Monday 5 August 2013

Drying Lavender

The last few weeks our garden has all come into flower and fruit, so I've been having fresh tomatoes and rocket from the garden in my sandwiches (So good!) and the lavender was smelling lovely.
So I trimmed off a few of the stalks with flowers, making sure to leave a few on there for the bees (bees love lavender and we've got to help them out) and to make sure we get more next year
I was left with a good amount of lavender, although they had different length stalks. All the things I read said to cut them off just above the leaves and this varied per stalk.
All the tutorials I did read varied on how to actually dry the stuff though! Most agreed they need to be out of sunlight to keep their colour but they varied in how to actually do it. So I thought I'd try a few ways and see what worked best. One said to tie each stalk individually then tie bunch them together and hang upside down (this seemed a lot of effort!)
Others said just to bundle together, and hang upside down or just leave in a cool dark place, so I did 2 bundles just tied together 
 I also left a few untied as some tutorials didn't ask for it to be bunched together
One bundle and some of the individual ones are just in a pot on the table, this room doensn't have any windows so gets minimal sunlight
That's mint in the bottom, we had some left from mojito making a while back and Tom thought it would smell nice in there. I like it as a table decoration.
The individually tied bunch is hung in the wardrobe in the hallway
 The other bundle is hung in my wardrobe making my clothes smell nice
 And the rest of the individual stalks are in the bottom of Toms wardrobe
We'll see which ones work best, the bundles and individual stalks are definitely the easiest and I can't see how tying them individually has any more benefit...

When it's dry I'm going to try making some drawer and wardrobe fresheners, hopefully they will be pretty easy as my sewing isn't great!

The garden is a bit changed about at the moment and we were making mojitos because just before I did this we had a barbecue so that garden looked like this
First barbecue in our little garden and it worked out ok, not too cramped, we just need to put the garden back together!

1 comment:

  1. dried lavedar flowers are yummy in lemonade and cupcakes too

    so impressive that you got a nice harvest from a container garden

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