, deep soil, and a genuinely strong arbor - one vine is enormous.

Start with the fruit. Buy a firm, mature, unblemished chayote — a grocery store or Latin or Asian market works fine, which is unusual and wonderfully convenient — and leave it somewhere warm and dim until a shoot pushes out of the fat, split end. That can take weeks; it is not dead, it is thinking. Then plant it on its side or at a shallow angle, sprout end up, with about a third to a half of the fruit left above the soil so it does not rot. Only the sprouted fruit goes in the ground; there is no seed to extract.

Site it for full sun, deep well-drained soil with plenty of compost worked in, and — this is the part people underestimate — a serious structure. A mature chayote is a heavy, sprawling thirty-to-fifty-foot vine, and it will happily engulf a fence, a shed, a small tree, or a neighbor's yard. A stout arbor or a chain-link fence is right; a tomato cage is not. Fruit hanging down through a horizontal arbor is the classic and by far the easiest to pick. Plant after your last frost, once the soil is truly warm.

One vine is enough for a household and will pollinate itself — it carries separate male and female flowers and relies on bees and flies to move between them — though two plants often set a little more heavily. Space them at least 8-10 feet apart, further if you can. In zones 8 and 9 pile mulch over the crown in late fall and the tuberous root usually survives to run again in spring, which is much the best way to grow it: a second-year vine starts earlier and crops far harder than a first-year one.

Water deeply, feed moderately, train the runners onto the structure, and resist the urge to fertilize a vine that is already enormous.

For most of the summer chayote asks very little beyond water and room. Soak the root zone deeply once or twice a week rather than sprinkling, and mulch to hold it; a vine that dries out repeatedly flowers late and sets badly. Feed moderately — compost at planting and a balanced side-dressing once or twice through summer. The temptation, when a vine is running, is to push it harder, and that is precisely the mistake: heavy nitrogen gives you a magnificent vine and no fruit at all.

Spend your effort on training instead. Guide the runners out along the arbor or fence and spread them rather than letting them pile into a heap, so that light and air reach the middle and so that you can actually find the fruit in October. Keep the crown weeded and mulched. Pests are few and rarely serious: powdery mildew whitens the older leaves late in the season and mostly does not matter, aphids gather under young growth, and cucumber beetles work the flowers — do not spray a vine in bloom, since the bees and flies working those small greenish flowers are the entire reason you get fruit.

Pick young - 4-6 inches, skin still dentable with a fingernail - every couple of days through fall, and strip the vine before frost.

Chayote fruit arrives in a rush in the fall, and the single most useful habit is picking it young. A fruit 4-6 inches long and 4-8 ounces, whose skin still dents under a fingernail, is tender, mild, and needs no peeling at all. Left hanging, it goes pale and hard, the skin turns leathery, the single seed firms up, and eventually a shoot emerges from the fruit while it is still on the vine. Check the vine every two or three days once it starts; a good plant can produce dozens of fruit in a fortnight.

Cut or twist fruit off with a short stub of stem. Then watch the forecast: frost destroys hanging fruit overnight, so when a freeze is coming, strip the vine completely, immature fruit included — small chayotes are excellent cooked whole. Set aside two or three of the best, unmarked, fully mature fruit as next year's planting stock and keep them somewhere cool and dark until they sprout.

Two side harvests are worth knowing. Through the season you can pick the tender last few inches of a runner with its young leaves and tendrils — sayote tops, superb stir-fried — though every shoot you take is fruit you will not get, so go lightly. And when you finally retire a vine that is two or three years old, dig up its tuberous root: a large starchy tuber eaten in Mexico and Guatemala as chinchayote, roasted or fried like a potato.

Two to four weeks in the fridge wrapped, longer somewhere cool around 50°F - and it will eventually sprout, which is how you get next year's plant.

Chayote keeps better than most summer squash and worse than a winter squash. Do not wash it; wrap unbruised fruit loosely in paper or a perforated bag and refrigerate, and it holds two to four weeks, sometimes longer. A cool dark room around 50°F is if anything better than the fridge — hard, deep chilling makes the flesh go pitted and dull. Whatever you do, it will eventually push out a shoot: that is not spoilage, that is the plant doing exactly what it is designed to do, and a sprouted fruit is your planting stock.

For a real glut, cook and preserve. Chayote blanches and freezes reasonably well in cubes for soups and casseroles, though it softens; it pickles beautifully, staying crisp in a way few vegetables manage; and the Louisiana answer is to cook it down with shrimp or ham into stuffed mirliton or mirliton dressing and freeze the filling. Cooked, mashed chayote also freezes fine as a base for the next casserole.

Mild, crisp and endlessly adaptable: raw in slaw, sautéed, stuffed, pickled, in soups - and the seed is the best bite in the fruit.

Chayote's mildness is a feature. Raw, sliced thin or shredded, it is crunchy and faintly sweet and makes an excellent slaw or salad with lime, chile and salt — think of it as somewhere between jicama and cucumber. Cooked, it stays firm where zucchini collapses, which makes it a good soup and stew vegetable and a fine candidate for gratins, curries, and anything braised. It is very good simply sliced and sauteed hard in butter or oil with garlic, and it takes to strong flavors precisely because it brings so few of its own.

The signature dish in the United States is Louisiana's stuffed mirliton: halved, boiled tender, scooped, and the flesh mixed with shrimp or crab, ham, onion, garlic and breadcrumbs before being piled back into the shells and baked. Mirliton dressing is the same idea on a casserole scale, and it is Thanksgiving food in New Orleans. Elsewhere: Mexican cooks boil and dress it or fold it into soups, Caribbean cooks gratin it as christophine au gratin, and across Asia it goes into stir-fries and simmered dishes.

