Want bees to visit your garden?
Try growing a luffa vine in your garden if you can afford some space. The bright yellow flowers that the plant produces are highly visible to bees. Even the big, slightly clumsy carpenter bee is fond of luffa flowers. I always see a couple of them visiting the flowers of the luffa vine that is grown in the community garden every morning.
Attracting bees to the garden helps with the pollination of other flowers. This is especially important if you are growing fruiting vegetables where poor fruit set due to the lack of pollination is a common occurrence. Hand pollination can be too tedious.
To attract bees to the garden, one has to grow plants that produce flowers that are visible to them. Choose to grow those plants that have yellow, blue or purple flowers. They should also be ‘flattish’ so that the bees can easily land and seek out the pollen in them. This means that single petalled flowers are preferred. The luffa flower is one good example of such a flower.
Besides being able to attract beneficial wildlife to the garden, the luffa also produces fruits that can be eaten. There are several varieties and in Singapore, we are most familiar with the angled luffa with its long club-shaped fruits with obvious raised ridges on its rind. Botanically, the angled luffa is known as Luffa acutangula. There is another species, L. cylindrica, is called the smooth luffa because it bears edible cylindrical fruits with no ridges. The fruits of the latter species are those used to make vegetable sponges. Fruits are allowed to mature on the vine and the skin and seeds are then removed to yield a sponge-like, tough network of fibers.
Besides these two types of luffa, there is one more variety which produces very long, slim, ridgeless fruits. I got the seeds of the cultivar “Special Long” from Known You Seeds which is insensitive to daylength. Fruits can grow up to around 70-80 cm by 3.5 cm, with an average weight of 400-500 g when mature. This type of luffa is popular crop in Zhejiang province in Mainland China.
The luffa plant, I feel, is also a great educational tool. It can be used to teach children about the sexes and anatomy of flowers. The luffa, similar to many edible cucurbits, bears flowers of the two sexes, in an obvious manner, on a single plant. The female flowers have an obvious ovary behind the petals which look like a baby fruit. The male flowers do not have these. One can also use cucurbit flowers to serve as an example to illustrate the process of hand pollination.
Below are some pictures which I took of the female flowers of the Special Long luffa hybrid and the fruit development process.
The flower bud with a long ‘stalk’ is the female flower which develops into the baby fruit (ovary) later on.
The young female flower bud of the luffa plant (cultivar - Special Long).
A recently pollinated female flower with its wilted petals. See the obvious fruit-like ovary behind the petals.
A young fruit of the Special Long luffa.
A fruit that is almost ready for harvest for consumption.
For more information, download the following article which I wrote some time ago, which contains some info on the cultivation of the different types of luffa in Singapore.
http://www.greenculturesg.com/articles/aug07/aug07_luffa.pdf
