This is our first Spring/Summer garden in our home. For the first year of being in our home I focused on the inside and when Spring hit us this year all I wanted to do was hang outside!
We have a little rock boarder around our pool so to not take up yard space, I put four garden beds along the backside of our pool enclosure. We weren't expecting too much from this garden since it was more of trial run and see if we could handle it. Surprisingly we're all enjoying the upkeep of the garden. One of the beds is for herbs and the Basil was ready for clipping!
This part is the fun part for the little ones since they ALWAYS want to pull everything off in the garden. I showed them how to pluck the leaves and away they went filling their colander! We decided to make dried Basil for now but would like to try our hand at making a Pesto sauce next. Since we make some Christmas gifts every year we are putting the dried Basil into glass herb jars.
The bright green leaves were just too pretty not to take some photos!
After giving the Basil a good wash we laid the leaves out on a backing sheet and backed at 180 degrees for two hours. This dried the Basil leaves out and we could just crumble them up now to funnel them into the jar.
I purchased glass seasoning jars from Target a couple years back with the intention of making our spices prettier but I never did it. I'll be putting them to use this year to make our homemade basil Christmas gifts!
What are some of your favorite handmade gifts? We try to make useful gifts every year.
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I know it is fresh and you have just picked and dried the basil, but does the flavor hold even after it is dried? This is a great idea for homemade Christmas gifts! That idea is brilliant! The nice thing here in central Florida is that we can grow our herbs year 'round, too!
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