How to Harvest and Preserve Herbs | 3 BEST Ways to Preserve Herbs!

hi everybody cheryl and lady coming to you from the ladies garden and home and today we're going to harvest some herbs and i'm going to share with you my three favorite ways to preserve the herbs so i hope you join us [Music] so i have probably about a dozen or so different types of herbs growing just even in these containers on my deck their wonderful space saver i really enjoyed being able to easily access them but i've got basil oregano lemon balm thyme parsley chives more thyme rosemary and some oregano catnip and more thyme here and then in the green stalk here i have some more basil i've got some more catnip i've got some sage and i've got cilantro and some purple basil so i have quite a bit of herbs growing and i absolutely love them frankly i couldn't cook without them sometimes i come across a recipe in a book or online and there's no herbs added to the recipe and i'm like how does it have flavor so i generally harvest herbs one or of two different ways depending on how the plant grows the first sort of like this parsley here where the outer leaves are taller and the growth comes from the middle you see these little leaves coming up through the middle you just simply take the outer leaves first and this will give these more air and room to grow other herbs that you would harvest this way are sage again taken from the larger outer leaves the plant will get bigger from the top but also you see there's new growth here i also do the same with dill and cilantro those are the kind of plants that grow with the larger leaves towards the outside with the smaller leaves than the new growth coming from the center some plants grow by putting off double nodes under the top growth like this basil for example so what i do with when i harvest basil and a bunch of other different types of herbs is i cut them above where i see the two leaves growing and what happens is this will then turn into two more shoots coming up so that's how you get the plants so bushy other plants that grow this way in addition to basil include thyme oregano so if you were to take the top off here all that will become new growth lemon balm too see those tiny little leaves and to keep the plant tidy what i'll also do is take off some of the older leaves and if they're not too brown i go ahead and i dry these too and this catnip as well although i am trying to leave some flowers now if you're doing a lot at once you're not going to want to sit here and pick them off like that so it works just as well when you're trying to harvest a bunch of at once to just take the snippers in and give it a haircut on top okay when we come inside the first thing we want to do is wash our herbs just like you would your vegetables so i put them directly into the salad spinner here and then add a couple of handfuls of salt and this is going to kill any buggies and we'll just let that soak for about 15 minutes also since these were in containers up on the deck i'm not going to add vinegar to the water which i normally would do if it was in the ground near where maybe some animals could get to them [Music] and if you don't have a salad spinner that's okay just um you want to dry them off on a paper towel all right i'm going to just separate these out many people hang dry their herbs and there's nothing wrong with that in fact i do that with lavender the reason i don't do it with the herbs i'm going to be cooking with is because i have three cats and a dog that all shed terribly and if i were to do that i would have very very fuzzy herbs i hang my lavender in my closet the animals don't go in my closet and it makes my closet smell really really good but i can't fit all my herbs in my closet so i'm going to share with you three simple methods that i find very quick and very easy with the emphasis on being easy so the first way i'm going to show you that i like to preserve herbs and i find this method very easy and quick it's also closest to when you use fresh herbs in your garden is what i call the freezer cigar method and what i do is i wrap them um in some saran wrap and then put them in a nice zip lock bag and i keep them in the freezer and i think what i'm going to do for this particular batch is i'm going to mix up an italian blend that i use in my [Music] in my sauce so it would be oregano parsley basil so you know a handful that i would throw in and what i do is i wrap it up really tight like this like a cigar bring it up really tightly like this keeps it from getting freezer burn and then you know as the season goes on and i harvest more i can just add to the bag but you don't want to defrost it when you go to use it because that'll make the leaves kind of funny but if you drop it in completely frozen into your sauce or your soup it really does taste like it came fresh right out of the garden and then another tip for making sure that your vegetables herbs whatever you put in the freezer doesn't get freezer burn is when you go to seal it what i do as i close it up as much as possible kind of hold it closed where the straw is and then and it keeps the air out of course i love to use fresh herbs in my cooking i also really kind of end up going for the dried herbs more often i think they're just more convenient their within arms reach and also you don't have to use as much because once an herb is dried the flavor becomes much more concentrated so i tend to go for the dried herbs most of the time while i'm cooking and one of the ways that i dry my herbs is simply in my toaster oven i set the toaster oven to warm which is the lowest temperature i have here and then i set it for an hour now mine only goes to an hour until it turns off but i find that i like that because if i let them in too long they might burn and that's not what you want to do you don't want to cook the herbs you just you just want them to dry and this is how it's going to look when it comes out of the oven this was basil you can also use parchment paper it's going to look very dry and crispy but be careful because this to me does not feel like it is crispy enough these are not dry enough for me if you can hear it sounds dry but they don't fall apart what you want like this is starting to fall apart that's what you want that's how dry you want your herbs to be so this is going to go back in the toaster oven for another couple of hours although that's not the quickest preservation method it really doesn't take too much thought you just throw it in the toaster oven that's probably one of the easiest ways to do it you could also use your main oven to do this i don't like turning the gas on in the summer it gets way too warm in the house also it only goes down to 170 degrees and i'm really not sure that's going to be cool enough for me to be able to just dry the herbs and not cook them but certainly you can get a lot more done in the oven as opposed to the toaster oven there are also dehydrators which are quite expensive i don't think they're economical for my use but i'm going to tell you in a minute my favorite method which is the most economical you could imagine my third and most favorite way of preserving my herbs is putting them into paper bags then i usually put some of this dry and dry silica pouches just to help the drying process along [Applause] thyme and oregano and car keys come with me so so yeah i just basically keep them in paper bags in the back seat of my car all summer the the climate is right because to dry correctly herbs need darkness air which the paper bag provides them and warmth which certainly the car provides them in the summer when the frost starts to come i just bring them inside and i process them all together and i'll show you what i do when i preserve them once they're nice and dry crispy and they're falling away from their stems very easily you can go ahead and put them up at this point is when i remove the stems i find it easier this way i just put them in some glass jars or spice jars you can get these on amazon in fact for most of the stuff that i used today i just got them on amazon and i will link to you my links for those products [Music] and then to ensure that they are really dry when i um go ahead and put them up i just throw one of these in actually the smaller version but the idea is is to just make sure they're going to be [Music] nice and dry [Music] [Applause] [Music] i hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a like and share it if you would like with some friends um and please subscribe so we can share this wonderful gardening experience together and from the ladies garden and home enjoy your gardening journey bye say goodbye lady lady says goodbye already wow this video took a long time can you please get out of my house so i can have my dinner thank you bye lady lady says goodbye you

Channel: The Lady's Garden & Home

Views: 16,250

Keywords: how to harvest and preserve herbs, how to harvest herbs, how to preserve herbs, how to preserve herbs from garden, how to preserve herbs in freezer, herbs, harvesting herbs, preserving herbs, best way to harvest herbs, best way to preserve herbs, best ways to harvest and preserve herbs, harvesting and preserving herbs, harvesting herbs from garden, preserving herbs from garden, how to dry herbs, how to harvest basil, how to dry herbs for tea, freezing herbs, drying herbs

Id: CdnTK0Ur7MM

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022