Experiments in the vegetable garden: luffa

This year we planted also the luffa plant (it’s like a giant zucchini/cucumber) in our family vegetable garden. When dried it becomes a sponge.

We looked for it in many garden centers but none of them had it. We accidentally found it in a plant market in Senigallia a day in May/June. One plant cost 8€, so we took only one.

We did not know what to expect, we never grew it, but in the end, it was a positive surprise. The plant grew a lot, it stretched for almost 10 meters over a net. Until the end of October, we collected 6 well-dried fruits that became sponges.

We still have about 20 of them on the plant but they are still quite green.

Given that the winter is coming, days have gotten shorter and it’s quite cold, and we have an abundance we decided to experiment and collect some of them and let them dry away from the plant.

We put some of them in the basement:

And we left others, the ones almost dried, on the balcony to take advantage of the few sunny days ahead of us.