Ancestral Intelligence: Mama Luffa

Almost every household you know has one hanging in their bathroom and in the kitchen - a plastic loofah to wash your body and a scourer to scrub-a-dub dishes. But what is little known is how the shower loofah and the dish scrubber came about.. The intelligence of our ancestors and the connection to nature all around them.

Brown luffa fruit on the vine, ready for plucking

The resemblance of the loofah sponge to the luffa fruit is no coincidence and is likely where these plastic lookalikes took influence from.

The luffa when young is used for eating and once mature and dried is useful not only for scrubbing bodies and dishes but has even been used as a component of filtering the nasties from water and as insulation.

Although the luffa doesn’t have history here in Aotearoa, it is valued to this day across other cultures of the world for food and as the ‘original sponge’.

Dried luffa, deseeded and ready to use

Acknowledging that luffa can naturally break down releasing it’s nutrients back into the whenua (land), feeding the soil, it’s easy to see why they are popping up in modern gardens as we increasingly look to ways we can minimise the use of plastic and our impact on Papatūānuku (our Earth mother).

This is precisely why last spring we decided to source some luffa seeds to follow suit the intelligence and ingenuity of those before us by growing our own natural luffa sponges.

After spiralling up bamboo poles and growing for 6 months in our māra kai (food garden) at Boundary, earlier this month on a nice sunny day our luffa were looking nice and brown on the the vine, so I gave them the pluck before the thick of the Autumn rainfall hit.

When we peeled off the cracker dry skin to reveal the luffa’s fibres, it was like being teleported to a time where this would’ve been a huge yearly harvest to stock up and replace cleaners and mattresses for the year. I was truly excited to have harvested something that was intentionally grown as a tool rather than for ornamental value or your typical eating.

We harvested a humble 3 fruit from our 1 vine. From one full luffa fruit, it’s easy enough to slice into 5 pieces giving us 5 scrubbers.

A couple for the kitchen, couple for the bathroom and a few to trade with others.

Mama luffa will absolutely be a staple in our māra (garden) for future Springs and Summers, and we look forward to increasing our learnings and the harvest!