How I harvest and dry my dill
Apr 21, 2019 11:48:10 GMT -5
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Shawn, MaryL, and 1 more like this
Post by ASFx on Apr 21, 2019 11:48:10 GMT -5
Anyone who has grown dill knows it grows extremely fast, usually to the point where it’s growing right into your lights and shading out the plants next to it... but you don’t want to raise your lights yet because everything else is still small compared to the dill. Well here’s how i deal with that problem.
Any time my dill gets too tall or bushy, I cut it down so that just the baby inner growth remains, like this:
The above photo was taken on Thursday night. And now here it is again today (less than 3 days later) on Sunday morning:
Currently this dill plant happens to be a random dill pod I had to move out of my other box because I ran out of room. So for now, it will stay with my peppers. Dill grows much faster than peppers, so every time this dill gets up to the light, I cut off all the largest branches again, just leaving the inner growth to come back and do it all over again a few days later.
Here’s how I like to dry my dill:
Both of the dill bundles in this pic were harvested from the same plant in the above pics. After removing the dill branches, I tie them up by their stems with butcher twine (very tightly because the stems will shrink!), then tape them to the wall in my kitchen. In about 1-2 weeks, it’s fully dry and I can then squeeze it with my hands to make it all crumble into a small mason jar for later use. As an added bonus, herbs hanging on the wall make the kitchen smell really nice. I greatly prefer this drying method instead of using the oven or a dehydrator because this way, all the good essential oils in the herbs stay intact and don’t evaporate from heat. Dehydrating or baking herbs causes a lot of the oils to diffuse right into the air, and that’s no good. And hey, drying herbs on the wall is free.
Any time my dill gets too tall or bushy, I cut it down so that just the baby inner growth remains, like this:
The above photo was taken on Thursday night. And now here it is again today (less than 3 days later) on Sunday morning:
Currently this dill plant happens to be a random dill pod I had to move out of my other box because I ran out of room. So for now, it will stay with my peppers. Dill grows much faster than peppers, so every time this dill gets up to the light, I cut off all the largest branches again, just leaving the inner growth to come back and do it all over again a few days later.
Here’s how I like to dry my dill:
Both of the dill bundles in this pic were harvested from the same plant in the above pics. After removing the dill branches, I tie them up by their stems with butcher twine (very tightly because the stems will shrink!), then tape them to the wall in my kitchen. In about 1-2 weeks, it’s fully dry and I can then squeeze it with my hands to make it all crumble into a small mason jar for later use. As an added bonus, herbs hanging on the wall make the kitchen smell really nice. I greatly prefer this drying method instead of using the oven or a dehydrator because this way, all the good essential oils in the herbs stay intact and don’t evaporate from heat. Dehydrating or baking herbs causes a lot of the oils to diffuse right into the air, and that’s no good. And hey, drying herbs on the wall is free.
