Secrets to Drying Herbs With This Centuries Old-Method for Stronger Medicinal Properties

knowing the best way to harvest and preserve your herbs is going to be the difference between having the maximum medicinal and flavor benefits or sacrificing some of them so one of the most important things you need to know when you're harvesting your herbs is you want to do it in the cool of the morning before the sun has begun to hit them and just as the dew is beginning to dry off of them so we don't want them stopping wet in the morning with all of the dew but the reason that we want to do this is because when we're harvesting them the essential oils that are in the plant in the morning time they're at their highest concentration in both the flowers and the leaves if you wait until later in the day when the heat and the sun has hit them they go back into the stems and back into the root of the plant so morning time is also my favorite time especially during the summer to be out in the garden because it's when it's cool [Music] so we're going to be harvesting these are my chamomile and in the morning [Music] you'll also notice that the little white petals are tucked down it's kind of like they're being shy instead of fully out so that's a good sign too that it's still early enough in the day to be harvesting these and as you can see this plant has a ton of blossoms all over it and so to sit and pluck each of these by hand is going to take forever they make some rakes that you can get that you can pull them off and you can harvest them that way but with the old-fashioned method that i like to use to dry these i find it easiest to just come in here and that way i'm not touching all of the petals in the blossoms and i just come to the base here scissors work you can use pruning shears and we're just going to trim these off and put them here in our basket the other great thing about doing this is with your flowering herbs the more you harvest from them the more they will put up more blossoms so you're going to get more flowers and for beauty as well as to put into your herbal medicine cabinet so here i have my feverfew and i've actually already harvested from this once this year and it's already sent out a bunch of new blossoms so i'm just going to come down here and clip it off at the bottom [Music] now this is my elderberry flower and on your elderberry plant both the berries and the flower are edible and actually pretty much a powerhouse as far as we're talking in your natural medicine cabinet especially for their immune boosting properties and also anti-viral however this is the first year that this has bloomed and unfortunately my pollinator to this one did not put up a bloom yet this year so that means i missed the blossom time on these ones over here but because they didn't have anything to pollinate them they're not going to form into berries so i want to make sure that i get this large flower harvested while it's still fresh so that i can use this so you can see that one it's just so lacy and beautiful it's almost hard to harvest it but it's going to be great in teas and tinctures [Music] now one of the other herbs that i'm harvesting this morning is my holy basil or tulsi and again i actually just harvested off of this holy basil plant less than two weeks ago so sometimes you're going to see when you're harvesting them you're like oh man you're taking everything but these herbs do really well when you do a hard harvest like that and they'll produce a bunch more for you these are really easy to harvest because we're going for some of these longer stocks the main thing is you just want to be careful that you're not crushing the leaves or the flour when you're cutting these and harvesting them we don't want to release any of these oils in there now we want to release them when we're going to use them so light handling is fine so over here i've got my peppermint so i've got mint peppermint here and i've actually got some chocolate mint in here which unfortunately does not actually taste like chocolate it just has a brown stem i have to tell you it was highly disappointed because i thought it would have like chocolate overtones yeah totally does it but it's still a great mint and i've harvested from these already and i probably should have come out here and harvested a little bit earlier so you want to make sure that you're not getting like a lot of these leaves are just getting old and so they've got some sun spots and a little bit of damage on them a little bit of yellowing these ones are not ideal to harvest you really want to go for the ones that are bright and green and don't have very very few if any blemishes on the leaves in fact no blemishes is actually ideal so for these with a mint we're just going to come down and i'm just going to get the ones up here that are still nice and bright and i'm not going to try and harvest down here where these ones are older so i'm just going to come right here so these are going to be shorter little stems but that's okay so we've got one left to fill up our basket here and that is my lemon balm so this i just started from seed and planted this year and so you can see it's already filling out pretty fast lemon balms in the mint family so it likes to spread but just like mint we want to make sure that we're just getting this bright green part not any of these older leaves that are showing anything and we're going to come down here to the stem part and i'm going to trim or prune cut it right there and again try to be you'll have a little bit of a light scent the mint family especially with the lemon balm and the peppermint have a really high concentration of the oils and so they're very fragrant the more fragrant the herb the more you'll smell that but ideally we don't want to handle them and crush them and release these oils too soon [Music] so now that we have all of our herbs harvested it is time to get them drying and you've got several options the easiest option and definitely the most old-fashioned is to take them in bundles and this is works really well with these ones that we've cut and we kind