Raising Tea

I love herbal tea. It is the English in me. Tea, in the day, was all there was for medicine and really, many of today's medicines are simply distillates from plants. Digoxin, a potent heart medication is a derivative of Foxglove, a lovely flower that grows in my yard. Aspirin is a derivative of the Aspen tree bark. Penicillin is derived from a mold that blows about on the very wind. Ask any herbalist or homeopath and they will be able to expound the virtues or terrors of thousands of plants, flowers and herbs. It is very enlightening to talk with people that know and use medicinal plants regularly because you come to realize how much nature provides for us. For almost every ill there is a cure. The hardest part is just figuring out which one will work best for you and where you can find them. I remember the exact moment that I fell in love with flower gardening. I was kneeling on a small triangular plot of soil at my old house in Winona. I had just dug out the soil and had it piled up next to me and I was planting hyacinth bulbs and daffodil bulbs that would come up the next spring. Maybe it was the day - it was a beautiful fall day with the light shining on my back, the soil still warm under my hands and the air so crisp and clean. All was right with the world in that one moment - the light, the air, the humus, ... I fell in love with gardening. Now, I had grown a vegetable garden when I was going to school in Iowa, but I hadn't fallen in love with that type of gardening. That seemed like a lot of work at the time....still does to some extent, but suddenly flowers were my thing. The house in Winona was also the first place that I started to grow some herbs, but then life intervened and we moved to LaCrosse and it was crazy busy with two full time jobs and three kids and before I knew what happened we were here on the farm in Iowa. There wasn't much to the yard in terms of flowers when I first moved in. There was an old rose bush and a few bulbs that popped up in the spring, but other than that, not much to work with ....But, now I had room and time - two things that are very helpful when planning a big flower garden. My husband would probably say that I have gone completely over board. Approximately 85 percent of the front yard has been taken over by my flower gardens and I have my eye on the other 15 percent still requiring a lawn mower. I love taking the "morning constitutional" through the flower gardens. They are more my sanity gardens than anything. My gardens are where I hide from my children, but am still close enough to the house to hear any of them if they truly need me. Flowers are strictly beautiful, something pretty to look at that soothes the soul, but herbs are flowers with a mission. They are kind of a cross over. They aren't flowery and showy, but many of them will, at some point in their lives, produce flowers that the butterflies and hummingbirds absolutely love. My herb garden started out small. A little oregano, a little basil and a few chamomile plants. My downfall (or so my husband would likely term it) is the garden center next to the grocery store. How convenient! For a while I think I would buy $30 worth of groceries and $75 worth of plants! And when I wasn't buying plants, I was buying books to better understand the plants and where they would grow best. Suffice it to say, I now have a fair number of herb and plant books that help to select which ones will grow the best in my area and what they can be used for. I also have acquired a fair number of books explaining how to make useful things out of herbs, not the least of which....is tea!

So What's The Difference?

The tea that you buy in the store is usually good, it comes in little bags and there are sometimes wonderful sayings on the box or on the tags of each individual bag, but it has been around a while. It has probably been factory farmed, dried, processed, mixed, bagged, boxed and then shipped. Fresh is always best....and by fresh I mean picked off the plant and put into tea. This is hard to do in Iowa in the winter. So, I play the part of a squirrel and during the summer I collect plants and flowers and squirrel them away for later use in the dark, cold days of winter. The wonderful thing about most of the herbs and flowers that make the best tea - they grow like weeds and often are weeds. My bee balm happily reseeds itself every year.....all over the garden. Every spring I have to patiently either remove it from its new favorite spot and put it back where it belongs (in my mind at least), or I let it run wild and form beautiful drifts of color in mid summer. As you can see from the picture, I prefer the later of the two options. Who am I to say where a flower will grow best. No flower I have ever known has read the text books....they like what they like. Actually, one of the most obnoxious weeds, stingy nettle, makes a very nice tea. While I was out hunting mushrooms this last spring, I was completely skunked in finding any morels on many days, but I did go through many lovely nettle patches. Nettle, although very painful to work with (especially when you find yourself without a pair of gloves),it does make a great tea that is very good for people with respiratory problems. On the days that I didn't bring home mushrooms, I brought home bags full of stingy nettle instead. Herbs are wonderful things to grow. A little sun, a little rain and they are good to go. It takes almost nothing to make herbs completely happy. So happy, in fact, that they will spread themselves all over the garden to the point of becoming a nuisance. My Lemon Balm has taken on this trait. Every time I turn my head, it has gone wild and spread itself everywhere. Thankfully, it is one of my favorite teas, so I am never without in the winter months. And weeding it out a garden full of unwanted Lemon Balm leads to the most wonderful citrus smell filling the air. Calendula, is another of my favorite all purpose, flower, herb and medicinal plants that loves to spread itself all over the garden....but really, who would be unhappy to see this gorgeous flower growing in their yard? So, the growing of herbs for teas is definitely NOT a problem! The control of them might be.

