As you might have read, I got a dehydrator at a garage sale for a mere $2.00.   I was so thrilled!  I’ve been wanting to give dehydration a try for storing foods.  Most decent units are at least $50, so this $2 find was a delight.  I love being to give things a try without breaking the bank.

Well, I did a couple trays worth of apples and they were pretty good.  A little different, but we liked them.  Unfortunately, if you sliced them pretty thin, thin enough to dry well, it meant you could only get about three apples in all the trays!  And it would take nearly a day to really dry them out well.  A lot of effort for just three little apples.

So I decided to give other things a try.  Like bananas, strawberries and pineapple.

To be honest, the pineapple was about the only good thing and we used canned pineapple.  The bananas and strawberries stuck so badly to the trays, it was very tedious to get them all off.  The dried fruit bits seemed to loose their flavor and were just kind of dull and dried out.  I know that they were dehydrator, but I somehow hoped they would be, well, interesting.  And then everyone kept saying, oh, they will be so good when you rehydrate them.

Rehydrate them?  So like I’m spending all this time dehydrating and then to make them enjoyable, I have to rehydrate them.  Oh, okay.  Yeah I suppose in the time of zombies, or as a last ditch food supply, these would be good.  But you would have had to have your unit running for months and months before! Ah, no thanks. 

I think I will stick to my old fashioned canning and freezing.  And then, just eating seasonally.  It was interesting, but I thought it was really tedious to cut them all up and wait and wait.  And then, I thought it was hard to make sure they wouldn’t mold if there was any moisture left.  I just wasn’t sure about it.

So, in the end, we decided that dehydration for preservation was just not our thing.  I put a little contest up on the Facebook page and sent the little unit off to a super nice reader lady, SteffiB, and she was just soooo thrilled to have won it.  I sure hope that she has a good time with it!

And I’m not sad or anything.  You know, homesteading, at least modern homesteading, is finding out what works best for you and yours.  You don’t have to do everything or get a lowered score in the competition phase.  If you do half a dozen things and they work for you, that is great!  So far, we’ve found that rabbits, bees, milk goats and dehydration are just not our strong suits.  And that is perfectly fine.  Why make yourself crazy?  You can always trade and barter for those things that are you are not good or comfortable at!  We do all the time.   It works out great!  Focus on your strengths and the things you enjoy!