Make your own tea!

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ninny

Lovin' The Homestead
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I was wondering what your favorite teas are and why? Do you grow the plant yourself if so how do you process it then?
 
I have grown chamomile flowers and made tea from them, but I'm not a big tea-drinker so don't really bother buying it much. :)
 
We buy black and green tea, but I drink a lot of herbal tea. Lemon verbena, peppermint, and rose hip. I grow the herbs and dry them for later. I'm going to collect blackberry and raspberry leaves this spring.
 
You can certainly grow a number of plants for herb tea. I think most places in N. America will grow herb tea plants of some sort or another. Personally, I prefer black tea, and so buy what I need - in quantity, as I don't drink coffee.. If it turns out at some point that I can't do that then I will need to develop a stronger taste for peppermint and chamomile.
 
I buy black tea. 100 tagless tea bags for a buck. I'll add mint occasionally, which I grow here. I'd love to do some chamomile though!

It costs me $0.03 to make a pint of tea. I could knock a cent off of that if I only used one tea bag instead of two, but whatever. Costs more when I sweeten it with honey too, but I try to trade for my honey and typically only use it as a treat. Usually it's sweetened with sugar, and that's added into my costs. I use quite a bit of sugar too... If someone used less sugar (or sweetened with stevia?) And only one tea bag they could get a pint for closer to a penny, or even less if you cook tea bags on the stove and make a gallon at a time or reuse tea bags. Anyways, other than herbal teas, or if you're the dooms day type, there's not much of a point in making your own black tea. Herbals though, boy can they get expensive!
 
We do Chamomile also. Super easy to grow. Don't have to plant it every year. We have a bed set aside and it comes back up every year even bigger than before. Its easy to harvest too so the tweens get that job. I like a little lavendar with the chamomile too. My mom has an old fashioned rose that she has nursed along the last 40 years that we get nice huge rosehips from also. I also have picked little ones of a cluster of wild roses on a neighbors property. He has what felt like a mile long hedge of the things. They were clinging to an old wire fence. So many and took so long and wow those little thorns hurt. Good tea though. I don't bother with tea bags. We have tea eggs and use those. My mom is from europe and most of the medicinal teas are sold lose in a paper bag I swear. My mom jealously guards her moms tea egg but you can get them anywhere I would think.
 
Never heard of a tea egg. What part of the rose is it's hip? Plants have body parts? :hide I have a large wild rose growing can I use it's?
 
The hip is the base where the petals attach. They will swell up and turn orange or red. So if you dead head your roses, you won't get hips. We have a ton of wild roses here but the type we have doesn't have a nice tart flavor so I leave them for the birds. The wild roses by my grandmas were very tasty, and I used to gather them. I like the hips best after first frost. I pick them, split them in half so I can scrape out the hairy seeds, rinse, and dehydrate.

I really need to plant a few old fashion roses so I can collect my own again. I like rose hip tea a lot. I have a 25 lb bag of dried ones I bought from the korean tea store last month.

Just make sure that the roses aren't spray with pesticides. Mom used to spray hers because of the aphids, but then she learned that soapy water worked just as well. She dead heads so no hips from her.
 
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