Holiday Gift Series 2010 - Herb Teas

Every year we try to give some good ideas for fun, easy, and inexpensive handmade herbal gifts. It's a series that always forces me to sit down and write, so that's a give to me!

One of my favorite gifts to give is a specially blended tea. Knowing the person, what they like, and what they might be fighting (sleeplessness, sniffles, germ-filled workplace, etc) make it personal. However, even if you aren't particularly knowledgeable about the medicinal properties of herbs, you can still put together a very pleasant tea that is individualized.This picture was taken a few years ago at Radiance, when Sarah and I were preparing to give a class on blending herbal teas. If you are lucky enough to have herbie friends nearby, everyone could gather and bring herbal tea ingredients for a blending party. Have several pots of hot water ready, and taste as you go!

Blending teas is an immensely enjoyable craft. If you've gathered and dried herbs from the garden in the previous season, you're all set. You can get some additional ingredients at your favorite purveyor of herbs - either a neighborhood herb shop or on-line, or make do with what you've got on hand.
Good herbs to start with include mints, ginger root, chamomile, rose petals, lavender, red clover, elderberries and flowers (I really like to dry blueberries and raspberries during the summer and chop them up for inclusion), echinacea leaves, flowers, or roots, lemon balm, lemon grass, hibiscus, rose hips... and really we could go on and on. Many, many herbs are good in teas - either adding bright notes to the flavor, or soothing, healing properties. Spices are delicious too. Cinnamon, saffron, star anise, licorice root, and cardamom come to mind immediately.
For gift-giving, you might want to choose to give a friend loose tea, which in the case of a particularly beautiful blend might be especially desired. If you suspect the recipient wouldn't use the tea unless it was in teabags, you can get heat-sealable teabags and take care of that little problem. All sorts of packaging is available at this time of year. Tins, boxes, and even mason jars that have a ribbon around the neck can be spruced up and labeled with personalization.
Some ideas for combinations...
Someone need to relax? Choose and blend from these:
Chamomile
lemon balm
passionflower
skullcap
catnip
oat seed
nettles
linden flowers
Challenged by lots of germ exposure?
elderberries
echinacea
astragalus
eleuthero (Siberian ginseng)
St John's wort
holy basil
thyme
Lots of colds and allergies?
ephedra
wintergreen leaves
mints
goldenrod
nettles
These are just a very few ideas and choices.
There are herbs that can support nearly every physical and emotional situation, but they do require some knowledge and research. Blending a tea simply for the pleasure in the cup is a wonderful gift as well. One of my favorites is a 50/50 blend of black tea with spearmint. Flavorful teas can be blended with raspberry leaves, strawberry leaves, and dried citrus zests and flowers.

I encourage you to give it a try if you haven't yet. Simply assemble 5 or 10 herbs that you have read about on the boxes of commercial tea blends. Add a pinch of this and a bit of that - ALWAYS writing down what you do as you do it (what if you discover the perfect blend and don't know what it was?) and brew small amounts to taste. Add to the blend until it is perfect. Make very small amounts until you've found a blend you like.

The kind of thing Lois would say

Tea For One

"Whenever you create something special for yourself, you are honoring yourself. Tea for one gives us a daily opportunity to evaluate, revaluate, to come to grips with our feelings. With this ritual, it is possible on a regular basis, to bring harmony and balance back into our lives."

- Alexandra Stoddard

Rainy day

It's damp, drizzly, and Monday morning, when I should be working at the demo Herb Garden at the Extension, so I thought this would be a good time to talk about that project.

We had a good initial meeting two weeks ago at the Extension office. I had received a list of trainee volunteers from the last Master Gardener class, and had passed around a volunteer sign up sheet at the April M.G. meeting, so I had a lot of potential volunteers. I sent e-mails to 10 and 9 showed up for the meeting. We are already doing better than last year!

