Drying Gourds!

It was super fun to harvest all these fun gourds last fall.  I just bought a random assortment of gourd seeds and planted them and didn't really know what would come up.  These little guys were my favorite!  We got some bigger gourds too, but these little ones were so cute.

We picked so many of them.  The kids were amazed when they kept finding more and more as they picked them.  

We gave cute little baskets full of them to neighbors, teachers and friends.  After some had sat on our own Thanksgiving table, we decided to dry out the ones we had left. Then it took an entire year to dry them!  I put them in the basement on some newspaper (so they wouldn't get the carpet yucky if they did get soft and squishy) and then every month or so, I would wipe them off with a rag dipped in a solution of water (a few cups) and bleach (a teaspoon)...not because I knew how to do this, but this is what google told me might work.  This would remove some of the dark spots or any mold that was forming.  Some of them got soft regardless and I had never done this before so I probably wasn't doing something right.  I just threw those ones out.  But others stayed hard on the outside and just dried out. Maybe it had to do with some of them not being as ready to be picked when we harvested them all at the same time.  Anyhow, a full year later, this is how they looked:

And I couldn't wait to spray paint them so this is what they look like now!  Why is spray paint so darn fun?  I think that if you dry these out completely and cover them with varnish or spray paint, they will last for a long, long time....next year these same ones may even be a new color!