Last year I cut my Rosemary plant back too far and it did not come back. This year I was told the Rosemary would not survive. My Rosemary plant currently is still thriving and I didn't want all of it to go to waste over the Winter so I decided I would try drying it and packaging it up to hand out at the holidays.
This is probably only 15% of my rosemary plant, you can barely tell I cut any off. I didn't want to experiment with too much of the plant, but I wanted enough that it if worked I wouldn't have to do a second batch.
Rosemary cleaned and stripped from the branches ready to dry in the dehydrator. Next time I want to try to dry it on the branches and see how well that works because lots of my Rosemary fell through the grids on the trays.
Rosemary in the dehydrator ready to go. I put all the trays on the dehydrator, but only put Rosemary in the top two trays to keep them away from the heat source and eliminate having to rotate the trays.
This is an old dehydrator that my parents used when I was a kid and passed on to me. Of course the manual was lost somewhere along the road and this was a test run in figuring out drying times. I wasn't able to run the dehydrator straight through because if I had left it on overnight it would have burnt the rosemary. I shut it off before we went to bed, it sat overnight and then I turned it back on the next day for a couple more hours. I might have over dried the Rosemary and in the future I will have to play around with drying times, but overall I think the end product was good.
Final product packaged up and ready to hand out, Happy Holidays!
My dehydrator looks similar to yours, but it is newer and made of plastic you can't see thru.. I have dried Rosemary (it has tray inserts that can't fall through), then I used that little coffee bean gadget to grind it into dust like.
ReplyDeleteThat takes some doing but sometimes I don't want the little needles in the meal..My Rosemary stays green through the winter here in NC.. in fact I just potted one and placed it on the Patio near the door so I don't have to go into the yard to get some when it's cold out :o)