image via Inhabitat

Today I was watching the garden guy on our local news station and he was talking about plants you can have indoors for the holidays.  When he showed the rosemary Christmas tree I fell in love and said to myself why hadn't I thought of that before? Not only is it an amazing centerpiece that I can eat and make the house smell good, but it's non toxic for my cat who will chew on anything new in the house real or not.  Even though we live in a house  We don't have a lot of space for a tree,we don't want to have to store it for the rest of the year, and our cat would climb it non stop (he even climbs the stucco on our house!), so we don't put up a tree ever.  This is a great compromise for anyone like us who don't put up a tree.

Mr Cat loves the wheat grass (which is cat grass) I buy from the grocery store too.

As I stated in my last post we had to hastily harvest anything we could due to a possible freeze.  I decided to cut down our catnip leaving about 6" of the plant and we brought all the catnip in to dehydrate it.   Our cat was beyond excited about our catnip harvest.  Especially when we started hydrating!   My husband said it reeked of catnip.  I think our cat got a contact high because we was running around with the crazies all night.  I felt like a dealer hiding the baggy from him and having him trying to figure out if I was "holding".  With the baggies piling up in my drawer that looks like pot, I couldn't help but think how funny it would be if the cops tried to come in and bust me only to find out it's catnip.

I have always just dehydrated herbs here and there in our dehydrator, but we had a lot of stuff to dehydrate this time and it was late, so I was wondering if there was a better way or just how to store the herbs until I could finish dehydrating them.  So I turned to our book "The Backyard Homestead"  by Carleen Madigan, (which I highly recommend it's one of the best homesteading books I've seen so far), to see what she said about drying herbs.  She gave one option as dehydrating in the microwave.  She said it only takes minutes in the microwave.  "Sweet..."  I thought and tried it per her instructions dispute the fact that she said to be careful 
about not getting them to dry because they could start on fire.  Well..   mine actually did catch on fire! After my experience, I think I know how to still utilize the microwave but more safely.  Read below for how to utilize the speed of the microwave safely.