Beyond the Scrub: Loof’n Round Gardens and the Quiet Revolution of a Useful Plant

It starts the way good Southern farm stories often do: with a gift, a garden, and an insistence that work should make something real. In 2018, Julia—once a corporate graphic designer, later a marketing director—accepted a tiny loofah, “maybe the size of my pinky,” with a few seeds shaking inside. Curiosity sprouted into a backyard experiment, then into Loof’n Round Gardens: 300 vigorous vines running across an eight‑acre homestead in Cleveland, Tennessee. By late November 2022, the farm opened to the public—a living argument that a simple gourd can anchor a business, a community, and a saner way to think about everyday tools.

Loof’n Round Gardens sits about half an hour from Chattanooga (and roughly the same from Athens and Sweetwater), a tidy hub for locals, weekenders, and the loofah‑curious. The vines are rowdy—thirty to forty feet if you let them—hence Julia’s nickname for them: “wranglers.” The scale signals something larger than novelty. This isn’t a craft table; it’s agricultural entrepreneurship with a spine—trial, error, and steady expansion, taught season by season by the land itself.

Most people know loofah as a scrub. Fair enough. In practice, the plant becomes a toolkit of durable, compostable alternatives: soft face pads that last a year or more; medium‑firm body scrubs that go six to seven months without hosting funk; tough, non‑scratch cleaning pads for cast iron, glass, china, floors, shoes—even tires. When they need a reset, everything rides the dishwasher’s top rack. Old‑fashioned simplicity—plant fiber and water—meets modern expectations for hygiene and longevity.

There’s moral clarity in swapping petroleum‑derived throwaways for something that composts. That value proposition has put the farm in conversation with “refilleries”—zero‑waste shops where customers bring containers to restock household staples. In Chattanooga, Full Circle Refillery and Frequency Refillery carry the scrubs. The shared ethos is obvious: less plastic, more local, more durable. Commerce with clean hands.

Calling the loofah a “scrub” is like calling the olive a “pit.” Process hundreds of gourds and you meet the rest of the plant.

Seeds yield a light oil that Julia presses on‑site. She uses it for very dry skin and eczema; customers offer testimonials on stubborn issues like psoriasis. We’ll say the quiet part out loud: these are personal experiences, not medical claims. Even so, the formulation stays straightforward—pure oil or oil‑in‑salve—and users have reported hair and scalp benefits, from reducing dandruff to coaxing growth in stubborn patches.

Before a loofah becomes a fibrous sponge, the young gourd is full of tender “meat” and water—edible, mild, and useful in the kitchen or on the skin. Blended into smoothies, it adds fiber and body without stealing the flavor; simmered like zucchini, it soaks up seasoning. In the skincare lab, that same gourd meat shows promise for brightening and toning when blended into gentle cleansers. Even the pale‑green “peel water” from processing seems to soften skin—one of those farm‑floor discoveries made by hands and buckets, not lab coats.

And the leaves? Steeped, they produce a naturally sweet, caffeine‑free green tea—thanks to plant sugars laid down to charm pollinators. That opens a regulatory road: securing a manufactured food license to sell loofah tea to coffee shops and kombucha brewers, while pursuing FDA‑appropriate pathways to talk responsibly about any seed‑oil benefits. It’s the grown‑up side of innovation: paperwork, inspections, labels—so promise can travel from farm table to store shelf without losing integrity.

I first heard about Julia through a mutual friend, and when I began researching Loof’n Round Gardens I stumbled onto her Facebook, website, and TikTok. That’s where she really caught my attention — thousands of viewers drawn in by her joy, her fascination with loofahs, and even the occasional ASMR clip of her peeling back their dried skins. Julia’s passion is infectious. She seems endlessly delighted by the plant and all it can do, and that energy poured into our conversation.

Though I had prepared questions in advance, I hardly needed to ask them — she was already brimming with answers, eager to share stories, insights, and discoveries. What came through most was her enthusiasm for the loofah, for her community, and for the larger purpose she sees in her work. It was a joy to spend time with her.

You can lecture all day about botanicals; nothing lands like peeling a loofah yourself. Hence the tours and workshops. In the sweet spot of September through early October, visitors pick and peel right off the vine. They go home with sample bags and—more importantly—a story about a thing they did, not just a thing they bought. When local news crews show up, it isn’t spectacle; it’s the experience turning neighbors into advocates who tell visiting relatives, “You have to see our loofah farm.” Regional pride grows one tactile “aha” at a time.

Day to day, the work is the work: prune vines, process scrubs, restock shops, answer questions at markets, refine wholesale relationships with like‑hearted retailers in Cleveland and Chattanooga. The strategy is steady: keep the footprint local and the circle wide, choosing partners who echo the farm’s environmental and social aims.

Threaded through this story is an invisible trellis: a small but potent network of growers and researchers who share what they learn. The line stretches from Kentucky to West Virginia to Chicago—names like Jessica, Jim, and Paul—people trading tactics, seed knowledge, and processing tricks without the stifling hand of gatekeeping. That generosity isn’t branding; it’s ethic. The work is to figure out what this plant can do and return that value to the communities who’ll use it. In an era obsessed with secrecy and “IP,” the loofah network reads like a counter‑spell: curiosity over clout, collaboration over competition.

That spirit has been catalytic. Paul’s East Asian family connections helped steer research into traditional loofah seed‑oil uses—narrowing the search, testing smarter, and showing where folk practice and modern study rhyme. Craft traditions survive the century by staying porous to one another.

The journey from “victory garden” to 300‑plant production wasn’t accidental. The timeline is clean—2018 first planting, expansion, a late‑2022 opening—and the growth plan is practical. About two acres are in loofah now, with family relocating to help as operations expand. Meanwhile, Julia imagines collaborations with natural‑product companies—True Botanicals, Mad Hippie, The Earthling Co.—brands whose ethic fits and whose catalogs curiously lack a loofah scrub or loofah‑seed‑oil product. The goal isn’t to sell out; it’s to scale what works while staying honest about what the plant can actually do.

Do you know someone growing something beautiful, building something bold, or living in quiet alignment with their values?  We’re always looking for voices to feature — makers, growers, dreamers, and doers who are part of the parallel economy and the heart of what we stand for.

Reach out to Alary Woods at: [email protected]