Terry reserved a room for us so the cold weather wasn't an issue. For introductions we talked about why each of us wanted to work in this project - to learn about herbs was the common response, and what our assets were that we could bring to the project. All except my gardening friend Sharron are Master Gardeners and most are also involved with other gardening volunteer projects. For example Gloria is a former florist who is also working on a raised bed herb garden for seniors in her town. Mike has a small farm, selling compost, mums and pumpkins in the fall, just put up a greenhouse and planted herbs in hope of getting into
business wants to learn about the plants he's growing.

Kathy offered right away to spruce up and paint the Herb Garden sign. Margaret offered to bring a Mideastern chicken and rice herbal dish made with garam masala that she makes for our lunch one week. Mike offered to bring tubs of his compost and he has a line on some old drainage tiles that we could use in the Tea bed for restraining the mints. Sharron has graphic art talent and will finally make me a good map of the plot.
Doesn't this sound like a great group?

As a group we decided to meet on Monday mornings to work in the garden with an eye to having it in good shape for the Genesee County Master Gardener Garden Tour at the end of June.

We toured the garden, and I noted that some of our Master Gardeners hadn't even been back there yet. Terry printed up copies to distribute of a nice Extension bulletin that I'd found on the Internet, from the University of Kentucky, on growing culinary herbs, which is a good place for new herbies to begin learning about herbs.

Back indoors I had a snack ready to share, of course, tiny heart-shaped lavender short scones (biscuits, really), that I made that morning, with a delicious Queen Anne's Lace jelly that I had purchased from Donna Frawley who spoke at the Herb Symposium two days before.

We ended the meeting with a project. I brought bottles and bags of dried herbs from my garden and also from last year's Extension herb garden. We discussed making herbal tea (tisane) from dried herbs as we passed around sample herbs. I discussed my favorite herbal tea book for beginners The Herbal Tea Garden by Marietta Marshall Marcin (Garden Way, 1993).
We made our own personal herbal tea blends and each of us made two teabags to take home, using paper tea bags that you fill yourself and seal with an iron. (I got them from Nichol's Garden Nursery which you can find online.)

I dug up some more names, and sent some more e-mails out, and got no responses. (Howd'ya like that?) Last Monday we nine met in the garden and set to work. Luckily the fall cleanup went well, so the two to three hours were mainly spent cleaning up the debris of winter.
I brought dandelion tea to sample, and talked about dehydrating the leaves of the young dandelion for a spring tonic tea and the roots which I grind for a mineral rich winter tea. I brought along a package of a commercial health food store tea called Dandy Blend to compare with my bottle of home ground dandelion root. They look and taste a lot different!
Dandy Blend had a cute picture of a dandelion on the label and it is very tasty and good for you. But it is pricey, on par with instant coffee I'd guess. The label of Dandy Blend calls it Instant Dandelion Beverage, but lists roasted barley, rye, chicory root, dandelion root and beetroot. It tastes like Postum which is chicory, I think.
Dandelion root, dehydrated and ground, has a bland flavor. I rather like the Dandy Blend better but like I said it is spendy, so my idea is to mix it half and half with my ground dandelion root.

I think I'll try to do a herb oriented demonstration like this every time we meet, and the volunteers who want to know more about herbs can learn that herbs are just plants that have a use.
Growing herbs is no different from growing flowers and vegetables.
And there is no secret to using them - but there is a secret it seems in today's busy, packaged food oriented society to using herbs, and that is to learn something you want to try and then to actually DO it.
Like the Nike ad suggests.
Only... the weather has to cooperate!

Now for some photos. Here are Calendula flowers drying in my dehydrator. The flavor is so minimal with calendula petals, and retaining the color and shape are important. The dehydrator does a good job in this instance.


A closeup of a herbal tea (tisane) blend: the flowers are of pineapple sage, Salvia elegans.


I 'garbled' the dried leaves from the stems over a clean bedsheet. You can grow a large quantity of herbal tea plants in a very small amount of space and with
minimal expense. You can be confident of how they were grown and how they were harvested and processed. You can have fun making your own custom blends.
So why buy commercial?


