Matthew's Journal

I use all of oregano, rosemary, sage, and thyme fresh for preference. Just pinch off what's required, and chop the leaves down if that seems sensible.

To dry, take a number of sprigs, tie together and hang upside down somewhere dry and (for preference) dark. Once they're dry it can be helpful to put them into a paper bag so that any leaves that fall off can be rescued and cooked with. This should work for all of the herbs you mention. If you want your oregano without flower heads on it, harvest it sooner rather than later, though the flowers are not a problem in cooking.

Don't harvest more than about 1/4 of the plant, especially with perennial herbs in the first year, unless you want to be buying new plants every year. I've had variable luck overwintering thyme, sometimes it survives, sometimes it doesn't. Likewise Oregano - a good tip is to grow Marjoram instead, it's just a different cultivar from the oregano family, and can be used exactly the same way, but it survives consistently outside in the soil in Britain.

Erm, I think that's my total herb knowledge brain-dumped...

Oh, blue glass bottles - re-use is preferable to recycling, so give them to me! (Or use them yourself for storing oil etc!)

I'd use all of those fresh, apart from bay. I'd just pull off some chunks and discard any stem that looks too woody.

Only instead of "what should you do..." please read my answer as if the question was "what would you do..." Because I don't know definitively; that's just the way I personally deal with the matter.

I'm sure I've read green goes with blue somewhere. But I always think it's weird that Bombay Sapphire comes in a colour usually used for poison. Thinking about it, perhaps not so strange!

Another vote for using fresh herbs.

For rosemary, I tend to take off the long spindley stalks, which encourages more bushy growth anyway.

IME thyme does OK outdoors in Cambridge, but if it's in a pot (and IIRC yours is), needs plenty of water. I killed my outdoor thyme by failing to water it. Just take long runners of it, run your fingers along the stalk to pull off the leaves and chop them a bit (or in a stew where you can easily remove whole stalks, just drop the lot in).

Sage I tend to pick a few leaves from random stalks and use fresh. Sage and onion gravy goes well with pork (very slowly caramalise a couple of onions with a teaspoon or two of sugar, add a bit of cider vinegar, boil off most of the acid, add water, add a teaspoon of wholegrain mustard and as much chopped fresh sage as you feel like).

In general, I use fresh herbs later in cooking than I'd use dried herbs.

As others have said, I'd use them all fresh in the summer, and dry only what you think you'll need for the winter. Despite being Mediterranean in origin, they do all like at least some water and fertilizer (yes, it is possible to kill sage, lavender, rosemary and all the rest by dehydration, and I've done it more than once); oregano is the least frost hardy, followed (in my experience) by bay, sage, rosemary and thyme in that order. The thing most likely to kill any of them is waterlogging, especially once it gets cooler - if it is very wet they may be happier under cover.

For all of them, pick out the stems you would cut out if you were pruning (lightly): don't cut them back into the hard wood (most of them won't regrow if you cut a stem back into brown wood), and do try to cut just above a pair of good buds. If you want to pick a lot to dry, go over the plant pinching out the top couple of inches of each sprig, rather than cutting branches back hard in places. The exception is oregano, which isn't woody (at least not if it's razed each winter); I try to overwinter one or two plants (or more often rely on my mother who is both living in a milder climate and better at propagating from cuttings than I am), but most of them I'll cut and dry before the first frosts.

If you can't tie them up into bunches because the bits are too short (I'm always reluctant to cut into last season's growth), you can dry herbs on a cake-rack, or stretch a bit of old (clean!) net across a frame to make a drying shelf that fits your airing cupboard if you think you'll dry a lot. The ideal place to dry herbs is somewhere dark (as previously discussed), dry (duh!) and not too hot (or you lose volatile perfume). In practice, the airing cupboard with the door open is often the best compromise, but a very cool oven can work if the weather is muggy, or right next to the intake of a dehumidifier. In cooler weather, above a radiator will do (or over the Aga if you have one!).

green=blue+yellow ergo blue = subset of green most definitely in my head.
Clear (and colourless) means colourless so it would be wrong to put any coloured glass in there at all.
Brown=red+ yellow+blue/green (all colours mixed=brown; think plasticine!) so it wouldn't be wrong to put blue in brown, but it's further from brown than it is from green.

The easiest thing to do with your blue glass bottles is to give them to me before emptying them ... ;-)

This says they go in the green bank.

Green bottles, blue bottles, they're all glas, aren't they?

OK, I'm not sure you should really use glas for green bottles. But it amused me.