- Having a prolific and lush herb garden is a staple
and it should be in every single gardener's front
or backyard.
But there comes a time when you actually have
too many herbs, so I'm going to show you in this video
exactly how to dehydrate every herbs in my garden.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening.
We moved this herb bed from over there to over here,
we're redesigning the entire backyard right now
and this is a great time of year to take this parsley,
this basil, this sage, this lavender,
and figure out actually how to preserve it
for the long-term.
We're gonna do that first by showing you
just how to hang dry your herbs,
but then we're also going to look at using a dehydrator.
So cultivate that like button,
and I will send you via smellovision this beautiful sage
straight through to your screen
and let's get into the video.
By the way, this video is sponsored by Excalibur Dehydrator,
the dehydrator company which we are going to use later on
to turn this into some beautiful, beautiful spices.
The first thing to know is timing for harvesting your herbs.
In the morning is going to be the best time,
it's when they're at their most fresh.
The heat of the day hasn't really messed
with the plant too much,
maybe there's not enough water in the soil
and they start to wilt a little bit,
not great for the flavor.
Also the essential oil content is highest
in the beginning of the day.
So if you come out in the morning
and you take a little sprig or a big sprig like this,
it's gonna smell a lot more fresh and vibrant in the morning
than it would in the afternoon or the evening.
And this basil smells really good,
this is Greek columnar basil.
I'll say when you're harvesting your herbs,
it's a great time to also prune them
to stimulate more growth.
We've talked about this on the channel before,
but let's take a look at this guy right here.
What I wanna do instead of just clipping off
any random part on this stem,
I can just come in and clip right above a growth node,
just like that and now these two will branch out
a little bit more, and with Greek columnar basil,
it's actually a great way to make it bush out
instead of get really columnar
and tall like it is right now.
So coming in in the morning, let's start harvesting.
We'll steal a little rosemary now, same principle,
letting this bush a little bit
by pruning right above a node.
Grab one more for good measure here.
When you're grabbing sage, this is the last one
that we're grabbing right now
that follows that same pruning rule,
but it also grows typically a lot more clumped and bushy
just straight from the outset.
So if you don't wanna be very particular
about grabbing your sage, you don't have to be,
I just can't seem to help it.
So I've got a nice handful for the dehydrator.
Oregano is a fantastic one.
I kind of just come through and almost grab it in clumps
and just cut clumps out like this
and I try to thin out areas
that maybe are a little bit overgrown.
It's getting to be fall so this is not looking
in its most prime state, but also a great time
to preserve what's left and what looks good.
Now as a little bonus I did say herbs and spices.
I'm gonna harvest for you guys some of my homegrown turmeric
and my home grown ginger.
It looks really terrible right now up top,
but below is what we really care about.
With ginger, you actually wanna see these start to fall
and brown a little bit,
and I'm going to go really close
because it's a very satisfying pull on both the ginger
and the turmeric.
Take a look how ginger grows horizontally underground
with an underground rhizome
and you can just pull them straight out of the ground.
One of the more satisfying harvest you'll ever see.
Let's go.
Ooh, and look at that.
I'm gonna show you how do you hydrate this as well.
Turmeric sometimes doesn't come out of the ground as easy,
but I'm gonna give it a good yank.
You might have to wash this off a little bit.
Ooh.
Oh boy, it's stuck in there.
You can start to see it peeking out here,
but let's clean this off.
The last herb I'm gonna grab, it smells so good.
If you can guess it drop it in the comments,
but it is of course lemon grass
as it flops all around my face.
I've grown this a lot, I've propagated it a lot,
it's a fantastic ornamental grass, honestly,
but of course you can harvest it.
I like to come in with a knife
and gently separate these individual stalks
away from the main base.
So I'll come in like that, didn't feel so gentle
in my heart right there, but take a look,
you get these individual stalks.
Now I'll show you a little quick tip
right before we get into the actual preparation
of these herbs.
If you ever do wanna propagate your lemon grass
in a very simple way, even this little chunk right here,
just this, I've planted literally that before
and it's grown into some huge ones.
In fact, it grew into this one right here.
