Fresh is an excellent characteristic of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, but you might not be lucky to get a fresh flower when you want. But for many reasons, you might need to preserve them.
To preserve them, you need to dry them, as dried flowers are flavorful and economically smooth, especially home-dried flowers. They taste better as they’ll be organic and free of preservatives.
You can preserve various flowers for six months to one year. You could even grow your flowers at home and dry them to preserve them. Some flowers like basil, borage, chives, coriander, lemongrass, mint, parsley are best when kept frozen to retain their flavor but can also be dried.
Simple Steps to Preserve flowers at Home
Harvesting
The best time to harvest flowers that you want to dry is the right time. Pick your flowers when they start growing. But ultimately, you can harvest them on warm, dry mornings as soon as the dew has evaporated. But ensure one kind of flower at a time.
Drying
Prepare flowers before attempting to dry them, which doesn’t take much time. Clean any amount of soil and other things and wash them slightly to ensure that the essential oils are not lost while over-rinsing.
- Air dry flowers- Air-drying is as simple as it sounds. You do it many ways, spread the flowers on a clean cloth or surface, even hang them upside down in a bundle. Air drying is the best drying technique to retain the naturally occurring oils in flowers.
- Dry flowers in an oven- Oven-drying is relatively faster than air-drying. Keep checking your flowers, as you don’t want to burn the flowers in the process!
Freeze Your flowers
Freezing flowers, being the easiest method to preserve flowers and lock the minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and essential oils of the flowers. Spread the flowers flat on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer.
You can store them in an airtight container but should keep them still in the freezer. Secondly, finely chop and put in an ice tray, submerge in olive oil, and freeze until solid. You can transfer your flowers that can be transferred to a plastic bag but still need to be kept frozen.
Pressing
Another way to let your flowers stay helpful for a more extended period would be to press them. Pressing will remove all the moisture from the flowers, leaving only dry materials. You can preserve the flat dried flowers in a container and use them whenever required. You can use the SharpStone press for drying your flowers efficiently as they are the best presses for flowers. Once dried, we can move to the storing step.