Oregano

Over the past few days, I've been working on the oregano patch. I mentioned in a previous post that I had planted oregano in the vegetable garden one year. It's a perennial that likes to roam and it started colonizing the adjacent lawn. I decided to just let it grow where it wanted to and now I have a sizeable oregano patch that comes back every year.

The oregano patch out by the vegetable garden.

I also discovered that this oregano (and I have no idea what particular variety it is) has little flavor when used fresh, but when it's dried it's wonderful. So I started using our dehydrating machine to dry it out. We've used the machine to dry other things, most notably tomatoes, making our own version of sun-dried tomatoes. I cut the oregano, wash it and remove anything that's not oregano, then layer it into the dehydrator's trays. It takes a few hours to dry.

The dehydrating machine.

Once it's dry, I have to remove the leaves from the stems. This is busy work and takes a little while, but I can do it while watching television. Once the leaves are stemless, they're ready to go into jars. If I process enough oregano to fill four or five jars, there's enough for at least a year, almost two. We use it all the time, on pizza, in tomato sauce, and in soups and stews, among other things.

One batch of oregano, de-stemmed. Somehow it reminds me of something...

I don't harvest all the oregano in the patch, so what gets left behind produces pretty purple flowers that look nice out next to the vegetable garden. I have some sage plants in another location and it only just occurred to me to try drying sage the same way. I plan to do that later this summer.

I'll top off these jars with the next batch.