So you can take a lemon grass like this,
especially if it's got a little chunk of root here
and just cut this piece off, just that very bottom base
and it'll propagate directly from this right here.
So pro-tip, takes a little bit longer but can be worth it.
I'm going to harvest the rest of these
and let's get to prepping these herbs.
I've got all the herbs that I'm going to preserve
and dehydrate in this video, so we have our basil,
and I wanna talk about how to prep them for the dehydrator
or for hang drying them because the time-honored
and oldest way to dehydrate is to grab
a bundle of lemon grass like this,
tie it up, put it into maybe a brown paper bag
and hang it somewhere for about two weeks
and then you're done.
But if you do wanna speed it up,
we're gonna of course do that.
So let's take a look at basil.
Now, if you have a larger leaf to basil
like a classic Genovese basil,
then it can make sense to just remove the leaves completely
and dehydrate it leaves only.
You certainly can do that here as well
if you want a really easy way to do that,
what you wanna do is just grab the top and then pull down
while holding the main stem, so just pull down like that,
sometimes the stem breaks on you,
but generally you're gonna get most of the leaves off
that way and then you can create a little pile
and then that's gonna be how you dehydrate.
Now, you can of course take something like a rosemary
and just leave it on the stem.
The problem with that is that
it's going to dramatically increase the dehydrating time
that you have.
So, you know, think about it, it's a hard woody stem,
sort of a succulent-esque type of leaf,
it's gonna take longer anyways,
but it's also kind of annoying
to strip rosemary off of its stem like this,
so you can just pop it directly in,
but remember your dehydration time is going to increase.
So that's a couple of thoughts on how to prep.
Something like sage right here,
this is a great example of one that it's very easy
to remove the leaves and it seems like
that's just gonna be the way to go
instead of putting it in with all of the stems.
So in this example, great time to just strip it
of its leaves, collect those in a pile
and then move on to the next one.
But as we get into some of the more cumbersome herbs
or spices like our turmeric,
this big old honking hock of turmeric right here,
and our ginger,
you can't really put ginger or turmeric
in a dehydrator like this, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
And so what you wanna do is grab your best chef's knife
and take cross sections or just slices
and you want them to be as uniform as possible.
And so I'll go lengthwise across the ginger like this,
and just come in and really try to do
maybe like a millimeter thick slices here
as uniformly as I can.
I think I made that one a little bit too thick,
but that's okay.
No one ever complains about it being too thick guys.
Okay, I'm sorry about that one.
All right. Let's move on.
So you can see what I'm doing here,
just really thin uniform slices.
This is a lot easier to spread out across the surface
of the dehydrating trays
and it's gonna dehydrate much more uniformly.
When we get into something like the lemon grass,
well, you're not gonna be able to fit this, are you?
So what you can do is, like I said,
chop these bottoms off really quickly,
use these for propagations,
and then I kinda like to split it into leaf and stem.
So where the leaf begins is right about there,
so I'm just gonna cut that off and I find the stalks,
I give my stalks actually to a friend of mine named Supani,
she makes incredible Thai food here in San Diego,
so I kinda just give it to her
and see what she does with it.
You can do a lot with these lemon grass stalks
especially in Thai cuisine,
which is one of my favorite things on earth to eat.
So I might separate these and save these for later.
You can dehydrate them though, but with these,
you just wanna cut them into somewhat uniform chunks
as well, almost like you're dicing something.
So if you think about it kind of like composting,
where the more surface area, the quicker it gets done,
the thinner you make these slices,
the quicker they're going to dehydrate,
but you don't have to, but I'm going to anyways.
So let's go ahead and just chop this out.
Lemon grass can be a little bit fibrous,
you're just gonna break this lemon grass down
into something that you can more easily spread out
across the surface of a tray.
Okay, I'm gonna keep on working on this
and I'll see you over at the dehydrator.
We're here in the epic garage in my preservation station
as I'm calling it.
So I have a freeze dryer below,
but we're not talking about that today,
we're talking about the Excalibur dehydrator.
I'll put the exact model of the one that I'm using
in the video description.
It is incredible.
I've been salivating over these things
since I had my very first garden way back in the day.
