I’ve always had this romantic image of how it would be to have an actual really big garden (not just a little backyard). Heavily influenced by Soulemama‘s beautiful posts of course. I just pictured myself wearing a pretty sunhat and flowy dresses, moving mindfully around the beds, harvesting a bit of this and a bit of that.
Well…. I have a really big garden now. Or maybe garden is not the right word for it. We have a lot of space around our house and I’m slowly working on getting it under control. It was actually quite empty when we bought the property. I think they used poison on it. That’s what they do around here..But after a year things started growing and now, after three years, the soil is back to normal.
Anyway, instead of walking around with shears and a basket, most of my gardening is done using a pickaxe. It’s hard and sweaty work. Wearing a flowy dress would be really inconvenient and my sunhats always fall or blow off. But it”s all good. I love it.
And yes, there is harvesting too. Mostly when a plant, bush or tree that is medicinally or culinary valuable needs trimming, so no mindful picking just a few leaves. Nope. Buckets full.
I thought I’d show you how I process and dry them.
First I cut the herbs into smaller bits, or remove the leaves (in this case that’s hard to do, and the stems are medicinal too).
Than I rinse them three times (no specific reason for that number, it just feels right).
I let them sit in strainers for two hours, to get rid of most of the water.
And then I spread them out on towels and cover them with other towels. I let it sit like that for about two days or so.
This herb is called Puta Luange (Stemodia maritima). I’m still getting to know it, but my books and the internet tell me that it’s good for diarrhea, periodontitis and wounds.
After those two days I transfer the drying herb to paper bags. Not too much per bag. Made that mistake once, ended up with a moldy mess.
And then I just put them on top of my cupboard for a few weeks. I shake the bags every day or so and usually herbs are completely dry after three or four weeks. When they are completely dry I transfer them to jars, but storing them in paper bags would also work. I left some bags with herbs when we left in April and those herbs were perfectly fine.
I know a lot of people prefer hanging herbs in bundles, or drying on racks, but this works very well for me in this house and this climate. That’s actually another one of those romantic images I had to let go off. My first bundles of drying herbs got eaten by little lizards, got sunburned, accumulated an awful amount of dust or fell apart before I could properly save them.
Oh well, this will do just fine. And maybe one day, when I find the perfect cupboard, my herb collection, that is now cramped into the two bottom shelves of the kitchen cupboard, will look like the romantic picture of an apothecary that I have in my head. Nope, I’ll never learn 😉
NOT A STATION 