| Processing the aerial parts of your crop needs
careful planning from the start. When growing the crop You need to think about how your
going to process it even before harvesting it! It's very important, so when you come to
harvest time, there is not 200 kilos of fresh herb to dry and process at once. Grow your
crops in blocks three weeks apart. Leafy crops need either hammer milling or chaff cutting. It depends what the buyer needs in the end. How are you going to know what market your herb is going to? The best way is to leave the crop in a condition that it can be milled down. If it's hammer milled you Heartsease crop. |
can't always get a sale for
finely cut herb.
Leave the herb in a chaffcut state or not cut at all, until you know what state it needs
to be in. Chaffcutting is still the best way to present any leafy crop in, but you can't
always get it in a small chaffcut state to one centimetre. Lemongrass needs to be
presented in one to two centimetre pieces for sale. Yarrow needs to be the same. Echinacea
tops can be milled through a hammermill on a large screen only. So you can see there are
lots of ways to process your crops. What about flowers? When plucking flower crops like Chamomile and Calendula, these crops need no further processing than drying. |
When packing your product for sale in health
food stores in your own value added packets, tea grade herbs need a fair amount of time
spent packing them and making the product for market presentation.
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