Drying Homegrown Herbs in a New Way!

hi everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead it is a beautiful cloudy day actually here in the missouri ozarks perfect temperature this is the best time of year for me because late spring is when my herbs are big enough that i can start harvesting them and herbs are one of my absolute favorite things to grow here on the homestead i've actually been interested in growing herbs and have been growing some in some shape or form since i was actually a young teenager that's when i started becoming interested in herbs so ever since then i've been reading about them i've been growing them i've been using them in cooking and finding other ways to use them in body products that kind of thing and i absolutely love it so today is a really fun day for me i'm going to start doing some harvesting of the herbs that are ready to go i'm going to bring you along with me today today i'm going to be harvesting one very common herb that most of you know about you'll absolutely love it and the second one you may not know very much about so i'm excited to teach you a little bit about that but before we get into that i do want to just kind of take you on a tour of some of the herbs that i have growing here we've been here in this uh homestead for about five years now and since we moved on to the property i haven't found the perfect place for an herb garden i've started one one area it didn't work out i started one in another area and we decided that pigs would actually be better in that area so now until i know exactly where i want them the perfect spot i have probably eighty percent of them in big containers and it's doing really well and i really like that i have a portable way to move them around if i don't like them someplace or another i can just move them so first i'm going to take you around and give you a tour of a lot of my herbs that i have growing here and then we'll get started harvesting the two i'm going to do today and get them preparing for preservation this year i'm going to be preserving all of my herbs through our freeze dryer when we get to that point i'll tell you a little bit more about why now i prefer to freeze dry them over drying them i'm going to start with my absolute favorite herb in all of my little herb gardens and that is right here this is spearmint and this is the most fabulous spearmint i have ever encountered and i prefer this over peppermint any day i actually got this from a friend who lives locally and i was able to snag some of her spearmint before she moved to a different part of the country and i absolutely love it and because spearmint and other mints can cross pollinate and then kind of change over time i don't have any other mints on the property because i just don't want this to ever change this is one of the plants that is ready for a really big haircut a wonderful harvest and so this is one of them my favorite that i'm going to be harvesting today spearmint is a fantastic tea i love mint tea and so that's really why i'm harvesting this it does have some medicinal properties really most of what i grow here is for cooking or for tea and a lot of them have medicinal properties now i'm not going to be talking with you about the medicinal properties of everything that i grow there are lots of benefits to lots of herbs and if you're interested in that i encourage you to do your own research and decide how you feel about that but herbal medicine has been something that i've been interested for a long time okay so moving on i already shared with you my absolute favorite spearmint next to me is catnip i grow a lot of catnip on the homestead it does have medicinal properties it does make a wonderful tea right right here i actually have some really young calendula it hasn't really done much yet it's reseeded itself from last year along with apparently some weeds so calendula is a wonderful flower it's beautiful and it does have medicinal purposes so that is why i keep this on the homestead it's also edible but for me it's a little bit bitter you all are probably familiar with this next herb that i have over here i actually have two buckets of it this is chamomile chamomile makes a wonderful tea samantha and i both enjoy chamomile tea it's also fantastic for the skin so i have this bucket worth and this bucket worth they're still kind of far behind but they'll catch up soon i have another bucket here of calendula which is still pretty small calendula is really an annual so it'll take a while for it to get going it will reseed itself but not till summer will those flowers come next up is thyme this is an absolutely gorgeous kitchen herb it's perennial which is why it is so big already this is a creeping time variety from baker creek i love it now these next three buckets are like out of control herbs that i saved from in the middle of the yard this year now once you have dill that's what this is once you have dill and once you let it go to seed on your property the wind kind of blows it everywhere and it literally ends up everywhere every summer when kevin's mowing between the onion grass that grows here a while and the dill when he mows sometimes it smells like dill pickles so i saved three of these from the yard they generally don't transplant well but these guys are doing okay this here is another spearmint when i had that spearmint bucket that i showed you before in another area it either had gone to seed or crept out of the bottom of the bucket it's so invasive that's why i keep them in buckets that this ended up being in the ground over by the pig area and so i dug this out of the ground i saved it and put it in this bucket it's just gone crazy in just a matter of a month or so this over here is another catnip it also must have gone to seed and then this grew up in the ground so i decided to save it and put in one of these buckets it's doing fantastic too so i have another big catnip plant this over here is korean hyssop it is super nutritious the leaves