February 2 was Groundhog Day. While East Texas has been in the deep freeze in the last couple of weeks, the sunshine hints that spring is just around the corner. My green thumb is starting to itch, I’ve ordered some German Johnson tomato seeds and collected luffa seeds from my crop in 2025. I’ve collected solo cups and potting soil to get my spring plantings started.
Last year, I shared the progress of my luffa (loofah depending on who is spelling this gourd’s name) plants with you. It was indeed a good year for them. The vines grew – taking over a third of my fence – just from from seeds grown in a single five-gallon bucket. I told you how to process the dried gourd to extract the sponge inside. And I shared the process of slicing them and covering them over with organic goat’s milk soap to make little scrubbies for the bath. So, I guess I’ll pick up my luffa story there.
I collected around 13 gourds this year. Unfortunately, the best two were still green when the freeze hit – and I don’t know how that will affect the sponge inside – but we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted on those. But so far, I’ve given several gourds to friends to use in their baths. I’ve also made 27 scrubbies scented in one of the following scents: lavender, Frankincense or lemon. They made great little gifts at Christmas time – and I still have some to share. I also have some of the sponges and will be making at least 18 more scrubbies before I’m through.
But in 2025, I discovered that you can eat the gourds – when they are small. The gourds take 180 days to mature to the sponges most people want, but these are too large to eat – talk about adding fiber to your diet. If you want to try eating luffas, you need to pick them before they get six inches long or so. It’s best if you wait until the end of the season so you can collect all the sponges you want.
This year, I had so many gourds and several of them started new growth at the end of the season. I wanted to discover what baby luffas tasted like, so I picked five or six of the late bloomers. I sliced a couple and shared them with some of my neighbors and people in church – raw. Immature luffas kind of have the consistency of zucchini squash and a taste kind of like okra. I sauteed a couple with onions and bell peppers and tomatoes and topped scrambled eggs with the mix. I even put some in a stir fry. I enjoyed them all those ways.
I also learned that you can eat the mature seeds taken from the dried gourd. Since I had a plethora of seeds this year, I thought I’d try roasted luffa seeds. I found a recipe that instructed me to sprinkle them with olive oil and then salt and other seasonings and roast them in the oven. Well, I tried this and shared them with some of my neighbors and friends at church – and the result was the same. Though you can eat them, they don’t taste good enough for all the work you have to do to get to the kernel inside. While eating them reminds me of eating sunflower seeds in the shell, the luffa seed’s outer coating is much woodier, and the kernel is just too hard to get out. So, from now on, I’ll save the seeds to plant in the spring and share with my friends.
When I was doing research on how to cook the luffa seeds, I discovered that you can also eat the bloom, the stems and the leaves. I haven’t tried any of those – yet. Maybe I’ll get up enough courage to try some or all of these this year. I hope 2026 is a good year for luffas – I can hardly wait for new adventures in cooking them.
