Onions, Onions Everywhere!

At right is the first rush of the bunching onion harvest, prepped for drying in my wonderful (but quite ugly) solar food dryer! These are just the whites – grown from seed – that have been seriously overrun by volunteer grape tomatoes. I decided to let the volunteers grow because the celeriac I’d put where they are all got washed away by torrential rains all spring. Unlike my Abe Lincolns up top, these actually are turning red about a month late. Rain and cool weather all the way through July has kept the Lincolns green-green for way too long, don’t know if they’ll ever ripen.

Seems that’s the story up and down the Eastern Seaboard this year. Cooler than normal, and wet enough to make swamps. I hear New Jersey and other states are having tomato issues, as are all my neighbors, so I’m not alone. Potatoes are taking a big hit as well, rotting in the wet ground or turning black with blight. Both crops may be total commercial losses this year, which means it’s even MORE important that mine come in and get preserved. That’s where my food dryer comes in!

I have so looked forward to not having to buy lids, boil jars, hard-prep and then water-bath this year. We don’t have AC in the cabin, since there’s no point for the perhaps 3 whole weeks of summer when it’s so hot we have to go sit under a tree instead of stay in the house, but it does get sticky and uncomfortable in the extreme when canning, even though I’ve learned to do the water-bath out on the gas grill.

The not pretty but quite serviceable dryer is something I’m more proud of due to NOT having cut off any digits or limbs with power tools than the fact that it works. So far I’ve been drying apples as they fall (Granny Smith and Macintosh) from what were supposed to be 10-foot tall single-limb “columnars” that got planted too deep and are now 20 feet tall and multi-limbed. Can’t get at the fruit with the ladder because most is too high, so must wait until they fall. They’re right outside the front porch, so I check a couple of times a day. Promptly cut off the bruised part from falling, core, peel and slice, dip in lemon juice (helps preserve color) and dry. Takes a day of full sun, or two of intermittent. Which is the story of the summer, and just my luck since I made a solar dryer. It just HAD to be a cool, wet, cloudy year. So far I’ve three quarts of dried apples and one of peels, which I’m going to powder and make applesauce, then dry into leathers strips.

So between apple batches (still waiting for ‘maters and pears, eggplant, leeks, peppers and pumpkins), I can dry the onions. The colander you see in the pic is full of cut greens. The very best thing about drying instead of canning is that nothing much goes to waste. I’ll cut and dry all the good onion greens crisp, jar them for now, then when I’m putting together powder mixtures for, say, veggie bullion or instant V-8 or potato soup or making salts and/or salt-free mixtures, I’ll blender-ize them into powder. Rather than just tossing them into the compost as usual, where they either rot or get eaten by da bear.

Greens shouldn’t take more than a day to dry, I’ll know by this evening because this is one of our rare full-sun days. If they aren’t quite dry by sundown, I’ll retrieve them and finish in the oven at 150º, which I’ve found works quite well. Dried food needs to be fully dried hard to store, as moisture will cause mold and rot. Half-dry stuff needs to go into freezer bags and frozen. The dry-dry will keep for years!

Figure I’ll half the grape tomatoes and dry those too, sort of tomato-raisins that can be added to all sorts of stuff, including a sourdough veggie-loaf I’m planning. The herbs (basil, rosemary, sage, oregano, tarragon, parsley, etc.) are doing great this year, so I’ll have plenty to add. Will let you know how that turns out! Harvested the bulb onions a couple of weeks ago, put some into storage and will slice the rest to dry and crumble into “instant onions” to add to soups and stews during the winter.

Figure after tomatoes (or during) I’ll dry sliced ‘taters too. Make scallop mixture and bottle that all up too. Have taken to saving coffee tins as well as miscellaneous jars and lids, since dry food only needs an airtight container stored in a dark cabinet, so those will hold a lot.

The very best thing about my summer project – the solar dryer – is that I’ll be able to put up most of the food grown, use almost all of it, and have a lot of good organic food on hand all winter. So much usually goes to waste! Now I’m planning a drying rack to be suspended above the wood stove, since judging by weather so far this year it’ll be getting cold enough for a fire by late September, the solar dryer’s not that big, and I’ve fall crops that should also be dried.

Stay tuned for developments on that end, and Happy Harvest!

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