Its that time of year again! The gardens starting to produce and I’m dehydrating and canning for the winter. Dehydrating zucchini is so easy to do and saves a lot of freezer space!
Wash and slice your zucchini into 1/4 inch slices, or shred. Place on your dehydrator rack and dehydrate at 115F until done. Mine took about 24 hours in the high humidity weather we have been having.
There has been lots of dehydrating in my kitchen lately! Since I received my Excalibur Dehydrator
These are peppers and mixed vegetables before and after dehydrating.
Recently a dear friend asked me if I would like a dehydrator she was no longer using. I was just so excited! I’ve been 
canning for over 15 years and I would never give that up. However dehydrating has many benefits. It saves a LOT of space and properly stored many items can last up to 30 years. Standard guidelines on canned goods are 1 year, although myself and many canners have used them well past that and they were just fine.
My main interest in dehydrating is time savings, space savings and long term storage.
This is the dehydrator I have except that mine has 4 trays. I love it, enough that I will be getting a larger Excalibur
one ASAP.
Below is what I’ve been dehydrating in the past week. The bag of corn was a 1kg (2.2 lb) frozen bag, it now fits in just 1 medium zip lock bag! Each bag of peppers had taken up 4 medium zip lock bags before dehydrating. We bought lots on a case sale last summer, diced and froze them. The bottom right are blueberries. Last week a local store had 600 g tubs of frozen wild organic blueberry’s on sale. Now these will be easy to add to yogurt or baked goodies! On the bottom left are banana chips, or what is left at them. lol The kids just love them!
I decided to join Crystal at Money Saving Mom and FishMomma at Life as Mom in the freezer cooking day. Although in my case I’m spreading it out over a few days. I find with many young little ones it’s much easier to spread the work out this way.
I actually started a few days ago and a little differently from many people. I’m partly emptying my freezers! Yes I’m working at taking many of the vegetables and fruits out and dehydrating them. This will save us a lot of freezer space and keep them in good condition longer then freezing.
Below is my plan although it may change depending on the sales this week.
My OAMC list for the next few days:
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