Gourd Cleaning

Dry Gourds / Green Gourds

Cleaning gourds is normally done after they have dried, but can also be done before they dry. Cleaning a dry gourd is a simple process. Wear your repirator, cover your dry gourd with a wet towel to prevent the release of mold spores, wet the entire surface by sqeezing in on it, not rubbing it. Once the entire surface of mold growth is thuroughly drenched, the wipe the mold off the surface with a 10% bleach solution.

Take the gourd into your cleaning bucket or sink, and soak it in warm water for about a half hour or so, (mild detergent is optional). It helps to cover the gourd with a wet towel while it soaks, this helps to keep the entire surface damp.

Once the gourd has soaked, it can be cleaned by scrubbing the skin off with a copper Choreboy or something similar. We do not recommend steel wool as it can turn the surface brown from the tiny particles of steel rusting.

Another method is to set them out in the yard and cover them with straw or hay, drench them thuroughly with a hose, and let them remain wet for about 2 to 3 days. The skin in many cases if they remain properly wet, will mostly slide right off the gourd.

Green Cleaning A Gourd

Scraping Gourds

You can clean smaller gourds by scraping the skin off using the backside of a table knife. The process of green cleaning gourds has the benefit of the gourds drying out much faster and the dry gourd has a whiter and mostly blemish free surface. This is a very desirable effect for pyrography and pen or pencil art, and also helps with staing art since the skin is whiter which boosts the colors and yields a greater contrast.

Small gourds like jewelry gourds and small bottle gourds typically under 4-5 inches in height are the most suitable for green cleaning. Larger gourds will wrinkle and crack if they are green cleaned. We don’t know exactly why this is, or if a thickness of 1/2 inch or more might allow for successful green cleaning, but our experience is, larger gourds do not green clean successfully. The largest gourd we have green cleaned is a Hyakunari bottle gourd about 10-11 inches in height, and weighing in around 8 pounds fresh. Larger gourds can be rot cleaned as talked about in our Gourd Reoprt Vol 1.

The Gourd report is purely experimental, if you try using some of the proceedures like oven drying and boiling, do not use gourds that are extremely important to you or gourds you don’t have plenty of, as there is a good chance your gourd will be ruined. 🙁

Dan Dunkin – The Gourd Reserve

Gourd Drying

Dry Gourds / Green Gourds

There are many methods of drying gourds, the natural method allows the gourd to dry out naturally. This can be done indoors or out, however some precautions should be observed.

Mold grows as gourds dry, therefore gourds should not be dried or left to dry in a garage or any room attached to a house or right up against the house. Mold consumes bio material, including wood and other things homes are made of. Dry your gourds away from the house, and if you wish to keep them mold free, wipe them every 2-3 days with a 10% bleach solution or 5% white vinegar, (5% is commonly sold already dilute, if the label says 5% use it straight)

Dry gourds off the ground. If you leave them setting directly on the ground they become prey to insects which will eat holes in them, including termites, (we’ve actually found a termite colony in the spring living inside a gourd), and mice and rats will also chew holes in your gourds and eat the seeds within.

Gourds left out in the winter to dry for some reason seem to dry more quickly, however extreme cold can kill the seeds inside the gourd, so if you wish to preserve your seeds, you should select one or two gourds for seeds, keep them in the garage or someplace protected from the extreme cold, and wipe them down every other day to prevent mold growth.

If you dry your gourds naturally and they have mold on them, please handle them with care and wear a respirator. Before you touch or move them, you should cover them with a drenched towel or cloth, and bring the cloth or towel into contact with the entire surface of the gourd to wet down the mold to prevent spores from releasing into the air by weighing them down with water. Wipe off as much mold as possible and transport them direclty to the cleaning process.

Drying a Green Gourd

This is the same process discussed in Gourd Cleaning and also in The Gourd Report

Some gourds the drying process can be rapidly accelerated by scraping the skin off with the back side of a table knife. Do not attempt this on a Large gourd as the gourd moisture will leave the gourd faster than the gourd can harden, the end result wil be puckers and cracks in your beautiful gourd.

Certain shapes of gourds do not fare well with the green cleaning process either. Gourds with long straight edges, like snake gourds, dipper handles etc. We have succesfully cleaned some types of dipper gourds while they were green, and we have even boiled small dippers that were green, and had them ready to craft within 24 hours, see The Gourd Report Vol 1. Just be aware that you may lose a gourd doing this.

one way to help prevent loss of a gourd in dry cleaning, is to let the gourd sit for a few weeks. If you have several gourds of the same type that are sitting in the same area, watch them. Within 2-4 weeks you may begin to see some browning around the stem or other narrow areas of the gourd. These gourds are normally too thin, this is why they are drying first and an attempt to dry clean these gourds will most likely be desasterous, unless they are very small gourds like Sennari’s. The gourds that remain completely green the longest are normally the thickest or strongest shelled gourds, and these will have a greater chance of success than the others.

Dan Dunkin

Cleaning Gourds

The Rotting Method Revised

The following method of cleaing a gourd is the rotting method from The Gourd Report #1, updated through more experimentation by one of our fellow gourding friends:

Hi Dan,

Read your articles on drying/curing gourds and greatly appreciate all the info. I just tried your rotting method and made a few changes. Thought you might be interested in the results. Used this on apple gourds averaging around 6 lbs. I cut a hole in the top around 2 to 3 inches diameter. Put them in a 5 gal bucket of water after removing what pulp and seeds I could. Apples are extremely dense so not very much pulp can be removed. Left it sit in the sun for 2 or 3 days and then removed softened (and slimy) pulp and put back in water. Sit in the sun for another 2 or 3 days and then removed softened pulp again. Put back in the water. I kept this up for 2 weeks and by that time all the pulp was gone, the gourd had very little bad odor and the skin came off with little effort. I sat the gourd in a south facing window and in a few days was completely dry and odor free. I have three buckets with gourds rotting now but had to move them into the house because the water gets too cold at night and slows down the rotting process. Surprisingly enough, very little odor comes off them even though they are uncovered. After drying, the lids still fit the gourds and can be used.

Thanks again for all the information you make available and hope this is some use to you. I number each one of my gourds when I harvest them and then keep records of different processes I use in drying/curing. A lot of work but a lot of enjoyment.

Gene – printed by permission

If you have a tip or trick that you use on gourds, please send them to us, we are building a tips page. If you have a tutorial, send that to us along with a link to your website. This will gain you more links to your website, and you will get to share your idea’s with lots of other gourd crafters.