Your Herbs Keep Their Oils Two Years When You Dry Them With This

Herbs dry best at 95-105F - warm enough to beat mould, cool enough that the volatile oils you grew them for do not evaporate first. An oven's lowest setting is usually 170, which makes fragrant hay. A thermostatic dehydrator holds the low band and finishes a batch overnight, humidity be damned.

It also does the tomatoes, apples and jerky - the herb setting is just the gentlest one.

Woody herbs - oregano, thyme, sage, rosemary - air-dry beautifully if they hang somewhere warm, dark and breezy. A collapsible mesh tower turns one ceiling hook into six shelves of drying space, keeps dust off, and folds flat for ten months a year. Save the dehydrator for the fussy soft herbs.

Dark matters: light bleaches both the colour and the flavour out of drying herbs.

Dried herbs in clear jars on an open shelf fade to grey dust in months - light destroys the oils faster than age does. Amber glass blocks the damaging wavelengths, and whole leaves crumbled at the pot keep flavour years longer than anything ground in advance.

Dry completely before jarring: one bendy stem moulds the whole jar.

Stripping thyme leaves by pinch is fiddly enough that the second half of the patch never gets harvested. A stripper - a palm card with graduated holes - pulls the stem through and shears every leaf off in one motion. Twenty minutes of pinching becomes two of pulling.

Works in either direction: strip fresh for the pan or dried into the jar.

Six months in, unlabelled jars of dried herbs are a guessing game the nose does not always win. Chalk labels rewrite each season, survive the shelf, and make the difference between an apothecary and a cupboard of mystery greens. Date them - dried herbs fade after a year and the label is what tells you.

Label the LID too; shelf jars get identified from above.