When to Pick Chamomile Flowers and How to Dry Them for Tea

The right stage is a two or three day window

A chamomile flower is at its best for a very short time. The stage you want is when the white ray petals have opened out flat, level with the yellow center, and the center itself is still low and slightly domed rather than tall and conical. At that point the flower is full of aromatic oil and it dries to a sweet apple scent.

Wait too long and the white petals fold back and hang down along the stalk while the yellow center rises into a cone. That flower is heading for seed. It has lost a good deal of its scent, it dries brown, and the tea from it is thin and bitter. Pick too early, before the petals are properly flat, and you get less from each flower and you have interrupted a flower that had not finished opening.

Because the window is short and the plant opens new flowers continuously, chamomile is not a crop you harvest once. Go over the plants every two or three days for the whole six to ten week flush. A bed left for a week gives you a mixture of overblown and unopened flowers and very little at the right stage.

Pick dry, in the middle of the morning

Pick after the dew has gone and before the heat of the day, typically mid morning. Flowers picked wet will not dry evenly and they go brown and musty in the drying tray. Flowers picked in the heat of the afternoon have already lost some of their volatile oil to the sun.

Never pick on the day after heavy rain if the flowers are still soiled with splashed earth, because you cannot wash chamomile flowers. Rinsing them ruins them: they absorb water, they take days to dry, and much of the scent goes down the sink. If the flowers are dirty, wait for the next flush.

1. Pinch the flower off just below the head Take the flower with a quarter inch (5 mm) or less of stalk. Long stalks add bulk and stem material to your dried tea without adding flavor, and they slow the drying because they hold more water.
2. Use a chamomile rake or your fingers spread as a comb For a large bed, a small comb style picker pulled up through the flowering tips takes the heads in bulk. On a few plants, spread your fingers, close them under a cluster of heads and pull gently upwards. Practice on the outside of the plant first.
3. Collect into a shallow basket Piling flowers deep into a bucket makes them sweat and heat within an hour, and heated flowers go brown. A shallow basket or tray no more than three inches (8 cm) deep, taken indoors promptly, keeps them in good condition.

Picking hard actually increases the crop. Every flower you remove before it sets seed pushes the plant to open more, and a bed picked every three days will yield for weeks longer than a bed picked once a fortnight.

Drying: thin layers, shade, moving air

Chamomile dries well and easily, provided you keep three things right: a thin layer, no direct sun, and air moving through. Spread the flowers a single layer deep on a mesh screen, a drying rack or a clean cloth. Piled two or three deep, the ones underneath stay damp and go brown while the top layer dries.

Choose a warm, dry, shaded, airy spot: an airing cupboard, a shed with the door propped open, or a spare room with a fan on low. Direct sunlight bleaches the flowers and drives off the oils, so drying them on a sunny windowsill, which is exactly what most people try first, gives you pale scentless flowers. Turn them gently with your hand once a day.

They are ready when the yellow centers crumble to powder between your fingers and the petals shatter rather than bend. In good conditions this takes one to two weeks air drying. In a dehydrator on its lowest setting, around 95 to 105F (35 to 40C), it takes eight to twelve hours. Do not exceed 105F, because above that the aromatic oils go off with the water.

Storing dried flowers

Store in an airtight jar, in the dark, somewhere cool. Glass with a good seal is ideal. Fill the jar and leave it on the counter where you can see it for the first week: if any condensation appears on the inside of the glass, the flowers were not dry enough, and they must come straight back out onto the screen or the whole jar will mold.

Store the flowers whole, not crushed. Crushing releases the oils and they are gone within weeks. Crumble the flowers only as you make the tea. Kept whole, dry and dark, they hold good flavor for about a year, and you can usually tell when a batch is past it because the apple scent has flattened into hay.

1. Label with the date and the bed Put the picking date and which sowing it came from on the jar. When one batch turns out noticeably better than another, that label is the only way to know what you did differently.
2. Check after a week Open the jar after seven days and smell it. A sweet apple scent means it is fine. Any mustiness means residual moisture, and the batch needs redrying immediately.
3. Keep a small jar of the best Set aside the best picking of the year separately. It gives you a reference to judge later batches against, which is far more useful than a general impression.

Keep a note of your picking dates and rough weights through the season. Over two or three years those notes show you when your main flush actually falls and how long it runs, which lets you plan a second sowing to fill the gap.

Yield, and when to stop picking

A well grown German chamomile plant at proper spacing gives roughly a cup of fresh flowers over a season, which dries down to a small handful. Fresh flowers lose about four fifths of their weight in drying, so a large basket becomes a modest jar. Ten to fifteen plants is a realistic number for a household that drinks the tea regularly.

Stop picking when the flush thins out and the plant starts to yellow from the base. At that point either pull the plant, or leave the last flowers to set seed if you want it to sow itself for next year. Do not keep picking a dying plant, because the late flowers are small, low in oil and generally not worth the drying space.