are kind of sweet and taste kind of like root beer kevin and i think you can put this in a tea you can just eat it cut it up eat it with your salad it's a little like i said it's a little bit sweet i absolutely love it so this is korean hyssop it's at about time where if i want to dry any of this for tea i need to be doing that pretty soon if you want to dry your herbs the best time to do it in the day actually is in the morning but you also want to cut them back before they go to flower this plant right now all of its nutrients are going into the leaves but once it starts putting on the flowers it's starting to put its nutrients and all of its energy into flowering and then going to seed so right now these plants like this are the best time to harvest them for teas and for any of the medicines that you want to make okay more herbs we have a bucket here of genovese basil now basil is definitely an annual here it dies when the cold weather comes and these guys actually aren't very happy yet because it's not really warm basil does so well in the heat of the summer it will just get gigantic and kind of out of control but it's waiting for the warm weather next to it we have some lavender lavender is actually my favorite herb of all time i know i said it about the spearmint but lavender is actually what got me interested in herbs when i was very young it can be pretty hard to grow here in southwest missouri but this this variety seems to be doing well in a bucket this big plant here is st john's wort it's starting to go to flower it's absolutely beautiful most people that grow st john's wort like this actually do harvest and use the flower so in this situation you do wait until it flowers next up is rosemary everybody knows rosemary i've got three tiny little plants here i grew these from seed this year so they have they need some time to catch up they'll get pretty big this year and then we'll move them into the greenhouse over the winter they don't do well in the cold and you run the risk of losing them every year so we'll put these in the greenhouse we did overwinter one last year and it's doing great next up here is bee balm bee balm is uh part of the monarda family um you'll know this by the smell of bergamot and you can harvest this for a wonderful tea but it's also really great for hummingbirds and bees once it flowers we have some young parsley here this parsley is going to get gigantic it's going to just get huge i started these from seed but they're not quite big enough to do any harvesting from them yet next up is sage i haven't had sage in a couple of years i don't use it very often in the kitchen but i decided this year i should grow some just to have on hand i started these from seed so that's why they're still pretty small most of the time they do survive the winter but sometimes if it gets too cold they'll die moving on to marshmallow marshmallow is generally harvested for the root moving on to anise hyssop anise is that licorice flavor and you can harvest these for tea they also have beautiful flowers i need to harvest this guy soon because it's starting to produce a flower ashwagandha they're an annual here because it gets so cold and another bucket of basil now over here is parsley and this is last year's parsley that i've let come back this year so that it can flower and go to seed i will be collecting the seeds out of here so that i can renew my stash of parsley seeds and plant for years to come parsley is a biennial which means that the plant grows the first year and the flower and the seeds grow the second year this this parsley was about this huge last year but just filled with leaves i was able to harvest and preserve a lot of parsley but this year i'm just letting it do its thing and go to flour and seed now the last herb that i'm going to be talking about today and this is the second herb i'm going to be harvesting to preserve in the freeze dryer and this over here is stinging nettle i have to be really careful not to touch it right now with bare hands because underneath the leaves are kind of little stingers like little barbs almost that when you get them on your skin it feels like you know when you get insulation on your skin it can it it really kind of hurts and it creates a rash but stinging nettle is very very nutritious when you cook it it tastes a lot like spinach it has lots of vitamins in it but it also has several different medicinal purposes i'm not going to go over all of them with you but our hope is to be able to use it as an antihistamine stinging nettle has been used to help prevent hay fever seasonal allergies and we actually experience quite a bit of that here within our family so that is my hope with this big stinging nettle plant so let's go start harvesting we're going to start with the spearmint okay here we are again back at the big spearmint plant now spearmint is a very vigorous grower and so don't feel bad about really taking a lot of the plant off of here i'm actually going to be cutting about two thirds of the way down the plant and leaving only about six inches or so sticking up out of the pot you can harvest them stem by stem if you'd like to i just grab a handful of the stems at once and just cut them all off and get big handfuls out of time oh my gosh it smells so good now one thing i wanted to tell you guys is that i used to dry all of my herbs and that is that's really a fine way to preserve your herbs i preferred to bundle them and then hang them to dry rather than the in the dehydrator i found when i use the dehydrator especially with mints like this that just even the the small amount of heat that a dehydrator uses really changed the flavor of the mint and if i just air dried them in bundles the flavor stayed more true to the natural flavor that it is when you harvest them now the freeze dryer which is what i'm going to be doing from now on it preserves the flavor almost entirely like it is on the plant but the other thing that's nice about the freeze dryer is that it