It’s early spring and I’m going through our onions and potatoes, checking for soft veggies. Luckily, I’ve only found a dozen onions softening up. The Dakota Pearl potatoes are just barely getting sprouts and are still as hard as rocks. So far, we’ve had hard, juicy potatoes all the way till fall when we dig our new crop. Now THAT’S a storage potato. We simply love them.

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I’m going to start dehydrating onions soon. They are pretty much all hard and fine — no sprouts. But I know they will not last too much longer and dehydrated onions and onion powder are SO handy in the kitchen. We’ve got four big crates of onions left so I’ll get to dehydrate a lot of them. I’m happy about that!

Will continues to work on the barn as the sun’s out today although it’s a little cold. He has also been reading up on operating the John Deere corn planter he rebuilt. He has an owner’s manual that assumes you know how to use a corn planter — it’s very vague in places!

I’m planting tomatoes this afternoon as soon as I get done running seed orders to the post office. We pride ourselves in getting them in the mail the next day after receiving the order, except weekends as we have no post office open on Saturday.

We recently found out that one of our battery chargers in the basement was not working. (We wondered why our batteries would go dead enough to trip the inverter overnight after a sunny, windy day and running the generator for a couple of hours!) Now we know. — Jackie

7 COMMENTS

  1. Cindy Hills,

    You can buy Dakota Pearl potatoes where I get ours, at Homestead Mills, in Cook, MN. Their e-mail is aho@homesteadmills.com. I just talked to the owner and Keith said he’d be happy to mail them to you. So just e-mail him and he can figure out shipping. The price is very reasonable!!

  2. Betsy,

    We have never had any sort of bugs in our onions or potatoes. The potatoes are always covered, mostly to keep out light. We don’t have any mice in the house because our wonderful cat, Mittens, is a GREAT hunter. Usually rodents won’t chew through the plastic totes but they could. If this is a problem, you can use large hard-sided coolers or metal containers with lids. You have to watch humidity, especially with potatoes in containers. Sometimes I have to lift the lid a bit in the early winter as beads of moisture from condensation form on the under side of the lid. Just cracking the lid for a couple of days stops that.

  4. Jackie,
    those are beautiful onion and potatoes. I love reading all your post and seeing the pictures of yours and Will’s homestead.

    Tracy

  6. Hello, Snowy spring greetings!! It looks like I’m going to have to learn something new. I now have a dehydrator but have no idea of how to use it. How do I dehydrate onions? The dehydrated onion and onion powder sounds very good and useful!

    I too am busy starting seeds and starting spring cleaning. We just had a huge dumping of snow so what better excuse to use to clean!!

    Have a Happy Easter!!

  7. Jackie,
    How do you keep critters-mice, bugs, etc out of your onions, potatoes and other items you store? We have a walk in crawl space and would love to store items, but I’m concerned about rodents and humidity. I’m in northeast Alabama so we have heat and high humidity. Thanks for your help.
    Betsy
    Scottsboro, Alabama

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