A Guide To Harvesting Herbs

The herbs I have here are used a lot in cosmetics. I have rosemary which I would infuse either in water to make a hair rinse or in oil to use for a hot oil treatment in my hair. I have mint, lovely mint, which is very cooling and refreshing! I use that in foot treatments; it's also quite deodorizing.

Now, sage- sage is especially useful in hair care products. It darkens those “mother”, shall we say "white hairs" and then finally, here I have lemon balm, or Melissa which is very good at focusing attention. I put it in an oil burner while my son is doing his GCSE revision.

Hopefully, it helps him revise. I have a lot of fresh herbs that I use in cooking or in making cosmetics, and I want to be able to preserve these herbs so that I can use them whenever I need them. One of the ways of preserving your herbs is to lay them out on a piece of waxed paper so that the air around them gradually dries them.

This is a fairly slow process but it intensifies the flavor of the herbs. You would need to turn the herbs every so often to make sure that the air is completely circulating around them. So you'd need space to be able to tuck them out of the way.

My preferred way is to hang my herbs from a beam in the kitchen or from a beam in the garage so that they're just hanging in the air allowing the air to circulate around them. So if I just take my little bunch of lovely purple sage that I have here, and tie the ribbon around it, I would then be able to take my sage and hang it from a beam or from a hook. Now, there's no wax paper touching this sage at all, so that the air can circulate around and dry the sage.

And then when I was ready to use the sage either in a cosmetic oil infusion or in cooking, I could just pick a leaf off, crumple it up and use that as my sage. That's how I would harvest and preserve my herbs! .