When to Harvest

For most plants that will be used as tea, the best time to harvest is before they flower. This works well for the flower garden as well because if you remove to tops of some of the herbs they form their flowers later in the season and prolong the flowering time overall. The one exception to the rule of picking before they flower is Chamomile....those you actually pick the flowers - which seems almost cruel to do to those cute daisy-like flowers, but I enjoy them ten times more in the middle of winter. Chamomile flowers I simply toss in a freezer bag in the freezer right away, without drying, to maintain all their freshness.

The best time of day to harvest is usually in the early mornings when the essential oils and nutrients are highest in most of the herbs....but there are the occasional plants that are better to pick at night - this is where the books sometimes come in handy. I tend to not pay much attention to what time of day I am picking as long as I get them hung up to dry right away.

Drying is a piece of cake. A sharp scissors, a piece of string or rubber band and someplace to hang them where they can dry. I tend to not put them in direct sunlight as that seems to bleach the leaves out while they are drying and I can only imagine that it causes them to loose during that process. Typically, an upside down tomato cage works very well, but really any place in my kitchen has been known to have herbs drying on them. I tie small bundles together and then hang them upside down to dry for a few weeks. If the weather is exceedingly humid like it was this last summer, I dry them a few minutes in a 250 degree oven and then strip off their leaves, put them in plastic Ziploc bags and put them in the freezer, or I put them in air tight containers for the winter. I have one entire freezer and one shelf of my cupboard packed with these herbs.

A list of the herbs that I have grown and saved for this winter include:

• Bee Balm

• Chamomile
• Stingy Nettle
• Peppermint
• Lemon Balm
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Sage I could add Catmint to this list, but that never seems to make it past my cats.

Every one of those herbs listed is a perennial, except for the Rosemary. That means that every year, without fail, those herbs come back (typically with a vengeance) and all I have to do is pick them and dry them to be fully stocked with tea all winter long. When it was just me, this didn't take much, but my kids have now latched on to the tea and how wonderful it is, so my stock pile has grown.

A Spot of Tea

To make a great cup of tea, as only the English (and the Japanese) can do, you need only three things: Loose tea leaves, a pot and boiling water. It helps, however, to have an actual tea pot. This one came to me by way of a friend, who, when hearing that I had an interest in loose leaf tea, managed to come across this little gem at a thrift shop. I have yet to find another like it, but I am always on the lookout. The basket holds the tea leaves and keeps most of them from finding their way into your tea.....but lets just enough through for a reading of the tea leaves later.

If you don't have an official "tea pot" then a regular coffee pot will work and then just strain the tea through a coffee filter as you pour it into your cut to filter out the loose tea leaves. And, as a complete aside, the chickens absolutely love the left over soaked tea leaves in their daily ration.

Use whatever tea leaves you have stored. In my case I usually like a mix of Lemon Balm, Peppermint and Chamomile, but I vary it sometimes to include Sage, Rosemary, Thyme, Cinnamon, Bee Balm, Nettle, Cayenne Pepper (very good for the digestion), or Ginger....whatever combination you feel like dreaming up or (better yet) what you feel your body needs. I am always amazed at the intuitive sense of our own bodies. There are many times when I will be making a pot of tea with some nagging problem lurking, - a head ache, an upset stomach, a sore throat, etc. So, I toss in the pot what I feel will make a good tea for that night and then while it steeps I look up in one of my many herb books what the herbs that I am using are supposed to be good for. Nine times out of ten, I have put together a tea that is good for what ails me. This last Friday, my daughter came to me with a horrible sore throat and a fever. Great! Going into the weekend, no doctor's office open and what looked like the makings for Strep throat. Gave her some ibuprofen and made some tea that was heavy on Thyme and Cayenne pepper. Hot tea with honey can cure just about anyone of anything. As she finished her tea, she came over to me and said, "hey Mom, my throat doesn't hurt anymore!" By Monday, she was doing great...no more sore throat. Chances are good that it was just a passing virus, but even then....3 days is a pretty good recovery time if you ask me.

The most important step to making a great cup of tea is to let it steep. Minimum of 5 minutes and really the longer it steeps the better. My husband will often find that I have left tea in the tea pot overnight when he goes to clean it. He poured one such cup of tea in a cup for me to reheat and I thought it was a cup of coffee because it was so dark in color - it was wonderful! I am also a big proponent of the "tea cozy". Keeping your tea pot warm with the steeping tea inside helps to bring out more flavor. A little honey added for sweetening and you will have the perfect cup of tea.