Plant · P-210

Luffa

Luffa aegyptiaca

Luffa doubles as a vegetable and a sponge from the same planting: fruit picked young at six to eight inches cooks like cucumber, while fruit left another month on the vine dries into the fibrous sponge sold as a scrubber. Trellised, it climbs 30 to 50 feet on only a few feet of footprint, so a single arbor of it becomes real summer shade in its first season rather than the decade a tree would take. Its leaves and vine are also strong forage - goats browse it readily, and its pressed seed meal has replaced up to 15 percent of the soybean meal in farmed catfish feed with no drop in performance. The seed carries a bitter, purgative compound, so breeding cattle and sheep should stay off it, even though people eat the young fruit long before that compound concentrates.