Garden Journal - Harvesting The Basil

The basil in our greenhouse has been growing like a weed !

So yesterday my wife harvested a load of it. There's still quiet a bit left on the plant, so it should grow back and give us at least one more batch before winter.

There are also enough leaves left to be able to pull off the occasional one to use fresh in cooking, but the idea today is to harvest leaves while they are at the perfect stage and dry them so they're preserved to use over winter.

Here's the colander full of the plucked leaves, just before washing.

After washing the basil, it was put on kitchen towel and dried in the microwave. This is a job which has to be done very, very carefully ! Regular checks are needed every few seconds; the goal is to totally dry the moisture out but not reduce them to ashes.

This also makes the kitchen smell amazing ! The aroma of basil is just delicious.

By the end of the process, the dried leaves are crispy enough to crumble up and put in an empty spice jar. Before being tightly closed, my wife also put in one of those little packets of desiccant granules. Both the jar and the desiccant were very much re-purposed, so nothing new had to be bought.

So there we are - one more step in the journey towards self-sufficiency, and one more thing we won't have to buy from the supermarket. It'll be interesting to see how much basil we'd need to not need to buy any at all !

Photos by my wife, used with permission