Two things people throw away and should not. The single flat seed in the middle is edible, nutty and the sweetest part of the fruit — cooks in the growing regions consider it the reward. And the young shoots and leaves are a genuine vegetable, stir-fried with garlic or dropped into broth. Young fruit needs no peeling; only older, tough-skinned ones do, and that is when the sticky sap becomes an issue — peel under running water or cook first and slip the skin off.

Low in calories, high in water, with useful vitamin C, folate, fiber and potassium - a genuinely light vegetable that fills a plate.

Chayote is about ninety percent water, which makes it one of the lightest vegetables you can put on a plate: a cup of it runs to roughly twenty-five calories. What it does carry is worth having — a decent hit of vitamin C, notably good folate, useful dietary fiber, potassium, manganese and vitamin K, along with a range of ordinary plant antioxidants. It is low in sugar and gentle on digestion, which is why it appears so often as a first vegetable for infants and in convalescent cooking across Latin America and Asia.

Because it is so mild and holds its shape, it is a genuinely useful volume-filler: it stretches a pot of soup or a casserole without adding much of anything, and swapped for part of the potato or pasta in a dish it lightens the whole thing. Keep the skin on young fruit for the fiber. Nothing here is medicinal — this is simply a clean, light, unexciting vegetable that happens to be very easy to eat a lot of.

A huge vine and no fruit is the universal chayote complaint: it is a short-day plant, so a late start, an early frost or too much nitrogen all end the same way.

An enormous vine and not one fruit — the classic. Three causes, in order of likelihood. First, the season ran out: chayote flowers only as the days shorten in late summer, so if your first frost arrives in early October the vine is killed before the fruit forms. Start the fruit indoors in late winter, plant out the day frost passes, and in zones 7 and colder accept that fruit is a long shot. Second, too much nitrogen — rich feeding grows vine at the direct expense of flowers. Third, poor pollination in a cool, wet, or insecticide-sprayed fall; never spray a vine in bloom.

Flowers form and drop without setting: usually pollination, sometimes drought — keep water steady from first flower and leave the bees alone. Fruit is hard, pale and leathery: picked too late; harvest at 4-6 inches while a fingernail still dents the skin. Fruit sprouting on the vine: the same problem taken further — and that fruit is now next year's plant, so keep it. White powdery coating on older leaves in late summer: powdery mildew, largely cosmetic on a vine this vigorous. The vine has eaten the shed: that is chayote; site it where thirty to fifty feet of growth is welcome. Hands dry, tight and itchy after peeling: the sap — peel under running water or wear gloves.

Season length decides everything. Zones 9-13: easy, and perennial. Zone 8: a real crop with an early start. Zone 7 and colder: a spectacular vine that rarely fruits.

Zones 12-13: a true perennial that crops for years from the same root; cut it back hard after fruiting. In frost-free places it can also escape from dropped fruit and smother wild ground, so keep it contained. Zones 10-11: excellent — plant in late winter, harvest through fall and into winter, and expect the crown to run again next year. Zone 9: the American sweet spot, and mirliton country; heavy fall crops, and the root usually overwinters under mulch. Zone 8: a genuine crop, but a race — sprout the fruit indoors in late winter, plant the day frost passes, and hope the first freeze holds off until November.

Zone 7: marginal. The vine grows beautifully and then frost usually arrives just as flowering begins. Grow it up an arbor for the shade and the shoots, start it as early as you possibly can under cover, and treat fruit as a lucky year. Zone 6 and colder: an ornamental annual vine or a greenhouse crop, not a food plant — the day-length trigger and the frost date simply cannot be reconciled outdoors. The limitation is not cold hardiness, it is that chayote needs the whole summer to grow and then a long warm autumn to fruit.

The fruit is the seed: sprout a whole mature chayote and plant it. Cuttings root too, and saving your own fruit is how heirloom strains survive.

Propagation could hardly be simpler, because the fruit is the seed. Choose a firm, mature, unblemished chayote — from your own vine, a neighbor's, or a grocery store — and set it somewhere warm, dim and dry until a shoot emerges from the fat split end. Some sprout in a fortnight, some take two months, and a few never do; start two or three. Then plant the whole fruit on its side, a third to a half exposed. Never cut the seed out and sow it: it dries and dies in minutes outside the flesh, which is why chayote seed is not sold in packets.

Stem cuttings also root readily in a warm season, which is useful for multiplying a strain you like without waiting for fruit. And because chayote is out-crossing and variable, saving your own fruit year after year is how a local strain gets established. That is not a hobbyist point in Louisiana: the traditional Creole mirliton strains, passed over backyard fences for generations, were nearly wiped out when Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Isaac put saltwater over the gardens that held them, and getting them back has been a deliberate, coordinated seed-saving effort. If you grow an old local strain, save fruit from it and pass it on.

Domesticated in Mesoamerica long before contact, carried worldwide by Spanish ships, and adopted so thoroughly in Louisiana that it became Creole Thanksgiving food.

Chayote was domesticated in southern Mexico and Central America and was a well-established food long before European contact — its English name comes, by way of Spanish, from the Nahuatl chayotli. Spanish and Portuguese ships carried it out of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it settled in so completely across the Caribbean, West Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Australia that in most of those places it is now assumed to be local: christophine, chocho, chuchu, sayote, iskus, choko.

Its American story runs through Louisiana. Brought to New Orleans through the Caribbean trade, the mirliton became a fixture of Creole cooking and of Creole backyards, where individual families kept and shared their own strains for generations. Stuffed mirliton and mirliton dressing are Thanksgiving and Christmas dishes there in a way they are nowhere else in the country. When the storms of 2005 and 2012 drove saltwater across those neighborhoods, most of those heirloom vines died with the gardens — and the ongoing work to track down, propagate and redistribute the surviving Louisiana strains is one of the more moving small stories in American seed saving.