Gourd Drying and Cleaning
With some simple household items and a tub or sink, you can clean and prepare gourds for your favorite craft project.
If you grow your own gourds you should pull them off the vines in the fall, you want to get them before they start to rot on the ground. You can do this the same time you pick your other similar vegetables, such as pumpkins and squash.
Leave several inches of stem on them to use for your various projects, many of the ones you can find in books or on the internet have a use for a long piece of stem on them.
Place the gourds in some kind of container that you can either throw out or clean out easily. A cardboard box also works, you can just throw the box when your done with the gourds. Then wait, yep, wait for the gourds to mold and get black on the outside. The room or area they are sitting in should be dry and have some kind of circulation so the whole room does not get mold growing in it. Just the gourds mold.
They will grow mold and such so you want to have some place like a shed or garage to put them in were they are not on the ground. This is important for the gourds, if they are sitting on dirt or something else that remains wet they will rot instead of just getting moldy.
After the spring check the gourds, they will have mold all over them and will be black or dark brown in color. They may also have some white on them in spots, this can be normal. The gourds will be very light and hollow. It will also be hard, you can thump it with your finger and it should not be soft. If it is soft, leave it be for some more time. If you leave it for more than a whole year it probably will not get hard.
The best way to tell when a gourds is done is by shaking it, if you can hear the seeds inside rattle, it is dry. Take the gourds out and get ready to wash them. You will need a large tub, wash basin or sink. You can wash a couple at a time or several at once. The easiest way is to do a bunch at once and get it done with.
First add the gourds you are going to wash and some hot water to the tub, you will want to completely cover the gourds. Also add a squirt of dish soap and some bleach, just a capful. But you say, they float. Yes, they do float, you need to sink them with something on top of the tub. I used a rack from the oven in my downstairs sink with some weights on the top to get them underwater.
However you figure out how to do this, just get them to stay underwater for an hour or so. Then you can start washing them. A scrub brush and brass scrubber work best. The brass scrubber is the kind that is very rough and you can buy at the grocery store. It is made of brass and looks like a pot scrubber but is for rough scrubbing. It works very well on the mold and skin of the gourd.
The gourd has a thin skin on it that has to be scrubbed off in order to use it for your crafts and hobbies. The skin is easy to tell when you start to get it all off. The whole gourd will be a uniform brown or tan when the skin is off. The skin turns a whitish color when it gets wet. You can do some and if you have to stop for some reason don’t worry, you can let them dry and start over again.
Scrub gently and you will feel the gourd give in some spots. Just be extra careful in these spots. They are weak or rotten spots that you can use to your advantage later. If you break a gourd don’t worry, the chances are you can find a use for the pieces later also.
When you have all the black, white and odd colored stuff off, rinse the gourd well. I just leave them sitting on a towel in the basement to dry. If you are doing this outside you can just set them out in the sun to dry. It should not take them long to dry out, overnight would be the longest needed.
You can now decorate or cut them however you want, my wife does the rest of these types of projects, I am the one who does the grunt work. She has painted and sold some very cute penguins, and a couple of bowl type gourds. You can use a Dremel tool with a rotary cutting bit to cut the gourds however you like.
There are several web sites that have project ideas and hints and tips for different hobbies using gourds. Here are some good ones:
http://www.americangourdsociety.org/
http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/ah_hobbies_interests/article/0,1801,HGTV_3121_1374240,00.html
At the bottom of this page there are a bunch of other gourd sites:
http://www.twincreek.com/gourds/crafting.htm
You can do a lot of things to gourds, turn them into other shapes and such by cutting, use a rotary tool or small saw. The skin of the gourd is tough, almost like a thin wood and will cut just like it. You can make them into a bowl shape or a cup with a handle.
That is one use that the American Indians had for them, a scoop for water. They also used them for many useful things such as cups, bowls and holders for food and herbs. They would decorate their gourd utensils to make them not only useful but decorative.
You can paint them using a acrylic, enamel or almost any kind of artist or hobby paint. They can be spray painted or by using a brush. You can spray paint them for a nice even finish on the gourd. A couple of companies have a paint that looks like stone when you spray it on. This works well for gourds too. It looks unique and different on a gourd.
There are many things you can do with a gourd when you have them cleaned and washed. It only takes a little time and effort to clean them and they are an easy garden plant to grow. It is fun and easy to grow gourds and use them for your own crafts and hobbies.
