Growing your own herbs is a great hobby: it costs much less than buying them, requires no special skills, and can add a delicious touch of flavor to your cooking. Whether fresh or dried, they’re also cute kitchen decorations.

Even if you don’t have an actual garden, you can keep them in a few pots on a balcony or windowsill. Just remember to water them, and the plants should turn out fine. Where you might get frustrated, though, is that you always seem to have either less than you need, or more than you can handle.

Especially with non-perennial herbs (parsley, cilantro, dill, and so forth), you either have to throw away the delicious excess or preserve it in some way. You could blend it into a paste and bottle it – pesto doesn’t have to be based on basil – but air-drying your herbs takes much less effort.

Most people just make little bundles using string and hang them in any convenient spot, and this works perfectly well. These tend to gather dust and attract insects, though, and it’s not always easy to find an appropriate space for large quantities indoors.

You could use a food dehydrator to solve these problems, but a good drying rack is cheaper, fits more herbs, and works just as well. Made of black nylon mesh, this particular one isn’t as pretty as some other options, but it does keep flies and birds away. This means you can safely hang it outside in direct sunlight, even when using it to dry fruit.

At 30″ high and 25″ wide, with several racks one above the other, this can accommodate any harvest a hobbyist’s garden is likely to produce. When you’re done using it you can simply wash it (by hand), fold it up using a kind of twisting motion, and store it in a drawer.