celery | organised castle

I don’t use my dehydrator as much as I could but after my recent success of drying onion and making onion powder I decided to experiment a little further.

The labels on the commercial stock powder in the pantry reveal that the two main vegetable ingredients are onion and celery so I am planning to have a go at making my own stock powder. There is celery growing in the garden in abundance so I decided to try drying some.

Here are the four trays filled with the stalks and leaves ready for drying.

And the final result…………

Here is a tiny Vegemite jar which is about 3/4 filled with 37g (a little over 1 ounce) of powdered dried celery. This is the yield from a full (albeit small) bunch of celery from our garden. Along with some of the onion powder, this is the beginning of my home-made stock powder.

The space-saving advantages of dehydrating are amazing. I am sure some things lend themselves to this process better than others and I am keen to discover other ways I can use the dehydrator. One of the next things on my list is ginger.

Do you have a dehydrator? What have you dried in it?

In my post from yesterday I mentioned the new garden hose. GMan unpacked and set it up today. Here it is.

The hose retracts onto the reel inside the case which swivels on the black spindle. Here is another view with the hose slightly extended.

The 30 metre hose extends from the existing tap to the vegetable garden area. We do need more hose to reach the blueberries and the yet-to-be-built beds on the far side. We put some of the new fittings onto one of the old hoses and hung it inside the garden area. That way we can extend the new hose, attach the extra bit and we can water the whole of the vegetable garden area with ease.

GMan put this bracket on one of the posts to store the extra hose. The bracket was one that had come from my father and proved to be perfect for our needs.

I have really neglected the garden for several weeks but nevertheless we still have things growing. I weeded the flower garden that I made a few months ago and found that I even had some flowers.

These heartsease had managed to grow from seed and thrive among the weeds. I have weeded the bed and transplanted some so that there is now a border of them in front of the sweet peas.

Finally, I wanted to show you the garlic that I have growing and also the celery which is now ensconced in cut-down milk bottles to encourage the stems to grow upright in a bunch rather than spreading out everywhere.