My new dehydrator arrived a couple of days ago. I know to a lot of people that doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing in the world but for me? It’s pretty darned exciting. I need a way to preserve all of the delicious things we’re growing this year in our victory garden!

Well, hopefully it will be victorious. I better not get too cocky, right? 😏

Anyway, the dehydrator I’ve been using up until now is okay and does a fair job, but it doesn’t have a precise thermometer or a timer and it’s rather small so I wanted something bigger and with more features.

I did a lot of comparison shopping and opted for the Magic Mill because it was reasonably priced and holds a lot more than my old one. It also lets you set the time and exact temperature, which is really helpful. It has been running pretty much non-stop since I pulled it out of the box and I absolutely love it.

Today I have strawberries, bananas and apples in there. I was able to fit six bananas, two pounds of strawberries and two large Fuji apples and still had two racks empty!

It does such a great job and the house smells incredible, as you can imagine. This particular model came with nine wire racks, a silicone mat (for smaller pieces) and a solid tray for doing fruit roll ups and I ordered extra silicone mats for it so I have six total.

So far I’ve done onions, bell peppers, broccoli and carrots in it and they all came out perfect. Today is my first try at fruit with it, so we’ll see how that goes.

My wheat berries also came today so I got to play with my new grain mill.

I have zero experience grinding my own grains to make flour and I learned immediately that there are muscles in my arm that I have seriously been neglecting! 😄

Now I could have opted for an electric grain mill but I wanted a manual one *just in case* and I actually don’t mind the extra labor; it’s a great workout and I feel pretty good knowing it’s there. Just in case.

I don’t think I’ll be grinding my own flour regularly enough to need an electric one since I do just fine on good ole’ store bought flour (thank goodness) but if that changes and my immune system decides to make store bought stuff an enemy, then I may reconsider.

Either way, I’ll be stocking up on more wheat berries in the near future.

I think there is a learning curve to making them into flour, though, because even though I tightened it down as hard as I could the consistency came out more like cream of wheat…

I’ll probably need to run it back through the mill a couple more times and if that doesn’t work, there’s always my handy, dandy VitaMix blender which will surely pulverize it into a powder.

All that will have to wait though because between you and me, my arm hurts a bit now! 😆