Herbs from garden - fancy websites instruct to gather them just after dawn for potency, but ain't nobody got time for that.
Rinse off all sorts of bugs and pollutants, toss any damaged plant tissues. Would be better to not wash in water at all, but with the wildlife abounding in our pots...
Don't bother to remove leaves from stems - easier to do later, if at all necessary (e.g. tea herbs just keep the stems anyway).
Recommended temperature for drying herbs is supposed to be 35-50C. Use 40-50C setting on the dehydration cabinet because even though the temperature in the drier was 20C lower than it claimed to be (last I checked with the thermometer stolen from the smoking pot), setting it to 60-70 (so in reality 40-50) is too high and results in everything turning uniformly dark brown. Still qualifies as food, but has less taste and just looks ugly.
Single layer of herbs like sage or mint, even if they look fluffy enough that plenty of air should be able to pass through a multi-layer pile too.
Squish easily floating stuff like Calendula petals between two trays, or they'll keep turning up in every single impossible place throughout the following week.
Cover bottom of the machine with a sheet of oven paper.
Put thyme onto the lowest trays, because as soon as it dries, it'll start crumbling through the grate-tray onto whatever is below - in this case, the paper. Pro tip - to remove the leaves still stuck to the sprigs, just rub them agains the metal grates a bit.
Takes 2-3ish hours, depending on the specific herb - thyme and calendula are done in the blink of an eye, the fleshy grapefruit mint takes forever. So check the state of the herbs a lot more frequently than when drying vegetables or other juicy stuff, and take them out in batches when 'ripe'.
Oh and during that time the entire house smells vaguely of rosemary + toothpaste, heh.
Find out that you have, once again, ran out of any decent containers to store the dried stuff in and make do with whatever.
Cheers,
Hedi
