Preserving greens by dehydrating is a quick and easy way to store greens to use over the winter. A few hot weather greens grow in abundance in my garden. While we try to incorporate them fresh into meals, we always seem to have more than we can eat during the season. In an effort to preserve all that goodness for the winter time, I have found that dehydrating the greens is a great option. The process is fairly quick and easy. Once the greens are dry, I powder them in the blender to create a greens powder. The greens powder can be incorporated into all sorts of dishes – soups, stews, breads, meatloaf, meatballs, etc. You can use a little or a lot to make the flavor stand out or to sneak extra nutrition into a meal without alerting fussy eaters.

I use a 9-tray Excalibur dehydrator, so I can dehydrate quite a bit at one time, but any dehydrator will work. If you are interested in dehydrating, but do not want to spend a lot of money on one, dehydrators can sometimes be found inexpensively at thrift stores or yard sales. It’s a great way to try it out and see if you like dehydrating, without having to spend a ton of money. Follow the steps below or check out this video I put together, showing how I dehydrate greens from my garden.

Selecting the Greens

The process to dehydrate greens is fairly simple. Pick nice looking, fresh greens for dehydrating. I try to sort through the greens out in the garden, picking out any debris, taking leaves off the stems, and bringing in only the portions I want to dehydrate. This way, all the compostable material stays right out in the garden to enrich the soil. Once I bring the greens inside, I give them a good washing and dry them on a dish towel.

Dehydrating

Next, I lay the leaves out on the dehydrator sheets and turn it to 125 degrees, which is the vegetable setting on my particular dehydrator. You always want to try to use the lowest temperature possible which still gives good results in order to preserve the most nutrition. We are in a pretty humid climate, so I find 125 works well. If you are in a drier area, you might be able to use a lower temperature. I do not have a specific time that I set them on as it varies with each batch. I usually let them dry for the day or overnight and then check them. Once they are crispy, and crumble when I try to break them, they are done. If they are flimsy at all, I leave them on for longer. Sometimes the stems will need longer than the leaves, so they take a little longer.

Powdering

Once I’m confident that the greens are dry, I stuff them all in the blender and give it a whirl until the greens are finely powdered. It’s really a matter of preference with how fine to grind them, and you really do not need to grind them at all if you prefer them to be more like flakes in the final product. In that case, you could just stuff them in a jar, kind of breaking as you go. Powdering works for us because I am primarily dehydrating Malabar and Longevity spinach and while we like these, we don’t love them. When using them in a final product, I’m usually looking to mask the flavor or use them as an accent, not make them the star of the dish.

Storing

I store the powder in a glass jar, adding each batch to the same jar, until the jar is full. A full 9 trays powders down to maybe ½ cup of powder. It’s amazing how much the greens shrink down once dehydrated and powdered. That is also one of the benefits of storing this way; it really takes up very little space compared with freezing. It’s also shelf stable which I really like.

Once the jar is full, I vacuum seal the powder in a bag with the vacuum sealer. If you have a jar attachment for your vacuum sealer, you could seal in the jar also. I like the compactness of the vacuum sealed bags, but either works just fine. Since we live in a fairly humid area, I have not experimented with how long this would keep in a jar without vacuum sealing. My guess is that in a dry climate, it would probably be fine for quite a while.

That’s all there is to it. I like having these nutritional greens in my pantry, shelf stable and ready for use at any time. I have successfully added the greens powder to meatballs, spaghetti sauce, bread, and chili without anyone questioning the flavor. If you’re interested in preserving greens, I hope you’ll give this method a try. 🙂