of have longer here so i'm going to bundle them together here with some more of my fever few and one of the key things to keep in mind as you create your bundles is you don't want them to actually be too large because we do want to make sure that we've got adequate air flow so i'm going to put these together like this so we've got all of the stems here at the top kind of together and then you can take twine you can take string whatever you've got and we're going to tie these all together at the base and i've found it kind of works a little bit right here where i've got like the stem coming out because as these dry they will shrink and if i can kind of thread it through a couple areas where there's a little bit of stems as they dry and shrink up it just kind of helps to keep them from falling out basically and then i usually just do a little bit of a slip knot so i've got something a loop for where i'm hanging it so you can hang these in various places the biggest thing is you don't want them to be in direct sunlight and you want it to be an area where they have good airflow so we're not building a fire this time of year but i happen to have these hooks here and in the late evening all throughout the night we open up the windows so there's quite a bit of airflow that actually happens through here and so i can just take those and put them there so this is the feverfew that i harvested a few weeks back and then this was some mint that i also harvested a couple so i'll show you some of the tips to know that those are ready to go into storage but you want to hang them upside down and the reason we want to hang them upside down is so that all of those essential oils that we have been careful as we have been creating these so that we weren't bruising the leaves and that we were harvesting them in the morning when the greatest concentration is present we want it to all go down into the blossoms and the leaves as it's drying so that's one of the reasons that we hang these upside down so we don't want them to be in direct sunlight so like i said plenty of airflow this is a great and we're just going to let them air dry we don't want to do these bundles too large because then you don't have air flow and if you have a lot of the green stems together and you've got them bundled too largely you can get mold growth that will happen in there so i like to do mine in some of those smaller bundles but if you're like me i have a lot more harvested than i've got hanging space here so we need to have a couple other options especially if you live in an area that's really humid you can have trouble with airflow so humid that mold will begin to grow on them so we've got some different options but one of the most important things is we don't want a lot of heat so the oven is really not a good idea for dehydrating things like your herbs especially when you're planning on using them medicinal wise we don't want to use the oven but the dehydrator is okay to use provided that you have a dehydrator that goes down low enough so this dehydrator i've had for oh my goodness a number of years it's unesco and i can control the temperature on this and put it all the way down to 95 degrees fahrenheit so that's still considered raw i'm not cooking the herbs it's not really using heat it's just more airflow so if you live in an area with high humidity like i said or you don't have enough space i don't have enough space to dry all of these then i definitely will use my dehydrator making sure that it stays on that 95 degrees fahrenheit and i really like to use it things like the chamomile blossoms these little flower heads here i mean this is pretty dense this is pretty thick here in comparison to just the leaves so you can see this is just a flat green leaf well this has a lot of plant material there and so i like to use the dehydrator on things like this that are a little bit thicker so i'll use the dehydrator for them and also when i've harvested things like some of my holy basil wasn't long enough it didn't have a long enough stem i really can't tie this very effectively but this is a lot of good leaf material and i still want to be able to dehydrate that so those are some different things that you may pick up pick and choose when you would use the dehydrator versus when you would use the hanging method so i'm going to be putting quite a bit of my chamomile blossoms here so that they have that good airflow because they are more dense but even if you don't have a dehydrator we still have a very old-fashioned method that can work really well for you so a paper bag just a brown paper bag this one has a little bit of ink on it not a big deal but a brown paper bag can work really well so this is when you don't have a dehydrator but you have quite a bit of plant material like i do here and so we're going to put this in the brown paper brown paper bag because it's breathable now i've tried this in the past i tried drawing stinging nettle leaves in a pillow case and they all molded the pillowcase was either not the right type of fabric or i just didn't have enough air flow so the brown paper bag i feel like is a better way to go versus using the pillowcase i didn't have very good luck with the pillowcase you still want to make sure that what you're putting in there is loose enough like you don't want to pack it down super tight and that's another thing you want to make sure that we're not crushing any of the leaves or the flower blossoms during this phase when we're picking or where we're getting ready to dehydrate them so some people will choose to take like for example here with the holy basil or the mint or the leaves and they will pull all the leaves off right now and just put the leaves on a tray i don't like to do that because you are still pulling and crushing and touching some of these leaves i feel like it's a lot easier to just lay them on hole like this and let them dry and then once they're dried so when they're fully dried like this with our mint then i can just easily pull off this leaf and i haven't crushed anything or lost any of those great essential oils that