Herb Collection and Storage
If your lucky enough to have an herb garden (see the “making and herb garden” page) then collecting herbs is no problem. In the morning sometime, go out with your Bolline (if you don’t have one, thats ok, you can just pick them with your hands, or get a special pair of scissors and cleanse and consecrate them instead) and carefully snip the leaves you want. I usually harvest my herbs in the fall, unless they are flowers, then I cut them when they flower. You don’t want to cut too much, or the plant will die and not come back again, unless its an annual like basil or parsley, then you can cut the whole plant because it wont be coming back anyway. You may want to bring a basket with you to place the herbs in. They say that to let a cut plant touch the ground is to let it loose its energy.

Then, take a small group of them and hang them in a dry place. If wind can get around them then thats good too. There needs to be good ventilation. Some herbs take longer to dry than others. If the leaves crumble easily, then they are ready to be put in bottles. You don’t want to place moist herbs in bottles because they will get moldy. If you have herbs that you bought, the obviously you wont need to dry them, so just stick them in the jars

Once you have the dried herbs, you will need bottles. You can store them in small plastic bags for a little while, but after awhile you will want to move them to bottles. Save any bottles you use, relish jars, jelly jars, tomato sauce jars, etc. We had a bunch of small jars that boullion cubs were in and they worked great for small amounts of herbs. Take a look at garage sales as well, you can usually find all kinds of bottles, but make sure they have a wide enough opening so the herbs will come in and out easily. Before you put them in though, clean them with hot water to get all the dust and dirt out of them. You can crumble the herbs before putting them in jars, or leave them whole Make sure to label the jars, or you may forget which one is which! Store them in a place where direct sunlight will not get to them and they should be good for about a year, then should be replaced.
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