Preserving Basil

One of the wonderful things about growing herbs to use in cooking is that they are so easy to preserve.

It hardly takes any time to get a good stash of herbs in your cupboard to use year round.

This morning I wrote about how I preserve Basil so that it will taste just as fresh 8 months from now as it does today. Come over to our new site and read about preserving Basil. It's easy!

While you are there, don't forget to Follow the new site using Google Friend Connect. Follow us on Twitter too - you will find us at @CaribooValley

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Drying Herbs and Freezing Rhubarb

(originally posted August 10, 2010....reposting because I am suffering from gardening withdrawals and need to see some pretty pictures of fresh food and flowers!)

I did a good harvest of the Berry Bed yesterday....

here's a bunch of chives. I snipped them and set them on cookie sheets to dry.

Over here, you can see another way I use to dry our herbs....

We will be moving the rhubarb plants into their new beds this year, so I pulled most of the rhubarb of the one plant.

It's important to remember, if you want rhubarb to continuing growing, do NOT pull all the stalks. Leave some!

A basket full of lovage! Lovage has a celery like taste, it is really good!

 I snipped the leaves and now they are also drying on cookie sheets.

I used the food processor on the rhubarb, measured 4 cups into each Ziplock...

now they are in the deep freeze, to be dealt with later!

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Lovin the Lovage

A few weeks ago, I gave our Lovage plant a really good trimming prior to moving it into the new bed by the Greenhouse....

trimmed the leaves from the stalk

and set them on a cookie sheet out of the way.

A couple times a day, I would give the leaves a good stir with my fingers....

A few days later, they were nice and dry to the touch....

Just using my fingers, I crumpled the leaves well....

and since they were definitely already dry...

I transferred them into a mason jar, labelled it and put them in the cupboard.

We'll use the lovage all winter long, adding it to stews and soups...

It has a wonderful but strong celery taste. We LOVE it!

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Garden Harvest

We're having the same heat wave the rest of the West is having....altho I do think we don't have it quite as bad as some places on Vancouver Island....here's the temp at 6:30 this evening.....

Dang it's hot...we stay in the house all afternoon, it is simply too hot to work outside much.

Pretty much the whole province is under Extreme Fire Alert. It is sooo very dry out there, it's kinda scary! Forest fires are reported on the news every night....and Kelowna area had a large fire last week....

The Gman cut a bunch of lovage today, so I sat at the table and snipped and snipped and snipped....I have the time and am still not up to full speed, so it makes me feel like I am contributing something, lol!

I'll leave the leaves in the shallow basket for at least 10 days or so....stir it every day and store the leaves in canning jars for winter time use.

We luvs us some lovage! It has a taste quite like celery, and we add it to winter time soups and stews.....yummy stuff!

Here's a basket full of harvested veggies that Gman's Mama and Papa will take home with them. They are planning on leaving around 8am tomorrow morning, in an attempt to beat some of the heat. Still, it will be about an 9 hour trip home, and part of that will be spent waiting in the ferry lineup.

So, in the basket, we have a couple heads of lettuce, turnips, onion, and a head of cabbage.

And a few garden pics....everything is overgrown and overrun with weeds....the Gman is doing his best to get things harvested. I can't weed yet, as it's too hard on my arm...oh well...c'est la vie! Right???

That grass around the Berry Bed is pretty darn long, lol!

Animal Garden....

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The Last Batches

I've been pulling the "last" of lots of stuff out of the gardens, and trying my best to deal with it all....a slow but steady journey!





I picked the last batch of strawberries, amazing to me they have still been producing, as the weather has definitely cooled down...a LOT! Washed em, threw em in da freezer, and yesterday moved them into a Ziplock and threw them back in da freezer.....

Picked the last of the onions, they are quite a bit smaller than the first batch, but they'll do.....snipped a bunch of the greens to set to dry.











And, the last batch of peppers....sliced them in half and set them on the shelf behind the woodstove to dry

On that shelf, I have onions, green onions, peppers, radish seed, and a bunch of other stuff drying....gotta keep the woodstove going now!

I'm also trying to get the garden weeded, spread manure and throw down fall rye.... Sphere: Related Content

More Herb Drying

We had an away day yesterday...one of our two deep freezes bit the dust awhile back, and so we have had to replace it.....

It's still sitting in its box in the back of the pickup, so we gotta take care of that this morning...

I've been talking to a few friends and it seems to be a consensus that summer is rapidly coming to an end.....I can scream "NOOOOOOOOOO" as long as I like, but it ain't gonna change anything.

Sooooo, I'm gonna have to start pulling a bunch of veggies out of the gardens, sniff sniff....the root veggies are fine to stay in for awhile longer....but I best get the zuccini out. And I'm still hoping to get more beans, but I dunno. They need the heat, and they just ain't getting enuf!

I've cut more herbs and have them inside. I've got them wrapped up, and they just need to get put in paperbags and hung up.....from the left there are Chives, more Lovage, a teeny tiny bit more Parsley, and a bunch of Dill.....it sure smells nice in the house right now, with all those herbs mingling together!

Today is the Gman's Birthday! So tonite, we're going to our local Legion for Dinner and a Dance, that should be lots of fun!

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Drying Herbs

Remember this?

http://countrylivinginacariboovalley.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-dry-oregano.html

Ok well since then I have tied and hung bags of lovage and parsley....that was several weeks ago. This morning I thought I'd finish the job if the herbs were completely dried out, and they were.

So I took them down and got started with the Lovage.....it has an incredible smell, it smells and tastes a lot like Celery, only stronger.....I love it!

I left it in the bag, and just stared "raking" down the stems with my fingers. I loosened off as much as I could.

Then I dumped them into the bowl, and started picking out the larger pieces of stems......

I threw out the stems...

Then put the remainder into a mason jar, threw a lid and ring on it, and called 'er done! Crush it as fine or leave it as large as you want to.....later on, when I have more time, I can sift thru the herbs again and pull out any more stems that I can find. Or, I can just put it as is into a coffee grinder.....Super Easy!

And so here is what I've dried so far this year.....a quart of Lovage, a quart of parsley, and a pint and a bit of Oregano. We'll enjoy using these during the winter, and using herbs helps us stay away from the salt shaker...always a Good Idea!

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