really does take all of the moisture out of it so it lasts longer preserved the dehydrator it does a pretty good job and air drying it also does a pretty good job but the freeze dryer really just takes out so much of that moisture i can only keep dried herbs that have been you know air dried good i can only keep them good for about two years before i really start tasting and noticing the difference but the freeze dryer will keep them good for you know 10 plus years if they're stored properly well now that i'm all done here it doesn't look very pretty anymore but this is the time that i'm going to come back and i'm going to pour on some fish emulsion solution add some rabbit manure on top so that the next time it rains all of that nutrients will go deep down into the soil and it will just create the nutrients it needs to grow back up and it will be back up here in no time now that we have all these harvested we actually need to prepare them for the freeze dryer we're going to take the leaves off the stems because the stems just are too hard and fibrous to go into our teas okay it's such a beautiful day out here with a beautiful breeze that i figured i could do this out here for you guys so we are going to be picking off every single one of these leaves on the stems and we're just going to put them right on the tray for the harvest right freeze dryer that we have now i don't wash my herbs we don't spray them with any chemicals i don't care if there's a little bit of bug here and there i'm just going to harvest the leaves and not worry about washing them now you absolutely can pick off the leaves by hand and leave the stems behind and i did that for a really long time but actually i think last year my mom sent me a like a leaf stripper i guess there are lots of different varieties of these online or on amazon and it actually it works really great and it saves you a lot of time so let me show you how that works in this situation i'm going to take off just these top little leaves just makes it easier at the end there are different sized holes there put the stem through there hold on to it tight and it just takes most of the leaves off for you and just makes this process really easy again i'm going to take off these last leaves that are right at the top put that through the hole that matches the stem size gets them off and it just jiffy now a lot of times when you're using the harvest right freeze dryer if you're freeze drying things that are really thick you should really have them in a single layer but because these leaves are so thin you can really pile these leaves on top of here and it will do still do a really great job freeze drying them so i'm hoping that i can get all of these leaves on two trays to put into the freeze dryer and that will give me a really good start to replenishing all of my spearmint leaves that i used last winter as tea so i'm gonna just keep working here on these and when i'm all finished we'll catch up and i'll show you them all on the trays and then we'll move on to the stinging nettle well our two trays of spearmint are all filled up it's time to put these right into the freeze dryer well for now until we have the stinging nettles all done i'm just going to put these right into our harvest right freeze dryer and just keep them there until i'm ready to turn it on now this is the medium sized harvest right freeze dryer it comes with four trays and it does a really great job when we're all done i'll turn it on and walk you through all the steps to get it started it's really easy fantastic so let's go get our other two trays filled up with the stinging nettle so we can get this going now after this processes and it's all done i'll make sure to take it out for you and show you exactly what it looks like i'll taste it and tell you just how wonderful it tastes but now let's go get that stinging nettle okay here's the stinging nettle again now because it is stinging nettle we need to make sure that we protect ourselves as we harvest i'm going to wear gloves but i also wore long sleeve shirt so i could tuck my glove inside of there to protect my wrists now we're going to harvest basically in the same way as we did the spearmint this is a very vigorous grower it's not going to get stunted or anything by some really heavy pruning and harvesting so i'm just going to grab some of these branches here and just cut about two thirds of the way down well that haircut is over with let's take this big pot full of nettles back over to the cart and we can get those trays loaded now harvesting the nettle is going to be just a little bit different than the spearmint because a lot of this nettle has already gone to flour and some of the flowers have started to turn into seed so i'm just going to be picking off by hand the bottom leaves there are still a lot of them and putting those on the tray now we harvested a lot of nettle so it will be very easy for us to fill up these two trays so we'll catch back up when i have all of these picked off and the trays filled okay the last two trays are filled with the stinging nettle now i'm going to keep my gloves on still because it can still sting me but once it goes through the freeze drying process the freezing part of it actually kind of deactivates the stingers so once it's all dry i don't i don't have to worry about that anymore also if you cook them you don't have to worry about it anymore okay let's go finish loading the freeze dryer okay let's load these two trays in then we put this on there it's a insulator keeps all the freezing temperatures inside of there close it up let's turn it on then we just press the start button [Music] now it asks me if the food is pre-frozen or not frozen and they're not frozen so we're just gonna push not frozen i'm gonna close the drain so that the vacuum can be created in there i did that press continue now it's freezing and that's it we just need to wait until it's done and we can take it out and package it up and i'll try it for you guys [Music] well