The Surefire Sign That Your Thyme Is Ready To Harvest (And The Best Way To Do It)

Filling your garden with gorgeous aromatic herbs not only delights your senses but also helps to attract plenty of pollinators such as bees and butterflies. Thyme (Thymus vulgaris) is one of those lovely herbs that looks equally at home in a dedicated herb garden as it does when grown as a border plant around your flower beds. It's also a pretty specimen to grow in pots to brighten up your outdoor living space. Plus, thyme is an excellent aromatic herb that will help your rosemary thrive in the garden. If you're growing thyme for the first time, you'll want to know when it's ready to harvest and how you should do this, to ensure your plant continues to grow and thrive.

While thyme can be picked as soon as it's large enough to take a few sprigs here and there without stripping the entire plant, the surefire sign that your herb is ready to harvest in bulk is just before the blossoms start to open. At this stage, you'll find that the leaves are strongly scented and will have developed the best flavor. This is the ideal time to harvest a lot of fresh sprigs if you want to dry the leaves and store them for future use. But you don't have to stop there — the flowers are also edible and you can continue to harvest a few sprigs whenever your recipes call for it.

Harvesting thyme is not difficult, you just need a pair of kitchen scissors or your trusty pruning shears. Cut a few of the fresh stems, leaving the woody ones behind. As a rule of thumb when cutting sprigs, you want to leave around 5 inches of growth on the plant. To encourage your plant to grow nice and bushy, it's a good idea to cut the outermost stems regularly. But, make sure that you never take more than around 1/3 of the overall plant. You might even want to save some of those trimmings so that you can try a simple propagation technique to fill your garden with more fragrant thyme.

The best time of day to cut some stems from your plant is early in the morning before the intensity of the sun gets too hot. If you want to dry some of those aromatic thyme leaves so that you can use them all year round, cut the stems just before the flowers open and tie them into bunches. You can then hang these upside down in a cool spot until the leaves are fully dried. Once dry, strip the leaves from the stems and store them in an airtight container. Finally, you might be interested to know that there are certain thyme varieties that are said to have pest repelling capabilities, which is just another advantage of growing this herb in your garden.