Tag: Tea

Planning Your Garden

It’s that time of year where we need to look at the space we have to grow a little something to supplement what we get at the grocery store. This year, more than ever, is this important. Grocery prices are skyrocketing, independent farmers are finding it more difficult to stay in business, and there are just times where you want to buy produce and there was a run on that item with nothing left for you.

The great news is that you’re not held captive by what is or is not available in your local market. Even if you choose a little something that is easy to grow, that is one less thing that you have to depend on others for putting up in your kitchen.

Maybe a Victory Garden sounds intimidating. You don’t have to go down the rabbit hole of homestead farming. Start by picking one vegetable that you eat a lot of. Do you use a lot of pasta sauce, tomato paste, tomato soup, or ketchup? You can start by growing some tomatoes and offset those items that you usually buy from the store by making it yourself. You will find it surprising at how few ingredients you really need to make those items. And you cut those preservative and other junk ingredients out of your diet that are put in those commercial products. And tomatoes are not demanding when it comes to you time. You can fit this vegetable into the cracks of your time.

Even if you respond to me right now by saying, “I’m not a vegetable gardener. I plant flowers. I love flowers.”

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Did you know that right now the price of living has risen so much that people are putting off doctor visits because they can’t afford to pay the co-pay? In 2018 44% of Americans skipped visits due to price. (Forbes) In 2021, 41% skipped visits due to pandemic concerns. (AMA) Even with statistics provided in December, 2022, 40% of Americans still are avoiding visit for various reasons. (First Stop Health) This is a reality for many people. But that doesn’t mean that you do not have to go without treating your body with items from your garden, even your flower garden.

There are many flowers that you can grow in your garden that have medicinal properties.

Echinacea by Oast House Archive is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

Flowers

  • Echinacea: good for boosting your immune system and fighting colds and flus.
  • Rose Hips: (the dark pink or red fruit seen after roses have gone dormant for the winter) are high in vitamin C and good for fighting colds and flus.
  • Lavender: treats insomnia, reduces blood pressure, reduces menopausal hot flashes, and treats acne inflammation.
  • Dandelion: there are so many uses this flower has but some are soothing an upset stomach, aide with gall stones, and detox your liver.
  • Mullein: benefits for your lungs, sinuses, and ear aches.
  • Bee Balm: helps relieve flatulence and urination.
  • Yarrow: helps with fevers.
  • Elderberries: are high in flavonoids, vitamin C and A, betacarotene, iron and potassium.
  • Comfrey: is great mulch for all gardens (hint: in case you find it difficult to find a fertilizer). It also has anti-inflammatory properties (great for many different skin conditions), but also has a long history of being a bone mender. There are many medical articles that talk about how using a comfrey salve can decrease your broken bone healing time by half.
  • Chamomile: helps with muscle spasms and insomnia
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There are so many more flowers that I could put on this list. Last year I started increasing the amount of medicinal herbs and flowers in my garden. Not only are herbs amazing for making your meals flavorful (hello oregano, sage, basil, and the whole mint family), but they can also be used in tea with the above flowers to help treat the symptoms of oncoming colds before you become sick. Or maybe you have a skin condition where you need to look for specialty soaps in the store. Did you know you can make your own soaps for a fraction of the price and better for your skin? Fact!

I’m inspired. What’s next?

Whether you’re ready to grow your own vegetables or just want to stick to our flowers, there are plants that do well next to each other and ones that don’t. So by planning on where you are going to put everything you want to grow, you can be sure to keep the friendly plants next to each other and competing plants away from each other. And by knowing if your herb or flower is a spreader, you can plan on keeping them in their own contained area.

Some vegetables you can’t plant next to each other:

  • beans and onions
  • tomatoes and corn
  • celery and carrots
  • garlic and leeks
  • carrots and herbs (parsley, dill)
  • onions and beans/peas
  • lettuce and broccoli
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Vegetables that should be planted next to each other:

  • garlic and tomatoes
  • spinach and strawberries
  • beans and tomatoes
  • tomato, basil, and lettuce
  • corn, beans, and squash
  • radish and carrots
  • carrots and onions

By searching companion planting and the vegetables you want to grow, you can see what grows well together. You can also find out what does not do well together.

For example Marigolds deter pests that attack tomato plants, brussels sprouts, cabbage family, and bush/pole beans.

Search not just for vegetable companion planting but also flower companion planting.

