Loofah gourds coming on

You may recall that I posted about the sudden appearance of gourds a couple of weeks ago. I had clusters of male flowers for weeks but no female ones until the first week of August. The bumblebees did a bang up job making sure there was plenty of pollination and bingo, I finally had gourds on the vine.

Just add water and these things take off. The vines are so big that the dry conditions caused them to wilt severely while I was stuck in Florida last week. Some good slow soakings of the hill/bed perked them up again and since then the gourds started getting some size to them.

They really look like giant hanging zucchini:

This is the one I posted earlier when it really was the size of a small zucchini; since then it has grown at least 5x.

Now that these are larger I see that there are substantially more on the vines that I thought earlier; it looks like I’ll have a decent haul in a few weeks when they start browning and drying.

Why would I grow these? I don’t know really.

Why not?

😉

Once they dry, the skin peels right off and after the seeds are shaken out you are left with the fibrous skeletal frame that is the “sponge” we’ve all seen.

I’ll share- I don’t know what I would do with one or two much less a few dozen.