I have already bought a few herb plants this year. Currently they are sitting indoors by various windows, waiting for warmer weather to arrive. They are all growing, though some better then others. So I’ve done some reading in my container gardening book for ways to help them grow stronger, and have found most plants need to be trimmed regularly to encourage new growth .
Herbs are very easy to trim. You can either take the entire stem by cutting a few off at the ground, or you can take just a few new leaves off depending on what you need and what the plant is. Since I’m not going to cook with these herbs right away I’m going to dry them.
There are a couple methods suggested for drying herbs: tying the stems and air drying, placing the leaves and/or stems in a dehydrator, using an oven, or using a microwave. Herbs with higher moisture content will need to be dried carefully to avoid mold.
I’ve decided to try to dry all of mine (chives, parsley, sage, mint) in the oven over night. Sources say you want a heat below 150 degrees Fahrenheit. My oven goes as low as 170 degrees, so I turned it on and let it preheat. When it was preheated I turned it off, opened the door wide (to let some heat out), placed the herbs inside on the low rack, and closed it up. As you can see in the second picture, they dried enough to crumble when I pressed on them. Success!
Obviously this was a small amount to start with, but I plan to use this method again. Maybe the results will be different with a large amount – I don’t know, yet. 🙂 I do have a small electric dehydrator I’ll try sometime, but for now the oven seems to be a easy way to dry herbs.
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