Creating a Home Herbal Apothecary

The idea of creating a home herbal apothecary near to the kitchen has appealed to me for some time.  So today, I finally found a few hours to reorganize the storage spaces in the kitchen, dining room and mudroom, in order to make room for storing herbs and home canned goods in this giant hutch my father-in-law built for us.

So far, as you can see the herbs take up only the two middle shelves on one side.  There are culinary herbs, teas, tinctures and infusions.  The lower shelf has a few home canned goods.  On the counter is a batch of kombucha that is brewing.

The wooden container with lid (upper right corner, above) was also made by my father-in-law and it now holds our essential oils.

Inside the lower shelves of the cabinet, so far only on one side, are more home canned goods along with empty jars waiting to be filled as the garden progresses this summer.  This late in the year we've already consumed nearly all of our home canned food that we preserved last summer, and are just getting started preserving again from the garden.  Eventually, I'd like to be able to move the rest of the dishes from the other side of the cabinet and fill the whole thing with the apothecary and home canned items.  By late fall, we will typically have about 200 jars filled with home canned food. I'm pretty sure this enormous cabinet can hold it all.

Homemade curtains on the window help to reduce the amount of light in here for storing our canned items and produce. Since this room also has an external door to the back of our property that goes out to the chicken coop, we store chicken feed in here as well.