it looks like our herbs are all done in the freeze dryer looking at the timer it took just under 10 hours to process this batch that's pretty awesome now a while ago kevin did a video and talked about the cost of freeze drying when it comes to the electricity and just to give you some kind of frame of reference when we have a batch that takes about 24 hours to freeze dry it costs us about two dollars in electricity so this batch being about 10 hours would have been a dollar or less in energy so we're going to take this out and see what it looks like first i'm going to uh open up this valve [Applause] that basically takes all the pressure out of there and we can open it up what i'm going to do is i'm going to take out the trays we're going to take them into the house so we can take a better look at them and see what we think well you guys we have the trays inside and they look absolutely fantastic these two trays are the spearmint that we freeze dried and then these two are the stinging nettle so now that our now that they're out of the freeze dryer we need to get them into some bags quickly so that the moisture in the air doesn't start to affect their quality we are going to be using like smaller bags these are mylar bags and there's generally like a gallon size and a quart size these are the quart size because these are going to squish down into a pretty small amount so i'm going to be using these these are right from harvest right and i like these because they have like a resealable top on them when we add the herbs we're going to melt this so it will be totally sealed inside of there we're going to put an oxygen absorber in there to absorb all the oxygen so it stays nice and fresh but when i want to start using it i can open it and then reseal it if i want to just keep storing it in a mylar bag we're going to be using these today and i think that we'll be able to we might be able to get both trays into one bag here i'm not worried if they get crushed up inside of here because ultimately the spearmint i'm going to be using for tea and ultimately i'm going to be powdering up the nettle leaf so the more i can stuff in here the better you can get these funnels which i'm going to use they're super handy you can get these on amazon we were actually sent this by one of our subscribers who does a lot of freeze drying and i'm going to be using one of these like dough cutters and scrapers to kind of scoop everything off the tray and put it in here one of our subscribers who freeze dries uses these and sent these to us too they're super fantastic so i'll just show you how i'm going to do this here just scoop this up put it in there like that we've also heard people say that you can get like french fry scoopers like they use at mcdonald's and then it works really well for this process i think that sounds fun too and now i'm just going to pick this tray up and dump the rest of them in i'm just going to press these in here now let me show you how many are in there that's how full that is so i was completely wrong there's no way i could fit a whole second tray in there i don't know now that i did that you guys look how much room is left in there so i'm gonna go for it i'm not gonna waste that space in there i'm gonna put the rest of these spearmint leaves in that mylar bag these smell fantastic you guys i can't tell you how wonderful and just how just fresh they still smell the color of them too is also fantastic it's so green okay [Applause] okay both trays are in there i'm just going to open these oxygen absorbers i'm going to take out two of these because we're going to use two but i want to reseal them up really quickly so the rest of them aren't exposed to too much air i'm going to show you how this bag sealer works this is actually sent with your freeze dryer when you order one through harvest right you just hold down on here it melts it seals it up and it's all perfect so now that we have these oxygen absorbers out i'm going to put one in the bag of spearmint and then i'm going to use the sealer to seal this up and it will not allow any oxygen to go into that bag during storage just going to line it up there [Music] comes off and you can see that it makes a nice seal right at the top so i'm going to do the same exact thing with the stinging nettles to get them packaged up [Music] okay the nettles are all finished i also want to show you that there's a nice area on these bags to write what you have in there and the date that you freeze dried them so in goes oxygen absorber then we're just going to seal this up and these will be ready for long-term storage [Music] well i am super pleased with the way these herbs turned out in the freeze dryer you know we grow and raise so much of our own food and a lot of the ways that we've been preserving them in the past really only that food is good for a couple of years but with a freeze dryer it takes long-term long-term food storage to a completely new level for us we're so excited to be able to add that to the other methods of preservation that we do here on the homestead now if you're interested in the harvest right freeze dryer that we're using you can check out the link for harvest right in the description section of this video we'll tell you everything you need to know we are super pleased with that company so thanks you guys for joining me uh for a tour of the herbs that we're growing and how we are going to be primarily preserving all of our herbs from now on i appreciate you joining me today remember that if you're enjoying our videos the best way to help us is to share our videos on all your social media we'd also like for you to subscribe and give this video a thumbs up until next time thanks so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 187,502

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, harvest right, freeze drying, freeze dryer, freeze drying herbs, spearmint, stinging nettle, nettle

Id: 5Rtl3U8s5sg

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021