Tips for Harvesting and Drying Herbs

As we enter the height of the summer growing season, I wanted to share a few tips on the best ways to harvest the garden’s abundance:

🌼 Be sure to hang or lay out herbs to dry immediately after harvest, in a place with good ventilation that is out of direct sun

🌼 The best time of day to harvest herbs is in the early morning—this is when their medicine is most potent

🌼 In my experience, herbaceous plant material dries down to at least 1/4 its fresh weight. Roots perhaps half their weight when fresh? Plan ahead for this! Take notes on these rates for next season. If you are counting on larger quantities of dried material, grow abundantly, trade with friends, let people know what you need and let the earth know what you need

🌼 Drink your herbal teas however tf you want; in herbalism we consider tea made from 1 ounce of dried plant material in 8 ounces of water to be a medicinal dosage—which is a lot of plant material! Plan ahead. Start storing away and locking down your herbs early

🌼 You wouldn’t pick a tomato until its color had changed from green to red, right? There are also optimal stages in herbs’ life cycles. You want to catch them at their best, when their medicine is the sweetest & most potent. Each herb has an optimal timeframe for harvest: some are best in flower, some before flowers appear, some after flowers die back. Take the time to investigate, research and seek out medicine people to understand this equation for each plant

🌼 I can’t share a one-size-fits all formula for when in the season to harvest herbs, but a few things to keep in mind are that root medicines should be harvested in fall, when the plant sends its energy back to the root. Early spring is okay for perennial roots too, but I really prefer fall. Barks are best harvested in spring when sap begins running through the tree again. Berries whenever ripe. Herbaceous plant material : varies depending on the plant!

🌼 In working with medicinal plants, the earth is asking us to practice what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life In Capitalist Ruins, calls “the art of noticing.” Be open, ask questions, attune to the earth under your feet & bring as much humility to the process as u can muster 🌼