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Drying Garden Herbs

By: Lee Dobbins


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Herbs are grown for many different reasons: culinary, medicinal, cosmetics, and aromatherapy. In most cases, you want to preserve them to make them most useful and for easy storage and this is done by drying. Drying garden herbs can be done by many different techniques such as the following: bag drying, tray drying, air drying and the most recent, microwave drying.

Some herbs with beautiful flowers also have seeds that are useful. To preserve the seeds, start by letting the flowers dry on some paper. When they are dry, roll up the paper and empty the loose seeds into a container for storage. If you want to keep the herb leaves, a little more work is required.

Isolate and lightly wash the stalk, then immerse it in water for several hours. This should eliminate any impurities that weren't removed in the initial rinse. Place them to dry on an absorbent towel.

Place the plant in a small sized paper bag. The flower will now be gone, but place this end inside with the stalks showing about an inch to two inches out the top of the bag. Place a tie on the bag around the stalks, putting it upside down. Upside down meaning from the point of view of the plant. For example, the bag should be on it's base and the stems should be facing up. The leaves will become saturated with the flavor and the aroma when the oil in the stems moves using a capillary action.

If the bags are kept in a fairly dry place, the leaves of the plants should be brittle within two weeks. Some may take less time, some more. Carefully take them out of the bag and take the leaves off of the plants and put them in an air tight container. This will preserve them until you are ready to use them for cooking or to put into potpourri.

For drying garden herbs on a tray, carefully pull the leaf stem off the stalk and lay them spread out on your tray. Place the tray in a dark area with good air circulation. The tray needs to be removed everyday so the leaves can be turned over to assure they are drying evenly. After several days they should be dried sufficiently to use.

If you're short on time, turn to your kitchen microwave for help. Absorption will be better if you place the herbs in the microwave on top of a paper towel or paper plate than a microwave-safe one. You can microwave for a few minutes on medium power. The variety and quantity of herb, in addition to your kind of microwave, will determine the time you need to cook, but 2 to 3 minutes is good for most uses.

Test the dryness of the leaves by crushing them with you fingers. They should be brittle and fall apart easily. Repeat this test every half a minute until the leaves are dry enough.

Drying garden herbs in a microwave is not always the easiest or best thing to do. Sometimes instead of drying out the herbs, the heat settings on your microwave may cause you to cook the herbs instead. When the moisture has been dried out of the herbs, the microwave oven still runs. This may damaged your microwave. Microwaves work by shaking up water molecules in foods and this causes them to heat up and dry out. You may want to experiment with different settings on your microwaves to see what works best with your unit; however, you may want to try a different method of drying.

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You can learn more about planting and harvesting herbs as well as get information on drying garden herbs at basicherbgardeningtips.com/ where you will get basic tips for growing herbs both indoors and out.



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