Wild cucumber is the first annual growth to appear with the winter rains, and it’s still going strong now, five months later, with fresh vines, flowers, and maturing fruit all festooning whatever they can scramble over. I cut a fruit open to see how the seeds are going; they are still very soft. When the fruit ripens, it will explode and spray the large, hard seeds out in all directions.

Marah macrocarpa has an unusual germination method. The initial shoot emerges from the seed and grows downward into the earth. This shoot then splits, one part swelling to form a tuber, while the second part grows back to the surface and becomes the vine. The large, hard tuberous root can reach several meters in length and weigh in excess of 100 kilograms, leading to one of the plant’s common names, manroot.