Suddenly, I have more tomatoes than I know what do to with. I knew this would happen, as I planted about 15 seedlings, but I haven’t had time to prepare. I’ve been wanting to buy or build a food dehydrator for some time, but simply haven’t had the time to do so yet. Someone recently suggested using the back of my car, since it gets lots of sun and gets hot on a sunny day. So, I washed an old window screen, elevated it on bricks over some newspapers and started laying out sliced tomatoes to dry. We’ll see how well it works. I think this is a great way to get sun-dried tomatoes for later use, if all goes according to plan. And it has lots of room for more tomatoes as they ripen!
September 8, 2010
My mobile food dehydrator
Posted by ramblinrobert under Food preservation, My garden, my life | Tags: food dehydrator; drying tomatoes, food preservation, Subaru Forester |[3] Comments
Urban Agroecology 
September 26, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Love it! How did it work? We can’t grow tomatoes – too cold and not enough sun in our part of SF. I even tried suspending one plant (growing out of the bottom of a bucket) to try to raise it to a height where it might get a few minutes more sun than the rest of the yard (which gets shady quickly). Nothing.
September 27, 2010 at 10:43 am
It worked OK, but not great. I ended up with lots of dried gunk stuck to the screen. Now that my tomato crop is coming in, I’m swamped with tomatoes. So, I’m currently experimenting with an electric dehydrator borrowed from a neighbor. So far, it seems to be working much better than my ad hoc method. (Someone did tell me that when she uses her car as a food dehydrator, she uses plates instead of a screen and it works fine for her.) Sorry your weather isn’t good for tomatoes. Maybe we can work a swap. 😉
September 27, 2010 at 10:48 am
Sounds good! I’ll send you petri dishes of aphid poo and various lovely shades of moss and molds, and you send me bags of tomatoes!