You Can Have Your Tea and Grow it Too

You Can Have Your Tea, and Grow it Too

With more and more tea blends and infusions appearing on the market, some people are making their own tea gardens. According to this article, you don’t have to have acres of land to do it. As Sarah Wolfe reports,

“Tea gardens come in many forms, and don’t even need to be in the ground. Tang grows her herbs in a vertical garden hanging on a wall behind her restaurants, while other city dwellers cramped for space use pots and other containers. All you need is dirt, water and some seeds[…]Liversidge recommends easy-to-grow plants like mint, lavender or chamomile for beginners.If you’ve already got those growing, take a stab at other popular tea ingredients like coriander, lemon balm, rose hips, hibiscus and jasmine.Keep the plants in an area that gets at least six hours of sunlight each day, rotate them often and monitor moisture per directions on the seed packet.”

You can grow a lot of the ingredients to make your own herbal tea this way – in whether you put it in a pot or sprawling up a wall. After growing these herbs, make sure to harvest it in the correct way, as they are all unique. For example, chamomile needs to be cut at the base of their stems, not the top. Many of the herbs you would grow can be put in tea fresh, but drying them will certainly make them last longer and give you a better stock during wintertime.  No matter what, always make sure to store your ingredients in an airtight container.

While you can certainly grow the more herbal side of tea, or rather tisanes, in your personal tea garden, tea is much harder to grow. So for your Green Tea and Black Tea, you should probably leave it to professionals. Tea leaves aside, this is definitely an excellent way to personalize your tea, and who knows maybe you can make some of your own blends. Creativity in tea is always something to raise a cuppa to, so grow on tea aficionados or just buy your tea like rest of us.