Since Garrison and I have been married, I’ve bought/been gifted SO many little plants. A lot of them are year-round perennials that happily live out the winter months in our apartment, but we’ve been given (more like, I’ve bought) a bunch of herbs and veggies that only live for a season. This kinda makes the colder months hard for me, because all my beautiful, flourishing plants shrivel up and die. Pretty much the saddest thing ever, right?

But now that it’s getting colder outside, I’ve started trying to find ways to preserve what’s left of our cute little apartment garden. We had a beautiful bunch of herbs this year—lavender, basil, thyme, and oregano. I couldn’t stand to see them all wilt away, so I started testing out different ways of preserving fresh herbs, and here’s what I landed on:

Drying out fresh herbs is literally the easiest thing ever.

I used two different methods to dry out oregano (pictured) this year. They’re both so simple & the whole process smells amazing. Once you’re finished, your fingers will probably smell lovely like the herb, too.

The easiest & most familiar way to dry out your herbs is by binding and hanging them, like I did in the first picture. I snipped off bundles of oregano, strung them above my sink, and let them hang there for a few weeks. Once they were crispy and dry, I just pulled off all the leaves and tossed them into a glass jar.

Your herbs will lose a little color from this drying method, but they’ll still taste way better than any store-bought herb!

The second way I dried out herbs was by microwaving them. Carefully remove all of the leaves from their stems and spread them out evenly on a paper towel. Place another paper towel on top of your herb leaves, then pop them in the microwave for 30 second intervals. The oregano took me 4 rounds of 30 seconds. In between every round, I rearranged the leaves just a bit, so they wouldn’t stick together. I loved this method, because my herbs stayed so green! They look & taste amazing.

And voilà! Beautiful dried herbs straight from your garden (or the supermarket, I won’t judge).

xx, Emma