It's late December, and I'm still sorting through my loofah treasure. An ideal loofah is sort of like all-natural aerogel. One of the cool things about growing them has been seeing what a not-ideal loofah looks like.
Many of the ones that I harvested green rotted, and ended up in the compost. Others took a long time to lose their outer husk, and those tended to have a lot of flesh remaining in the middle. In a few others the husk stuck to sponge and I half-destroyed the sponge getting the skin off. I left some un-husked squash in a spare room for a few days, and they molded badly. Lessons learned. I can still smell them faintly in that spare room, unfortunately. (Note: if you are a guest in my house and you sleep on the sofabed and you think it smells faintly of overripe squash, it's just your imagination.)
Overall I ended up with about 10 premium loofahs that peeled without much trouble and looked good as soon as they dried. I could chop the big ones in two, which would give me about 15 decent-sized loofahs out of that batch.
Then there's another 10 or so that don't look very nice but will probably clean up well with a bleach soak. Last but not least, there's the funky bunch -- the ones where the skin stuck to the sponge, or there's still flesh inside, or the sponge is compromised in some other way. I don't know how hard I'm going to work to use these, but they'll be good for scrubbing plates if nothing else. (I used one today to clean out my cast iron pan.)
And the seeds! So many seeds. I have well over a quart. I'll give them away to my neighbors and let them have the fun next year.
