Dehydrating Celery

Dehydrating celery has been quite simple :) We had about 30+ heads of celery come from the garden this year and I cut them all down and it has been a several day slow process to get them ready for drying. I gave away quite a few heads of celery and canned up some into a vegetable mix, I also froze 2 gallons of cut pieces...but then the rest was saved for dehydrating! I sure wish I would have taken better pictures of the process, but I didn't.
This could easily be done in a day, but I'm starting to spread out my projects and not have high expectations for finishing them super fast!
Harvest, Clean and Cut your celery (into 1/2" pieces). Soak in water and baking soda for about 10 minutes or so (to preserve the color), I used a large travel cooler to wash and soak all of our celery pieces. Drain and pat everything dry and get ready to start drying them. At this point I put all my pieces of cleaned celery into the refrigerator because it was getting late at night and I didn't want to mess up because I was so exhausted and couldn't think straight! It actually ended up being a couple days later before I got around to dehydrating the pieces, but it didn't affected the outcome! Place all your pieces onto your dehydrating screens. Directions said: Dehydrate 18 hours at 100 degrees. I actually ended up using my oven for this dry set and had it on convection 170 degrees, I ran the oven for about 3 hours and then got a little too nervous to let it run through the night so I shut it off and started it up the next morning. I was glad I did because this seemed to work quite well and alot of the pieces were quite dry just from a partial drying and then resting overnight. I ran the convection for another 2 hours at 170 and then let it rest again and started it up for 1 last run of about 2 hours.
This sure wasn't the best organized method, nor did I follow directions too well, but 7 hours of electrical usage is better than 18.

I am shocked with how well they dried! I am always amazed at how much space is saved by dehydrating!! I am becoming more and more fond of dehydrating! I had 4 packed trays of celery and in the end it all easily fit in the middle of 1 tray and was all nicely tucked into 1 quart sized canning jar!