Drying Herbs

Hubby brought home a nice little bag of Comfry leaves this morning, from one of our Amish friends!! LOVE it when he finds something cool to bring me like that! LOL

I use Comfry in my herbal salve, and it's always nice to find someone who grows the herbs I use in it, so I don't have to buy them online...since I can't seem to grow much myself lately (or ever LOL). I knew I was getting lower than I really wanted to be with my herbs, so knew I would have to hopefully find some money to get some ordered...this just means I have one less to order...although it won't make near as much as one would think, once they are all dried...it should be enough for 2 or 3 rounds of making salve at least, which should get me a ways further down the road!

Herb's don't take all that long to dry, when you put them in an electric dehydrator...yes you could air dry them, but it's so much nicer to get them dried and put away as fast as possible. They shrink up a lot so while the tray's were full when we started out, by the time the leaves were dried and crispy there was lots of empty room left on the trays. The ones above were half to 3/4's dry...still have a little ways to go, but should be done in a couple hours anyway I'd think!

Love my dehydrator!  I don't get to dry as much as I'd like, since our garden didn't do well...but I've used it several times this summer already, and hopefully will more as fall progresses.  This is the first time I've dried an herb...and was thrilled with how it turned out!

Today Mom and I also got more tomato sauce canned up!  Fun times here on Hillbilly Hill Farm...to me anyway!  *giggle*  Probably boring to a lot of others, but that's OK.  The beans I started fermenting the other day are bubbling...not to sure how soon we should "try" them, but probably will in a day or two.

I did finally cut into the first block of cheddar cheese I made, today...it wasn't to bad tasting, but was kinda dry.  Not really something I'd want to eat by itself, but we had some on our baked potato tonight, and it was fine...so maybe it will be OK on/in things.  Maybe one of these days we can see how it melts.  Now to study and maybe figure out why it was dry.  Probably won't be doing a whole lot of that till winter, but hopefully I will remember to do it then.  LOL

That was pretty much what filled MY day...a good day spent with my wonderful mother!  Tomorrow we are going to go to one of the Amish communities around, to do a little shopping, so I'll get to spend the day with her again!  One of the many blessings we received with our move last year was more time with my parents for a change...although we seem to keep busy separately a lot, we do get to spend more time together too!  :-))