Added Note: While I was looking through my photos for something else, I ran across this one of my dandelion project. So I'm adding it later here in this post where it belongs, with the dandelion tea tale. Which may be stepping on Blogging Ethics but I'm doing it anyway.

What you see is my bag of dried leaves, a tray of dried roots and crowns, and my dedicated to herbs coffee grinder with ground root.

Tales of the Michigan Herb Associates Annual Conference

I will post something soon. It's truly been a l-o-n-g week. I do have some blurry photos and some commentary, so stay tuned. But I wanted to post a quickie Cuppa Tea of the Week:
At the conference I had an old favorite: Bigelow's "Constant Comment."
I like a cuppa good old Constant Comment when I'm in the mind of a little pick-me-up.

Ingredients: black tea, rind of oranges, spice, and "natural flavor."

Tea bag in individual wrapper. As advertised on said wrapper:
"The famous delicious blend of fine TEA flavored with rind of oranges and sweet spice." That third generation of the Bigelow family must be rich. I'da said orange rinds and cinnamon and lost half my customers.

Cuppa Tea of the Week

Lemon Ginger Sharpness Herbal Tea, by Stash

In contrast to last week's Lemon Blossom Herbal Tea, this week's tea is lemon flavored, yes, but has more herbal flavors, the ginger being the strongest overall flavor. It should be called ginger-lemon. If Lemon Blossom was an A, Lemon Ginger Sharpness is a B.
Concerning the ginkgo, no one told me I was perceivably more brilliant that afternoon, and I never noticed the advertised sharpness.
This one drink without milk, but sweetener might help.

Ingredients: Ginger root, lemongrass, ginkgo biloba, hibiscus, safflower, citric acid, and natural lemon flavor.

Blurb on the bag wrapper: ... "very pleasing lemon-ginger taste ... Studies in Europe suggest that ginkgo helps increase blood flow to the brain, thereby increasing sharpness and alertness and improving memory."

Wrapper entertainment provided by Emily Dickinson:
"That it will never come again
is what makes life so sweet."

tea receipt from Queen Victoria's time

(As usual, for a big picture, click on the picture.)

Did Victorian era housewives commonly infuse their (black) tea for 20 minutes and then add the infusion to the pot with hot water? I wonder what Elizabeth would have thought about our newfangled tea bags?

Cuppa Tea of the Week

Lemon Blossom Herbal Tea, by Stash.

I love it! With milk, it tastes like lemon meringue pie.

Ingredients: Rosehips, citrus peel, lemongrass, hibiscus flowers, licorice root, safflower, citric acid, rosebuds, ginger, and "natural flavors."
"an artful herbal tea blend with a juicy lemony taste and fragrant aroma."

Caffeine free.
Stash tea bags.

Tea bag wrapper entertainment:
"When the tea is brought at five o'clock
And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
The little black cat with bright green eyes
Is suddenly purring there."
--Harold Monro "Milk for the Cat"

busy busy busy - more about rose hips

Out gathering more rose hips, these from the R. englatine (the one whose foliage smells like fresh green apples)and cleaning and drying them in the dehydrator for tea.
I clean them by cutting off the ends and scooping out the middle- seeds, furzy stuff, and once in a while a leetle white worm. Then pop the hips in the dehydrator.
Good for you.
Did I tell you my German-American friend, Ulrike's story about growing up poor in wartime Germany. The kids would pick rosehips on the way to school to eat, and scrape the furzy stuff in the middle out to use as "itching powder" to tease the other kids... Kids will be kids. I seem to remember reading that during the same war English kids were fed rosehips as well, both sides' children were sorely lacking good sources of Vitamin C, such as citrus fruit, and rose hips being the very best source of C and its accompanying bioflavinoids.
Check the C bottles next time you go past the Vitamin counter at the store, they still add rose hips to better brands.