Weekend Edition: How To Make Garden Produce Last Longer

and Calendula tea and oil recipes plus their benefits

To Dehydrate or Not to Dehydrate. Is that even a question?

A few weeks ago we bought a dehydrator because we figured that with the fruit maturing, dehydrating was the only way we could take advantage of most of our fruit. There is no way we’d be able to eat it all–even giving a lot of it away to friends. There are a lot of fruit trees on this property. And who doesn’t want easy and healthy snacks that can last throughout the winter, well after the trees have gone dormant for the year?

Since we bought it, my husband and I have started experimenting dehydrating lots of different goodies, most of which come from the garden but my hubby especially has tried other fun experiments, too. 

We dehydrated hundreds of golden ground cherries (make lovely little golden tart raisins that are great in salads). We’ve tried dehydrating them a couple different ways: cutting them in half and putting them in whole. It’s way easier and faster to just put them in whole, but I’ll admit that I think I appreciate the flavor of them more cut in half. I suppose the future will show us which is more important: quick and easy handling, or yummier flavor. 

We’ve dehydrated apples that weren’t quite ripe enough to eat, but turned out pretty yummy after dehydrating them. We’ve had a lot of apples fall off the trees that weren’t quite ripe yet but we thought we’d see if we could use them anyway. My husband thinly sliced the apples and it only took a few hours to dehydrate them. We’ll have to do more again soon, because we’ve been happily snacking on them over the last week or so and they’re pretty much gone now.

My hubby made jerky. A Brit making jerky for his American wife in Spain. It really is love. But seriously, he did a great job! He made Bourbon Jerky. And while yes there could be some tweaking to the recipe in renditions to come, it’s delicious. The jerky and the dehydrated apples are great to take when we go hiking for that extra energy boost, and it’s fun to pull it out to share with others on the hike.

I’ve also dried several batches of Calendula flowers in the dehydrator. Calendula plants are prolific with their flowers and I had sowed quite a few seeds in the early Spring, so we have several plants out in our small vegetable garden this year. 

Calendula is more than just a happy flower

Calendula, also known as pot marigold or poet’s marigold, is a vibrant orange or yellow flower with a long history of medicinal use–not that I fully realized this when I planted them. I had seen calendula tea in a health foods section at the supermarket awhile back and thought it was interesting but didn’t look into it. Then when I realized how prolific my plants were, I started wondering about making tea with them. That’s when I discovered how cool the flowers are and the possible benefits they provide.