Plum Crazy

We have been picking plums as fast as we can. Neighbors, friends, relatives and even a passerby or two have had containers thrust at them in an effort to feed humans rather than raccoons.

Aside from the canning, the dehydrator is going non-stop these days. All those neighbors, friends, relatives and passersby my be getting plums in the form of emergency fruit packets well into the winter time.

I have been gifted a new-to-me dehydrator. As many of you may recall, my trusty dehydrator went belly up last summer. Being in the middle of the pandemic/food storage rush from all the newbies growing gardens for the first time, there was not a new one that could be found of the same type that I had. Mike, by sheer chance, happened to find the last one available in the county. It was similar to what I had but no way to control the temperature settings, either it was on or it was off.

Many of the herbs, delicate fruits and mushrooms that I dehydrate need a milder setting. I turned many a tray of produce into blackened bits before I gave up on the new dehydrator for most of the drying.

Then I was gifted one. It is an Excalibur brand, known for quality and more expensive than what I ever planned to use for my little projects. It has a lot of heat settings from culturing/raising bread doughs to jerky and I can set the temp to whatever I desire.

This unit has seen better days and the cabinet had been dropped or bumped so the outside doesn’t look showroom perfect but has large, square trays fit a massive amount of produce and the drying is uniform throughout the whole process.

I would be plum crazy not to go wild over the bounty that is coming off the fruit trees.