Harvest, Dry, Garble

I’ll be honest, processing herbs is one of the most time consuming tasks I have on my little urban homestead. Harvesting is fun, drying is just downtime and waiting; and then it comes time to put the herbs away. The last thing you want is dusty, overly dry herbs that you can’t even remember what they are so timeliness is of the essence.

After more than a decade of harvesting and drying plants, I have a pretty good system down of how to keep them all identifiable and organized. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to mix up various types of mint once they dry down or, goodness knows confusing dried comfrey leaf with plantain. I currently grow 5 types of mint and 5 varieties of thyme. Keeping those separate is definitely important.

Collecting and Drying Herbs

In the herbal world identifying plants is multi-step process. You organoleptically, identify a plant using multiple sense. Using sight, smell, touch, and taste. One of the most important things about knowing a plant is to know what it looks like in all stages, from seed to seedling, to flowering and dead. It’s also important to know what a plant looks like fresh versus dry and to notice that quality in herbs that dried down. Some dry better than others. And almost everything should be dried out of direct sunlight but in a well ventilated place. Sun drying is fun and all, but I can’t tell you how devastating it is to come back to a tray of sun dried leaves or berries that have actually cooked or burned.

I will admit that the more I learn about herbal medicine and about the plants growing in my area, the more plants I harvest (sustainably I promise!) and the larger my collection of jars of dried plants gets. Soon I will need to build a floor to ceiling wall shelf for all these jars of plants. It’s become quite an obsession.

This year goldenrod is a new herb to me. This is the first year I’ve seen it growing in the wild and had to harvest some. I plan to make some into a herbal salve and some into a tincture. If you know anything about soldiago, please share in the comments below.

Grindelia, you can see in the back of the picture above is also known as sticky cup gum weed. It is one of my favorite herbs. It’s absolutely sticky, even after drying, but the intoxicating, resinous smell is divine. Grindelia is similar in use to calendula. It soothes skin aliments, cuts, burns, inflamation.

I’m always on the look out for substitute herbs that grow wild here in northern Utah. I want to grow herbs that are adapted to the area I live in.

You’ll notice on this particular day while I was making space on the drying rack I gathered herbs and put them sort of all together in baskets. These are all for my family or immediate friends whom I know do not have any plant allergies. Were these to be dried for products in the shop, I would certainly have kept the lemongrass separate from the goldrod (soldiago).

So after I’ve gathered all these baskets full of plants I take them to the processing table, put on a good podcast such as the Evolutionary Herbalism podcast with Sajah Popham or Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson; and then I go to work, garbling (the technical term for processing herbs) until my fingers are sticky with resin or irritated from being poked or stabbed or generally roughed up. This work although time consuming, smells amazing and is so satisfying.

I can fully relate to the squirrel that lives in my maple tree who tucks away nuts in some of my potted plants or who goes about gathering acorns and seeds from my sunflowers. I too am tucking away goodies for later.

Do you dry herbs? Do you want to have your own fresh herbs in the kitchen? Tell me about your experience or dreams about herbs and medicinal plants in the comments below.