Imagine you open up a CSA box—a kit of produce from community supported agriculture—only to find an apple covered in ashen warts. You’d probably be inclined to kill it with fire, or at least condemn it to the compost.
But if that fruit were a species of Cucurbitaceae—the gourd family—you might have an entirely different reaction, proudly displaying the knotty, mutated produce on a console table in your foyer. Blemishes are boons in many Cucurbit fruits, and when it comes to gourds, the funkier they come, the more we cherish them. One seed supplier even champions something called a “blister gourd” as being “larger and more warted” than lesser, more symmetrical varieties.
As the leaves turn to tints of reddish-orange, it’s time to trek to farmers’ markets and pumpkin patches to bring home the knobbiest, knurliest and gnarliest Cucurbit fruits you can find—that’s right, it’s decorative gourd season once again, folks. Though their flesh be adamant and their seeds bitter, thousands of decor enthusiasts will flock to the farm to pick out gourds for arrangements spilling out of wicker baskets or piled on dining table centerpieces.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
