How to Store Fresh Herbs During Winter

No one likes paying $3-4 USD for herbs in the winter. And most of us prefer not to buy and consume herbs that have traveled thousands of miles in the back of a truck or bottom of a boat before reaching us. And if you’re like us you might have the “problem” of an overabundance of herbs in your garden at the end of harvest season. What’s one to do with an herb surplus when temperatures reach 35 degrees Farenheit (1 degree Celcius)? Well, this is a good problem to have. You have a few options:

• Dig the plants out of the garden, place them securely in a pot and bring them inside until next season
• Freeze your remaining crop and tap into your fresh herbs all winter
• A combination of both options

The first option of digging the plants out and bringing them inside requires careful transporting and a window with a lot of light. This option often results in a quick death (~1 month) of your herbs and a high electricity bill.

How Can I Store Fresh Herbs During Winter?

As for the second option, you wrap your garden fresh parsley in a sealable plastic bag, effectively forming a “parsley stick.” Be sure to remove as much air from the bags as possible. Whenever needed, you can remove the frozen parsley sticks.

Here are pictures of me washing, storing, and freezing a “parsley stick.”

Fresh Picked Italian Parsley from our garden

Washed Parsley

Remove as much air from bag as possible before sealing

Place Parsley in Freezer

Whenever you’re ready to use the parsley, remove it from the bag and cut your desired portion from your parsley stick and put the remainder back in the freezer for later use.

Another method is what I like to call “parsley popsicles.” Fill an ice tray with parsley and add water on top. A good ratio is 90% parsley and 10% water. You essentially create “parsley popsicles.” When you’re ready to use the herbs, just pop the ice cubes out of the tray and let them melt or pop the cubes right into a soup or stew. Thank you to our friend Gerri for the tip on this method. She’s been gardening for years and effectively uses the parsley popsicle method each year.

Parsley Cubes, Image via Rebecca Moss Gardening

So what approach will we take? We’re going to freeze most of our parsley, mint, and rosemary but we’ll also keep a portion of it alive in a pot inside. For new gardeners, it’s important to experiment. Experiment (whether failed experiment or not) is the best teacher. We’ll keep you posted on our progress. 🙂

Note: It’s best to use frozen parsley in dishes that are independent in the aesthetic aspects of parsley. In other words, use frozen parsley in stews, shakes, soups and marinades but do not use as a garnish since it doesnt look as beautiful as fresh parsley.

All of these options present viable winter season options for organic, local, low cost, home grown herbs, as opposed to store bought mystery herbs. The same method can be applied to other herbs such as cilantro, rosemary, thyme, and mint. Happy storing! 🙂

What are some of your successes, failures, and adventures you’ve had in your garden while preparing for the winter?

Compost Tea as a Fertilizer

We experimented with our own version of compost tea this summer. It happened organically (haha 😉 ) when a tub of our compost (mostly banana & orange peels) started to form liquid nutrients at the bottom. Upon researching this topic, it turns out that compost tea is a well known method for growing and protecting an organic garden. In fact, compost tea making companies and centers have started to sprout up in the US on the west coast.

Our Compost Tea

Side Note: Notice that we have several pieces of newspaper built into this compost tub. The reason is that the newspaper provides carbon and prevents our compost from growing mold. Eventually the newspaper decomposes and it too becomes part of the soil.

After a couple days of letting the organic liquid accumulate inside the tub, we poured the compost tea into the soil surrounding one of our kale plants. Our rationale was that providing liquid nutrients directly to a plant’s root system will help it grow. Thus we’d create a natural way of improving taste, quality, and yields.

As humans wash down supplements with water to increase absorption, we did the same with the compost tea and kale plant, giving the area ample water to let the compost tea seep into the roots. Three weeks later, we could see a noticeable difference in growth.

We added compost tea to the soil surrounding the second plant in from the left:

Little did we know that the effectiveness of compost tea is a widely debated topic in the organic gardening community. Some believe this to be an effective practice for growth and insect repelling while others believe its effectiveness is overstated.

Research is well underway in determining answers to these questions and our readers might ask where we stand on the issue. We’re firm believers in the belief that the quality of the soil is strongly correlated with the quality of the food grown. We can only speak to the above experiment and as you can see the kale plant we fertilized with compost tea absolutely flourished (as did the entire row compared to the row behind it.)

Two months later, the plant that we applied compost tea is still the biggest yielder:

We’re far from experts on this topic but felt that this experiment was worth sharing with our readers. Before embarking on the compost tea journey, be sure to research the safest and most prudent way to do so but also beware of outlets trying to sell aquatic pumps and all sorts of unnecessary gadgets.

Have any of you used compost tea in your garden? What have your experiences been like?