The Luffa Experiment

I found THIS website last year and thought it was kinda interesting.  After poking around for a while (and found that you can even use luffa for toilet paper!) I decided I wanted to try to grow some.  My mom and I ordered some seeds and waiting until the spring to plant.  I planted mine mid-March (since the harvest time was so long).  I planted 8 seeds and attached lattice work to the back of the garage.  I did not know what to expect as we patiently waited for the stuff to start growing.  It was it sprouted WAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY later than everything else in the garden, so I was thinking it would not work.

This picture was taken May 15th.

This is how the current garden looks:

There are BIG HUGE YELLOW flowers that bees and wasps just LOVE!  I HATE…HATE….HATE those things.  All of them!  There were some BIG HUGE black and yellow BUMBLE BEES today.  AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!  When I get brave enough I might take a picture of them because they look cool…but I’m still scared of them.  Yes, I am a big weeny.

Because of the bees, I told Wade I think we need to take the whole thing down…even though this seems to be the ONE thing I can grow!!!  I decided to pull a couple of the luffa and see what has come of them.  I pulled an “original” one that has been on the vine for about a month now, as well as one that has just grown.  I took them inside and cut the ends off and began peeling.  This is what I ended up with:

Pretty COOL!  Next I opened the one that just grew in the last week or so.  It was TOTALLY different.  I am afraid I am going to have to wait until they get a bit “older” before I pull them from the vine.  The website where I found this said that they wait until the first frost before pulling them off the vine.  That means another 5 months before I could get them.  I can’t have bees until then!