Some plants encourage and help each other, while some others repulsively repel the others: as they do not grow together, they will not go together well in cooking. It takes long time and great care to develop the right feeling fot that. Let us first point out that freshly picked plants and their juices are the most effective as food and medicine. No method of drying, preservation, packing and storing can be useful in avoiding decomposition and decaying of active substances of plants. But, the fact that in our climate the vegetation period does not extend throughout the whole year, and also that we mostly have urban lives where the plants are not available forces us to pick up more when we have the chance and to store the plants.
Plants can be kept for winter by cooking, pickling, fermentation, freezing, but the simplest, cheapest and, when tea herbs are concerned, the most widely used method is drying. However, in order to have the result of the effort involved into picking and drying, to preserve the healing properties and nutritive values of the herbs prepared to the utmost extent, it is necessary to obey the below given rules: