Harvest Dill as Flowers?

[digitS']

It is a complaint about dill that I have heard often: Dill is finished before the cucumbers are ready for pickles!

I don't make pickles, or can, but I pick flowers . I also dry herbs and have suggested that before -- harvest the dill when you want and dry it. Wait for the cukes.

It seems that the pickle makers want the flowers/seed heads for their recipes, anyway. Why not cut the flowers from the plants as they open?

The season may be extended, it would be with most plants. But, the dill flowers do not all open at once anyway:



Leave a couple of these plants to self-seed and not even the tractor guy can stop them from coming back the next year . I like dill in baked fish, especially. Maybe I should harvest and dry the flowers just for that! (Lemon basil can replace the dill in the baked salmon but it comes along later than the dill.)

Steve
the photobucket gremlins have promised to straighten the picture ... i never know when that will happen!

 

[Ridgerunner]

That's sort of what I do Steve. I cut the dill flowers off, rinse them, and roll them up in waxed paper. That goes in freezer-type gallon zip-lok bags. When I make dill pickles, I unroll the wax paper to get however many I need. No blanching, no drying (other than patting the water off with a paper towel) no other preparation. As long as you get them before they go to seed, they keep flowering for along time.

I've tried cutting them off practically tot he ground and drying them in my dehydrator for dill weed, but they go to flower so fast it's hard to get much dill weed.

I've never considered drying the flowers and substituting those for dill weed. You've got me thinking now.