I don’t know a gardener, myself included, who does not sometimes find himself or herself with more fresh food ripe and ready to eat than can be used even after striving for an extended harvest. We want to honor the food I grow and the efforts by many beings to make it available to us by eating all of it. I’ve already written about storing some crops indoors during the winter in this post. However, many crops cannot be stored without some processing. In this post I’ll discuss one of those methods, dehydration or drying, that we use to process some of the food we grow for storage and why and how we use a solar food dryer for this purpose.
I’ve arranged the post into sections. If you’ve not heard of preservation by dehydration before and want to know what it is and why and how to do it, read the whole post. If you know what dehydration is but wonder why anyone would use the sun as a dehydrator rather than buy one of the electrical appliances sold for the purpose, start at Solar Powered Food Dehydration. If you want to skip directly to the design we used and the modifications we made to it, start at Our Solar Food Dryer. And if you just want to know what foods we’ve dried and how we use them, skip to Foods We Dry.
