Drying and storing

The parent page has the method right: harvest dry mid-morning, hang in warm dark airflow, store whole in labelled jars. This is about the failure that turns a year's harvest into a jar of mould, which happens at the step between drying and storing.

Dry enough is not what it feels like

Crackle-dry describes the leaves. The stems and midribs are where the water is, and they dry slower than everything around them.

A bundle that snaps and crumbles at the leaf edge can still hold enough moisture in the thicker parts to support mould once it is sealed in a jar. The jar then equalises: the wet parts give up their moisture to the dry parts, everything ends up damp, and the batch is lost.

The tests that actually mean something:

• Stems snap, they do not bend. A stem that folds is not dry. This is the real test and it is stricter than the leaf test.
• Leaves crumble to fragments between the fingers rather than tearing.
• Roots and barks snap cleanly and show no give at all. They take much longer than leaves, often two to three weeks rather than one.
• Weight stops changing. If you are serious, weigh the batch daily at the end; when two consecutive days match, it is done.

Strip the leaves from thick stems before drying if the stem is not what you want. It removes the slowest-drying part of the plant and halves the risk.

Conditioning, the step nobody does

This is the addition that saves batches, it costs nothing, and almost no household guide mentions it.

1. Put the dried material loosely into jars, not packed, and seal them.
2. Leave them somewhere you will see them, and look every day for a week.
3. Any condensation on the glass, any softening, any smell of damp, means it is not dry. Tip it back out and dry it further.
4. Shake the jars daily during that week, which redistributes moisture and exposes anything hiding at the bottom.
5. Only after a week with no condensation does it go into the long-term store.

A jar that fogs on day three has told you something that would otherwise have appeared in February as a ruined harvest. The whole check is a week of glancing at a shelf.

Why whole beats powdered

The parent page says store whole, not powdered, and the reason is worth knowing because it explains the whole storage strategy.

What you are keeping is mostly volatile. The aroma is the active fraction in many of these plants, and volatile means it leaves. Grinding multiplies the surface area, so a powder loses in months what whole leaf loses in a year or more.

So:

• Store whole. Grind at the point of use, in the quantity you need.
• A jar you can smell through the lid is a jar that is losing its contents. Check the seal.
• Buy or keep a small pestle and mortar rather than powdering a batch in advance.
• The exception is anything you use daily, where convenience wins and it gets used before it fades.

A rough guide to how long, and the parent page's figures are right: leaves and flowers about a year, roots, barks and seeds two to three. Treat those as when to replace rather than when it becomes useless.

The four things that degrade it

Light, heat, oxygen and moisture. Every storage decision is one of these four.

Freeze new material for several days before it goes into the store. It kills insect eggs and larvae that came in with the harvest, which is the other way a jar is discovered ruined. The same trick the food chapter recommends for flour and grain, for the same reason.

Label everything with the plant, the part, and the date, in pen. The parent page says to add the harvest to the app's inventory with dates, which is the right habit: an unlabelled jar a year on is a jar nobody trusts and everybody throws away.

Judging it a year later

Smell is the primary test, and it is a good one.

• It should smell strongly of itself. Rub a little between your fingers and warm it first, which releases what is left.
• Faint, hay-like, or of nothing means the volatiles have gone. It is not dangerous, it is just no longer doing anything. Compost it.
• Musty, damp or sour means mould. Bin the jar's contents, wash and dry the jar properly.
• Colour holds up as a secondary check. Green gone to brown, or bright flowers gone to beige, usually means light exposure and lost potency.
• Anything moving in the jar is an insect problem. Bin it, and freeze the next batch first.

Replace on a schedule rather than on inspection. Leaves and flowers annually, at the same point every year, which for most of this list is the following summer's harvest. That way the store refreshes itself as a by-product of gardening, which is the only version of this that survives more than two years of good intentions.