I have been wanting to learn how to dry and store my own herbs for a while now… So I began researching and reading as many tutorial I could find and then I started experimenting.

One thing I love about drying herbs is how pretty they look hanging in the kitchen. I read quite a few blogs that suggested drying them in the oven or dehydrator but I wanted to do it the old fashioned way.
Something to think about when drying herbs out in the open is they could collect dust. So I may use the oven method next time and just hang some for the whole esthetic value.

I used a tack to attach the ends of a piece of twine to the back of my antique frame chalkboard… this way I would have a place to hang my herbs to dry.

I have herbs growing in various terra cotta pots around the cottage garden and I clipped some and brought them inside. I cleaned any debris off by lightly rinsing them and drying them thoroughly, then I wrapped the ends with twine and tied them to the string.

I let them dry in the open air for two to three weeks and then cut them down and began the process of removing the leaves from the stem. I found that pulling the herbs down the stem versus up, made it easier to remove them.

While doing my research on drying herbs I read that if you don’t crush the leaves until ready for use then the herbs will last longer and the flavor will be stronger. However, I wanted to try out my vintage mortar and pestal to see how well it worked.

It seemed to do a great job with the few that I tried but I left most of the leaves in tact and put them in jars.

I used my bench scraper (one of my favorite tools in the kitchen) to break up the Rosemary just a bit and and then used a small funnel to put them in the spice jars You could also store larger quantity’s in small mason jars.
This spice jar set is a great option since it includes the square jar (the square spice jars are my favorite since they store nicely in my spice drawer). It also has the funnel and labels included.

I used my hand dandy label maker to print labels and now my herbs are ready for use.

There’s something so satisfying knowing that the herbs I’m using were grown and processed organically by me.

I hope this has helped inspire you to try growing and drying your own herbs.
As always, thank you for stopping by the blog and saying hello !

Hugs!