So what you do is you just gently take these trays out,
you can take them all the way out if you want to,
I kinda like to leave them in and just kinda prop them
as I lay my plant matter on top.
This one has one, two, three, four, five six,
seven, eight, nine, this one has nine different trays,
and I'm gonna separate the plants and the herbs
that I'm putting on per tray
because they're gonna have different drying times.
So for example, if we're taking our turmeric slices,
we are slicing these as thin as was reasonable,
but they're still gonna take quite a bit longer
than something like the oregano or the basil.
So these all go on their own row
and you could probably put ginger on the same row as well.
But with herbs especially,
especially the more sensitive and tender leaved ones,
you wanna go low and slow, kinda like a good barbecue,
but we're barbecuing plants here.
So I would say 95 degrees Fahrenheit
if your dehydrator can do that and then as long as possible,
maybe 12 plus hours but of course you wanna test and check
which I'm gonna show you once I've finished stacking
these up.
(upbeat music)
Now they're all filled up I'm gonna set my temp,
so I'm gonna go to 95, that low and slow idea,
I'm gonna crank my time up at least
into the 8 hour range, let's go to 12
and I'll check periodically,
and then all you have to do is click start.
All right, let's give this a check and see how we're doing.
The moment of truth.
What we wanna see is a lot smaller pieces
which I'm already seeing on this turmeric here
and then you wanna get a bit of a crunch.
So take a look, much dryer and then you want that snap.
Here we go.
Yeah.
Now let's check one of the herb drawers right here,
much smaller.
Again, you want that crackle.
Totally getting it there.
Sage, even these large leaves, snapping open, perfect.
We have our herbs, ginger and turmeric well dehydrated,
the snap factor is high.
I'm going to show you how you can store them
with just a mason jar or if you wanna get fancy,
how you can grind them into your own spice blends.
So up here in the herb rack I've got my sage,
which at this point if you wanted to,
you could snap off anything you didn't want
to go into your herb blend,
but I'm just gonna leave these as is.
On the rosemary, what I could have done before
is just leave the stems on like I mentioned.
I took them off here, but if you see any stem pieces,
it's way easier to kind of strip them off now
when it's dehydrated than it would have been earlier on.
Now, what I can do is just save these,
rehydrate them for soups or salads or whatever I wanna do.
But what I'm gonna do here is collect them all into one bowl
and then grind them up into my own version
of Italian seasoning.
So in these go into my little spice grinder.
I like a spice grinder instead of a food processor
'cause it can get the spices much more finely ground.
So shove these in, press the top down, couple of pulses
and right away I've got quite a nice spice blend in here.
So with this little Kev's Italian seasoning,
I can just toss this in a mason jar or a spice jar,
maybe throw a silica packet in if I want to
and I've got a beautiful spice blend to use in my cooking.
Now with the turmeric, you can actually make
a super finely ground turmeric powder
just by collecting and grinding it.
With turmeric, you're just gonna wanna pulse it way more
to get it more finely ground.
And there you go, you get that beautiful golden powdery,
highly staining turmeric powder
so you gotta be careful with this stuff,
but man it is potent, I can smell it right now.
It is perfect for soups, stews and even turmeric tea
or golden milk which I really like.
So I've got my little Italian spice,
I have my homegrown and home ground turmeric powder.
Look at the color on this, absolutely insane.
I feel like you could use it as a dye,
I'm sure that's actually something that it's used for.
And then the lemon grass if you remember,
I just left this as is.
I could dice this up a little bit more,
I don't really wanna blend it into a powder,
it's great to steep and just make some lemon grass tea,
you can combine it with lemon balm,
and the ginger I left as it was just sliced up
and dehydrated, probably use this for a soup or something.
But I'm sitting back out here in the herb garden,
you can see some of the plants that we harvested from.
It's that easy to take the stuff
that you're growing in the garden,
whether you have a bumper crop in the season
or it's coming to the end of the season
and you wanna preserve stuff throughout the winter,
the dehydrator is a fantastic tool.
So thanks to Excalibur Dehydrator for sponsoring the video,
allowing me to make some of this awesome stuff.
Link to them in the video description.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.