I love adding fresh herbs to my dishes. They add so much flavor and I feel like I'm eating a little healthier when I garnish my meals with them—plus it just looks so much more appetizing! Who can resist pasta topped with fresh basil or a taco topped with fresh cilantro?

However a frequent problem I run into is my herbs going bad before I can use them all. This is especially true with cilantro. I LOVE cilantro—but a little goes a long way and so unfortunately before I know it, I am pulling a brown gooey bag that once resembled cilantro out of my veggie drawer and throwing it out instead of using every last little delicious bit.

Obviously throwing my herbs at the bottom of my crisper in the same bag that I put them in at the store is not the most effective way to store my herbs and keep them fresh. However, treating them as a living, growing thing can help keep your herbs stay fresh and allow you easy access for more frequent use! This will be especially useful in the warmer weather when you are harvesting all your fresh herbs from your garden and need to make them last longer than 3 days!

The trick to keeping your herbs for a longer period of time is to treat them like a bouquet of flowers. I'll use cilantro in my example. Trim all the leaves off the bottom. You will be putting your 'bouquet' in water, and you don't want any leaves sitting in the water or it will spoil faster.

Next, trim all the stems. As with flowers, you don't need to trim off a ton, just a small snip will do.

Wash the cilantro and then dry very thoroughly. You want them to be as dry as you can get them, so shake off all the extra water, and maybe even consider gently patting them with a towel to get rid of excess moisture.

Find a jar that is tall enough for your lovely herbal bouquet. A mason jar works great. Fill it with water—enough to give the stems an ample supply of water, but not so much that your bouquet is falling out of the jar.

Once the herbs are in the jar, gently cover them with a plastic bag and secure the bag around the jar using a rubber band. I just used a Ziploc bag, but any clean, large plastic bag should do the trick. You want to make sure your cilantro is covered, but not squished.

Keep the cilantro in the fridge and snip leaves off your beautiful bouquet whenever you want! I love this method because not only does my fridge smell heavenly and I can make my cilantro last, but it also saves me time when I am cooking. I've already done the washing, so I can just trim off whatever leaves I need and get back to cooking.

The cilantro should keep at least 2 weeks, but can last 3-4 weeks if you do it just right! Here's to fresh herbs!