WHAT THE....? What exactly ARE you Drying?

To say I had a successful GroVid Growing Season would be an understatement! This month, as we approach our first HARD Frost, I am slowly putting the Growing Bags to bed for the winter. Mostly, that involves two things: cutting any remaining dead or green growth, and putting that into a Compost Pile, AND, emptying remaining soil into a SOIL pile.

I do take a little soil from the bags and mix it into the compost pile, to give me a little green brown mix. This upcoming spring I will have nutrient rich, very well aerated soil to begin my GroVid22 planting.

Part of all this emptying means harvesting the remaining vegetables. I have a LOT more onion, Green Chives, Red Beard Bunching Onion than I can use right away. A few weeks back, @shadowspub was doing her own Dehydrating of Vegetables, and she suggested perhaps I can extend my own harvests, by doing the same.

Above, I had a few of these bags of The Greens from the Red Beard Bunching Onion Note the Red Beard Bunching Onion. As well, as some Chives (more on that, lower down in the post.)

In addition to the bags of Green Onion, I have a basket of greens, too, Above. BELOW, I diced the green onion into about 1/2 inch pieces (1.5 cm).

Since the Dehydrating process does shrink your food, I placed a sheet of Parchment (Again, nice tip @shadowspub) in the Dehydrating Basket.

Into the Dehydrator, on 100ºF (37.8ºC) for 3 hours. About every 30 minutes (30 minutes Metric) I would shake up the basket to move the pieces around for better drying.

I started with three full trays of Chopped Green Onion, and ended with a large Wide Mouth 16 OZ Ball jar. (A little under 0.5 Kilo)

The jar Above RIGHT, is the Red Beard Bunching Onion, greens. Ignore the labels on top.

Dehydrating Chives

Wash and papertowel dry!

Dice the Chives into 1/4 inch (0.5 cm) bits
Then, into the dehydrator basket, again wiht Parchment, and run for 3 hours, at 100ºF (37.8ºC) Stir about every 30 minutes (still thirty minutes in metric!)

These ended up coming out to about 2/3 of an 8 ounce Regular Mouth Ball Jar (under .2 kilo) The spices should store nicely for about a year, once opened. We use chives on a lot of things and green onion goes into soups, sauces, and more. I suspect the jars will be empty LONG before they are no longer usable, in my house.