Luffa Overview

Summertime brings out luffa's vigorous, lush growth, with large yellow flowers opening daily for months.

Luffa, sometimes spelled loofa, loufa or louffa, is a fast-growing tropical vine in the cucumber family.  It has massive, dark green leaves and thick, juicy vines that can reach 30 feet or more in a summer.  The plant is most commonly grown for its gourds, which hang like zucchini or cucumber fruits from the vines and grow best when trellised up off the ground.  The plant requires a VERY sturdy trellis!  It is also a lovely ornamental vine, providing thick shade if trained over a tall arbor or pergola (but make sure to leave head-room under those hanging gourds).

Every day in summer and into fall, new flowers open--large, bright yellow flowers that display beautifully against the lush, tropical green foliage.  Butterflies, moths, bumblebees and other bees love the abundant blossoms, and will visit the plants all morning and into early afternoon, when the pollinated flowers fall and make way for new blossoms to open the following morning.  Most of these flowers are male; one female blossom forms for every ten male flowers, and after pollination, these female flowers form gourds (just like squash and pumpkins).  By late summer, these gourds grow to amazing sizes, even without any pruning or fruit-thinning.  As long as conditions permit, the vine will keep on flowering and continue producing new gourds, as well, allowing a continual harvest of young, edible luffa, which are cooked and eaten like zucchini or eggplant.

The large gourds are allowed to mature on the vine, forming seeds and dense, fibrous interiors.  These fiber gourds are dried and peeled for use as sponges, scrubs, filters and even paper!  Meanwhile, the mature seeds are highly nutritious and are used as a dietary staple, ground into flour.

The entire luffa plant, from vines to leaves to fruit to seeds, is medicinal.  Different parts of the plant contain different concentrations of the active chemicals.  Luffa is used as an immune system regulator, a dewormer, a pain reliever, a wound healing accelerator, an antiseptic and even as a treatment for certain types of cancer.

It is hard to say enough about this exceptional plant, which is easy-to-grow, nutritious, medicinal, and useful in so many ways that it could justify an entire book.  Rather than trying to fit all of the information on luffa into a single post, we've decided to break the subject into categories:

• Luffa in the garden
• Luffa sponges
• Luffa as food
• Luffa as medicine

With so many valuable uses, luffa merits a space (a big space!) in our garden of plants for resilience, even though the vine is grown as an annual in our Virginia zone 7 climate, and normally we prefer perennials.  After reading the following posts discussing the merits of luffa cylindrica, we think you will probably want to grow some in your own homestead garden as well.  Email us if you're looking for seeds to plant, or for kitchen and bath sponges.