On Drying Herbs

When I visited Jeremy, he let me take some of his herbs. I took comfrey leaves, spearmint, peppermint, and lavender. Near my home I collected Chaparral.

I dried these herbs and there are some things I learned.

#1 -  Make sure you have enough thin paper bags or cloth bags in which to dry all your herbs (unless you have a screen or dehydator). I only had a few paper bags and so I tried to dry some of these herbs in cardboard boxes which caused the large comfrey leaves to rot. I did end up with about a pint of usable comfrey leaves, but had they all dried correctly, I would have had more like 3 quarts.

#2 - I went crazy on the lavender and picked a "ton", but I did not pick enough spearmint leaves or peppermint leaves. I ended up with 2 quarts of lavender leaves/flowers, and a quart of sticks (because I couldn't bear to toss out all the sticks), and only a pint or less each of peppermint and spearmint.

#3 -  Chaparral has a rather sticky feel when it's fresh and so I didn't know what to put it in, so I layered 3 plastic shopping bags and put the Chaparral in them, as a rather temporary measure. But I never ended up taking it out. The bag was open and rolled down a bit so there was a really wide mouth, and every so often I would turn the Chaparral so that what was facing the air took turns. It ended up drying perfectly, and none of it molded. I got less than a quart, but that's okay as it is only a five or ten minute walk to get Chaparral that has not been breathed on by auto exhaust..

All in all, other than losing so much comfrey, I consider this a success.

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As you may have noticed from the previous posts, my friend has two kinds of sunflowers. One is the kind that is simply beautiful, and the other kind is the large head that gives sunflower seeds to birds and humans. I think he also has or had Jerusalem artichokes which also look like sunflowers when they're in the flower.  He was kind enough to, a few days ago, bring me one of the sunflower seed heads. I put it in a box face up and let it dry. Then I noticed the back was too moist and starting to mold, so I peeled off part of the back and left the flower face down in the box. Some of the seeds came out by themselves, and this morning after I finished filling up my bottles with dried herbs, I squeezed the head here and there, and more of the seeds came out, so I took a picture of it in the box.

I think this whole experience was very awesome.

Note:  I wrote this post on my phone, and with the help of voice to text which is a very irritating thing, and I would never recommend it, but at least I didn't have to turn my computer on. I only say this so that if there are parts of this post make no sense or have some blatant typos, that is why. Voice to text comes up with some really really weird words most of the time.

Also the damn Google Blogspot keeps jumping up to a higher paragraph every time I am trying to write or read the very last paragraph that I wrote/am writing. Definitely not something I want to do again.  Much, much better to go through the hassle of turning on my computer.

Edit [on my computer] to add: I forgot to mention the dandelion roots. I also got a bunch of them. After having them for a few days, I scrubbed them, put them on a paper towel on a shelf (metal; the kind that has a lot of air flow) with a paper towel over them, and let them dry. I could not get all of the dirt off the roots. What I'd do differently is let them dry for a week (or whatever seemed right), then use a brush to remove the dried dirt. Getting them wet, especially if they've been grown in any type of clay soil, only packs the mud/dirt harder into the many tiny crevices in the roots.