August 4th, 2008 - Garden harvest
Last weekend, I harvested the onions. I’m not sure how many I have this year. I didn’t buy a bag of 100, and never counted them! I planted about 15-20 as green onions (some of which are still growing!). I’m figuring around 80; maybe I should count them now.
Yesterday, we harvested the garlic. Eric loosened the row with the pitchfork–thank goodness he did it. It’s been very dry (despite watering Saturday morning) and the dirt mainly came up in huge chunks. (And then it poured last night. And thundered and lighteninged for hours in the middle of the night.) I again have way too much garlic. Two years ago, I tossed some very old garlic “seeds” (the bits that come from the flower at the top, they aren’t really seeds but will grow garlic) at the end of the garlic row. (They came from Gramma Paulukonis, who died in 1995. So they were over 10 years old.) Last year, they grew a little bit, forming one small clove each. I didn’t do anything at the end of the summer, and they continued to grow this year. They are still fairly small, but had multiple small cloves. I can’t believe something that old still grew!
I will dry it for a week or so (in the garage) and then bring some of them in to work to give away. I ended up throwing out probably half of last year’s garlic when it wasted away this spring. I will also try drying some to make garlic powder. We don’t actually use much garlic powder, but it will be interesting to try.
I dried some shallots and onions this weekend. Put the dehydrator in the back of the garage due to the smell. We left the car in the driveway, too! The first day it was pretty strong, but the second day was barely noticeable. I’m guessing the garlic will be worse, as the shallots aren’t terribly strong-smelling. These were all from the farmer. I’ve been using shallots in my dressing/dip, but it takes me a while to use the dip up so I got backed up quite a few shallots. I chopped them up for drying. Dried, they made up less than 1 cup! The onions came Saturday. I knew I wouldn’t use them any time soon, plus if drying didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be bothered if I lost a few I hadn’t planned on anyway. It was suggested to try them sliced, but I don’t think it worked too well. They took a lot longer to dry than the chopped ones. And the only thing I use sliced onions for is onion soup (which admittedly, I’ve made just once, this past winter. But we liked it and plan to make it again.) So I may as well chop them next time–we throw dried onion from the store into things all the time anyway. In fact, I use it more often than fresh onions because we usually use so little onion at one time it’s easier. I should probably dry a lot more onions. I put the thermostat all the way down to 95 (if I have the time, dehydrating is healthier if you don’t attempt to cook the foods with heat!) and it took maybe 20 hours total. I had only two sheets of each kind (the chopped ones on solid sheets). I think I took the chopped ones out after 15 or so hours. The slices might have done well with more time; I figure I’ll toss them back in when I do the next batch.
I also chopped and froze green onions. This will probably work quite well…except that my freezer smells oniony. :( I don’t’ know if it’s just from the freezing time (I put them on a cookie sheet) or the bagged ones as well. I’ll have to check in a couple days and either double-bag the onions and/or put some baking soda in there.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:43 am EDT
[…] And in the main garage, here’s a shot of the drying rack for the onions and garlic. It’s an old screen from our front porch when it had cool old windows (that didn’t work well and were covered with lead paint). […]