Topic: Luffa

[ACE]

Has anybody ever grown them. I might get away with it down here, courgettes until I am fed up with trying to get rid of them, then let them dry, saving on plastic waste with organic pan scrubbers.

[tricia]

Interesting  Ace! The  Telegraph had an article about them a couple of days ago.  I always grow too many courgettes and squashes,  so I think I'll give luffa a go this year,  just one plant though and fewer squashes. There are plenty of seed sites offering seeds.

Tricia 

[saddad]

I tried one year... didn't like it this far North and that was in the hot Summers of the 90's when they were telling us we would have to develop Mediterranean and "Dry Gardens".....

[early weeder]

I'm trying them too and hoping to have an alternative to the plastic pan scourers. We are just south of Edinburgh, high up and in a frost pocket so will plant them in the polytunnel. I love things climbing all it so that's fine.  Be good to compare notes ACE.

[Vinlander]

Young Luffa fruit are used as courgettes in the tropics -  so they will need to be really ripe before they develop enough fibre - my polytunnel space is much too precious to use on that. You can do something much "greener" with a fraction of the effort.

I'd recommend sticking with plain wire wool for pans - used handfuls* rust nicely into compost and contribute useful iron to the soil. *I'm not recommending impregnated pads here. Needless to say those "metal-look" scourers are mostly plastic and seem designed to disperse plastic fragments through the whole ecology - hard to see how they could have made them worse for the planet.

Wire wool is even better if you take the leftover worn out bits and set a flame to them as soon as they are dry - (they burn quite prettily) - because that display converts much more to the ferric form - that's the form that plants need most...

Why not enjoy the display to break that bonfire habit? (Just like nicotine patches but for pyromania). But stay upwind - iron dust isn't poisonous but it's very bad for your lungs (fortunately it's much more localised than ordinary smoke - that's less dense so it travels much further in all directions - much harder to avoid and bonfire smoke is particularly worse for you anyway)

Bonfires simply waste what would have become useful humus - and sadly the vast majority of the nutrients are lost too - but they don't actually disappear - they just become pollution.

Cheers.

[tricia]

 I grew 2 plants in my mini greenhouse in pots.  One curled up and died - the other one grew well with very delicate leaves and fine tendrils but not a single flower,  not one  . A total waste of time and money.  Has anyone managed to grow luffas successfully?

I'm sure Vinlander will be smiling and thinking 'I told you so'. 

Tricia 

[gwynleg]

I’ve got one largish loofah growing and 2 smaller ones that are rapidly increasing in size. Not sure that they’ll be big enough for proper loofahs but we’ll see!

[early weeder]

I had 2 Luffa plants started off in the polytunnel but they failed completely. However of the 6 cucumber plants I planted out in there only three grew at all and just before the first frost managed to produce three very small cucs. I'm usually giving them away! I've decided that for some reason cucurbits don't like the bed on that side of the poly. Even Courgettes struggle there. So maybe Luffas are a waste of space but maybe it's just where I tried them. Not sure I'll bother again though.