Hello all, Scott Neville from Harvest Right gave me the link to this forum, I had many questions for him and he knew that a lot of my questions would be answered in your forum. And I agree, Harvest Right should put up their own forum. I am a retired grandmother, big time canner and jelly maker and novice prepper and devout Christian who studies prophecy. So I have goals for my freeze-drying. I also quilt, crochet, make home made soap and body products, make jewelry, paint, draw and on and on……….the only thing I do not do is scrap book, all my crafts have taught me is that they are very money consuming so I decided to stop at learning how to scrap book. I have gone through all 7 pages of your posts and am learning quite a lot to say the least. My situation is that I seem to be from a different walk of life than a lot of you. I am definitely not a science person, some of your posts talking about the science went right over my head but that is ok I am still learning the most important thing to me – what will and what will not freeze dry and the pictures are such an added bonus enabling us to see what the food looks like, thank you all very much for the pics. Some of your posts talked about freeze drying butter and it probably not working. If you would like to know how to preserve your butter just let me know, yes you can "can" butter, I found the instructions on the Internet and did it and it worked, but on the other hand I have not tried the butter yet, lol, definitely need to do that. I just ordered my Harvest Right Freeze Dryer today. I took advantage of the opportunity to get the Stainless Steel model on special this last week in September. So to say the least I am anxious to get started whenever it gets here. I feel a little intimidated about the technical side of how to work the machine but Scott tells me he has customers much older than me that are using it so hopefully I will figure it out. My biggest goal is to make meals and freeze dry them, especially my homemade soup after I have made a roast in the crock-pot. Since the homemade soup would be very "liquidy" Scott told me I would probably want to put the soup into the freeze dryer trays, then put the trays into the refrigerator freezer first, then when frozen put the trays into the freeze dryer. So Kerry if you have any home made soup lying around it would really be great if you tried this and posted pics, lol. I look forward to more of all your posts and pictures, thanks so much to all of you for taking your time to do all this. thanks to all, darlene
