Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.
This is just a brief followup to Post #G21-049, where I decided to make a simple solar food dehydrator out of a plastic tote. My goal was to turn the last few batches of tomatoes into sun-dried tomatoes without using electricity. Continue reading Post #G21-050: Simple solar dehydrator, quantifying failure.
Edit 4/19/2022: As shown, this simple solar food dryer is under-powered and under-ventilated. It clearly will dry tomatoes, just not fast enough in my climate to suit my needs. I’m going to put together a modified-and-improved version of this for the 2022 garden year, and I’ll link to that when I have that finished.
Edit 4/28/2022: See Post G22-015. If you go with this, replace the “chimney” with a two-watt (or so) computer fan. And in the end, while this nice clean plastic tote is convenient, the throughput is too small. When all the dust has settled, my decision is to cobble up a much larger, fan-vented version of this once the tomatoes start ripening later this year.
The concept is fine. (How could it not be, it’s a big clear box with ventilation). It’s just too small and under-powered, so the throughput is low. Realistically, contrary to the pretty pictures here, it’ll only dry one layer deep. And you’ll need three (or so) good drying days in a row to get your (e.g.) tomatoes to leathery-short-of-crisp. If you want to dry a couple of Nesco-trays worth of tomatoes, per week, this should work fine. I’ve already moved on to a bigger “indirect” solar dryer (Post #1858).
This started out to be a little treatise on solar dehydrators, ovens, and kilns. And I may yet write that.
But my goal, right now, is to make a small solar food dehydrator that will work with four 13.5″ diameter trays from my Nesco electric food dryer. That’s “a batch of tomatoes” for me. The upside of using those trays is that I can always finish off the drying using the electric food dehydrator. It is, in effect, hybrid solar-electric food drying. Continue reading Post #G21-049: Simplest solar food dehydrator, works with Nesco dehydrator trays.
It’s been a good year for growing tomatoes in my garden. The best year I’ve ever had, which isn’t saying much.
This has meant spending a fair bit of time preserving tomatoes. And while I like to grow them and eat them fresh, I’m not all that fond of preserving them. Continue reading Post #G21-048: Going full West Virginia
This post is about the ongoing shorting of lids for home canning in the U.S. The only value-added here is that I’ve been tracking this for a while, so I can give some perspective on how things are evolving.
Briefly, U.S.-made disposable lids are much harder to find now than they were when I posted on this back in May. In my area, I found one retailer (Tractor Supply) that would ship them to store for pickup. On-line, they are still available from Amazon, but almost nowhere else. On-line prices appear unchanged to up slightly.
By contrast, there is no on-line shortage of foreign- (i.e., Chinese-) made lids. Prices appear to be falling, with some Amazon offers now in the $0.15-$0.22 per lid range, for lids in bulk. That’s down from about $0.30 when I checked back in May 2021.
U.S.-made re-usable lids (Tattler, Harvest Guard) are unchanged in price, but only the more expensive ones (Tattler, about $1 per lid) are freely available. The less-expensive Harvest Guard lids appear to be back-ordered by about a month. Continue reading Post #G21-047: Canning lid shortage revisited mid-August 2021
In this post, I estimate the carbon footprint of my home-made spaghetti sauce.
You’ll hear people casually assert that home-canned food is good for the environment. The idea is that it avoids (among other things) the fossil-fuel use associated with transporting food.
But as an economist, I guess it’s my lot in life to point out that nothing is free. Home canning uses a significant amount of fossil fuels. Home-canning of foods with relative low energy content leads to a significant amount of fossil fuel consumed per edible calorie preserved (see Post #G22). It can also generate a non-neglible carbon footprint, owing to the fossil fuels used.
Each quart of sauce I make generates a bit over two pounds of C02 emissions. But that is heavily dependent on a couple of things. Continue reading Post #G21-046: The carbon footprint of home-made tomato sauce
I pulled up my summer squash plants yesterday morning. These plants held up well and produced a reasonable yield, but their time had come. And so I called an end to summer squash season.
The members of my family took the bad news remarkably well. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think they were tired of eating summer squash. Continue reading Post #G21-045: Embracing my inner rutabaga.
Source: U Wisconsin Vegetable Entomology.
As was the case last year, the squash vine borer season has been slowly tapering off. My last sighting of a squash vine borer was a lone female about six days ago, or circa 7/23/2021.
I’m calling that the end of the season, unless I see another one. Continue reading Post #G21-044: Stealth mildew and a farewell to squash
If you use rain barrels to water your garden, you will eventually realize that you don’t have enough of them.
This post tells you that you never will. But that’s OK. Most of the benefit you will get from using rain barrels, you will get with the first few you install.
This post isn’t nearly as folksy as the introduction implies. To write this, I first created as reasonably sophisticated model of rain barrels and gardens using four decades of daily weather data for Sterling, VA. While the results of that model really only apply to my local climate, I think the more general lessons about rain barrels apply broadly to well-watered temperate climates such as the climate of Virginia.
Continue reading Post #G21-043: A model of a rain barrel system based on historical weather data
Just a few things I wanted to document as of 7/15/2021. Continue reading Post #G21-042: Marking time in the garden
I seem to have solved my problem of having no male squash blossoms (Post #G21-040). I’m going to write that up because, as far as I can tell, there’s no useful advice on internet on how to deal with the problem.
By way of background, I’m pretty sure that my mature male squash flower buds are being eaten by birds. Mostly they are being eaten whole, leaving just the stalk, but sometimes I find one that’s just had a large, clean bite taken out of it.
Regardless of the true culprit, putting physical protection around the immature blossoms has protected them so far, from whatever-it-is that was eating them. The ones that I’ve caged/bagged are surviving. Those left to fend for themselves continue to be decapitated or torn to bits. Continue reading Post #G21-041, Lack of male squash blossoms solved, squash vine borer gone?