are in there i just find it easier and it's a lot faster to pull them off when they're dry than to do it when they're fresh so for me it's kind of a time saver and also making sure and keeping all those essential oils inside so in this bag we're going to go ahead and load this up with all of the chamomile and you could put the feverfew in here i'm just going to do all of the chamomile in here because that i have quite a bit you can mix them up if you want with herbs like this that don't have super strong aromas it's fine if you dehydrate them together so we've got that loosely done in there and now we're going to take this to the drying area and i'm going to just fold this over just once so even though these are enclosed in the brown paper bag we still don't want to put them in direct sunlight so i'm actually going to hang these in the same place that i've been curing my garlic so not in direct sunlight but plenty of air flow and this during if we have a really hot day this can get about 85 degrees but the majority of the time it's going to be more around the 70s this time of year for us but the great thing about using this paper bag is one is it contains everything and it's breathable but it keeps the dust and the flies and the bugs from landing on our herbs as they're dehydrating so it helps to protect them so i will check on these in a couple of days you do want to check on them when you have them in a bag format like this and you even want to check on them too when they're hanging upside down just to make sure that you don't see any molds starting to develop because if they do start to mold you want to remove that as soon as possible so it doesn't spread throughout the entire bag now when it comes to your herbs being fully dehydrated and storage time there's another key thing that you need to know to make sure that you're not releasing all of those wonderful properties that we've been trying to preserve inadvertently so once your herbs are fully dehydrated first off we want to check them we want to make sure they're really dehydrated with leaves it's really easy they're going to be curled up they're going to be wrinkly they're going to be dry and if you do take them between your fingers and go like that they're going to kind of crumble so you can you can crumble them so this is how we know that these are fully dry and they're ready to go into storage now with flour blossoms it takes the blossoms longer to dehydrate in my experience than it does the leaves so these are definitely smaller so they have shriveled up they've changed color they're not as bright but if you push them between your fingers there's still some give i can still feel in that the where the petals are attached i can still feel that it kind of gives back and forth so if you're pushing on it and you can feel some give then you know it's not fully dehydrated and you want to let these hang for a little bit longer because if you try to put them into storage too soon they'll mold on you and so you want to make sure that those flower heads especially are all the way dry now some people with flower heads especially with things like calendula that are larger they'll pluck the petals off and dry them that way which can be faster but i gotta tell you i am not gonna sit and pluck petals off of all of these in order to dehydrate them i would rather just let them dehydrate for a couple more weeks then try to take the time to individually pluck all of them that would just take forever and nobody's got time for that right so these need to dehydrate for a little bit longer but when they are fully dehydrated and are ready to go into storage one of the mistakes that people make is they will take their dehydrated leaves and or their flowers and because when we're buying tea from the store oftentimes it's in the bag or loose leaf it'll already be cut up and like ready to go into a tea bag or a tea strainer but you don't want to do that the reason is because when you have lots of little surfaces then there's more oxidization that's going to happen a lot faster because more of the plant material is exposed to oxygen when it's all crumbled and broken up versus when it's like a whole leaf so for storage you want to put it into your jar i usually use glass jars you can use regular mason jars this is a wet jar you can use the fido jars but you do want to make sure that they have some type of a seal so this has that rubber gasket seal there and so these are those peppermint leaves and we're going to go ahead and put them into here so i can actually untie these so now we've got all of our leaves off and we're going to put them in here and we're going to seal this up and they've all been left whole so the importance of this is because we don't want to release all of those oils that we've so carefully preserved until right at time of use so right when you go to make your tea or perhaps you're doing a tincture with these dried leaves that is at the point when you will crumble them up because at that point when they're crumbled up then it releases all of those oils and infuses it into whatever liquid if you're doing an herbal tea or infusion a decoction or a tincture but you don't want to do it prior to that so for storage it's going to be whole and then when we're wanting to extract all of the wonderful medicinal values from said tea or leaves i should say that we may be making a tortilla or some of those other things then you're going to be crumbling them up and if you want to learn more about how to use herbs naturally in your medicine cabinet you're going to want to make sure that you are signed up for my free herbal class and check out the pioneering today academy with our natural herbal flues and cold remedies course

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 159,462

Keywords: drying herbs, herbal medicine, natural remedies, how to dry herbs, drying herbs in dehydrator, drying herbs for tea, drying herbs for storage, drying herbs at home, drying herbs outdoors, drying herbs outside, drying herbs naturally

Id: UUtWgVZ9VwE

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020