Last post i talked about preserving your food by freezing it. This post I'm going to talk about air drying to preserve some of your garden harvest. Unfortunately you can't air dry everything, would make things so much easier if you could. Some of the crops you can air dry are herbs, some hot peppers, and of course you cure garlic and onions and store them without refrigeration. This photo shows some of my hot peppers, at the top are long cayennes, below them are green and 1 red jalapeno, and the brown ones are chocolate habeneros. The jalapenos and habeneros are thick walled peppers and cannot be air dried. You can saute them and put them in olive oil, you can freeze them whole as well. The long cayennes you can air dry. As you can see in this photo, i take a long piece of doubled sewing thread, i knot it and string my cayennes on it. I leave the needle on until the thread is almost full of peppers. So as i harvest the peppers, i can just string them up. I leave them in an airy window. With peppers you don't have to worry about putting them out of direct sunlight. The peppers will dry naturally. I leave them strung up in the kitchen where i can take a few off whenever i need them.

When air drying herbs, make small bundles of them. Don't make too large a bundle as they won't dry properly, the ones in the middle of the bundles won't get the air flow they need and might start to mold, so keep each bunch of herbs small. You want to dry the herbs out of direct sunlight, in an airy place. Once the herbs are dry, store the leaves whole. Herbs keep their best flavor (the oil in the leaf) by having the leaf whole. Crush the leaf only when you are ready to use it. The herbs will keep their flavor better and longer this way.