The view from my porch is the pits (and the cherries)

When we moved to this new place, I lugged along my super-fancy solar dehydrator, even though we don't have much of a yard.

And by "super-fancy",  I mean this "dehydrator" is a bunch of scrap stuff I cobbled together: a bottom board, an old window screen, and an old storm window, with bit of wood framing to act as spacers between these layers.  In other words, it kinda looks like a pile of junk -- and the only reason it's NOT a pile of junk is because it's useful.  

But, we have no area of our property -- with the possible exception of our roof -- that gets consistent sun, I've learned as I watch my tomatoes and basil plants struggle for existence.  And since I don't have easy access to the roof, I'm not drying cherries up there.

When four of my jars (2 quarts and 2 pints) failed to seal, I decided to go public with my dehydrating.  That is, across the street from my house there's a parking lot for a hardware store that went out of business.  It has lots and lots of open space with no trees, in the usual the way these godawful parking lots exist to be perfectly designed for making the most of the greenhouse effect by roasting everything inside a person's car, or even inside a pile of junk that happens to be a dehydrator.  

It's hard to see in the picture above, but my dehydrator was out there (at the base of a pole).   Up close, it looks like this:  kinda like a pile of scrap construction material.  

FYI, one side of this dehydrator contained my 6 pints of cherries, and the other side all of the cherry pits, which I'll make into heating-pad bags.

It feels a little edgy putting my food projects out into public spaces.  People walked by this all day long, and it takes two days to turn regular cherries into cherry raisins, so I really wasn't sure how this experiment would turn out.  But nobody disturbed the set up; frankly, no one that I saw even seemed curious about it.  

And so after two lovely, sunny days, my six pints of cherries turned into one pint of dried cherries, and I put the dehydrator back away.   

Success!