  • Geraniums and Roses do well next to each other
  • Coneflowers and Black-Eyed Susans
  • Astilbe and Hosta
  • Hydrangeas and Daylilies
  • Daffodils and Amsonia
  • Daisies and Petunias
  • Marigolds and Lavender

Saving Time in the Garden

Now that you know what you want to plant, what does well together, and what doesn’t do well together, don’t wait until it’s time to plant your seeds or put your starts in the ground. Spend the time now in drawing out your grow space and determine where you will put everything.

I grew up putting seeds in the ground without a “map”. We would spend all day planting in a small garden because there was a swapping around of seed packets and other time wasting activities. Last year I mapped out where I was putting everything. By the time it came to putting seeds and starts in the ground, it only took me a couple hours to plant twice the area that my mother’s garden was.

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Plus, that “map” had the added bonus of being a reminder of what I planted where. This is particularly important because I planted cabbage and I can’t plant any brassica vegetables this year where I planted cabbage last year because of the competition between these two vegetables.

Not everyone keeps a garden the same way. The focus on most of the gardening community is that you just fertilize your garden, or scorch and burn to add nutrients back into the garden. I decided to practice not just crop rotation, but also resting the land. All throughout history these two practices were how farmers kept land without all the modern conveniences of amending soils with fertilizers and other products.

By keeping this “map”, I can keep a record of how long I’ve had a garden plot, planter box, raised bed, pot, or any other container. This puts a concrete calendar that tells me when it’s time to rest an area. This past year was my first year in resting the very first garden bed that I started. It made me nervous letting a decent size space go fallow. But I watched saw that only a couple dandelions sprouted in the bed. I left them because one of the jobs of dandelions is to draw up nutrients from deep down in the ground to the surface where my vegetables for this year will use. But dandelions always grow where they are most needed. It was encouraging that there were only a couple and not a whole garden bed full of dandelions. So the rotation and natural fertilizing with compost and tea from comfrey is doing its job.

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By watching your land sit during a year of rest, you can see what you are working with. Because your land will talk to you just like your plants will talk to you. They will tell you if something is wrong.

How to map and plan

I’ve looked at so many different sheets that homesteaders put together to share their process. The problem I’ve had with everything that I’ve found is that I have to shift through a dozen different pages to note the information that I want.

This year I decided to make my own sheets that are simplified and keep the information where I want it.

I’m providing my 8×8 Garden Plot and Weather Log for free on my website. Just click here and select the style that you want.

Why is a weather log important?

When I kept a weather log for my wild yeast starter, the mystery of why the same recipe was yielding different results.

In the same way, our gardens are going to respond to different weather patterns that hit. For example, the non-existence of spring and the extended winter jumping right into summer weather stunted all my seeds and starts. By keeping a record of the weather, I can look back on past years and see if and when I need to be concerned and add in hoops or other insulating method to help my crops in an uncharacteristic early season. And there was also an additional issue of powdery mildew hitting my pumpkins and comfrey plants in the midst of a sunny streak with absolutely no rain or my watering leaves. It turns out that the problem was the extremely uncharacteristic humidity levels. After a month of fighting mildew, I finally checked the humidity and saw that it was in the 90% range!

With everything that I threw at my plants to treat them, I ended up with a long list of what didn’t work. This gives me information in the future for looking for a different solution without wasting these resources. So never underestimate the power of keeping notes!

Last year I used a grid pattern not just for my garden beds, but for all my containers and irregular shaped beds.

No matter what shape or container you’re working with, all you need to know is the measurements and then you can roughly draw it on the grid.

Just keep in mind that when you plan seeds, you’ll want to keep a couple of inches away from the side of your container or raised bed so you can have a healthy root system.

The grid will do the math for you!

I set up the grid so that the darker squares can be used for a 1 foot measurement and the smaller squares can be used for other incremental measurements that you seeds require. Having this information already in mind, this past year I just used my pre-mapped seed drops sites, poked the soil with a chop stick and dropped my seeds. I knew ahead of time how many rows and columns I would be making so I didn’t need a ruler or anything else to space. (And spacing is always the most time consuming part of planting!)

Another thing that I hated with the other planning sheets is that they didn’t set it up like a map, complete with symbols to make your coding easy. It’s easier to use a shape code than an initial code when diagramming your seeds. I’ll tell you what! You never recognize just how many plants start with the same letter until you try to put them on a map. And they’re all at the beginning of the alphabet!

Make it Simple

I hope these two sheets will help you and your garden out as much as I know they will make my life simpler.

The Garden Plot sheet I will use for each of my gardening areas. I will be leaving the back of the sheet blank so that all I have to do is flip the sheet over to have more space for notes on what this growing season throws at me. And the Weather Log will be nice because a whole year can be seen on one page.

So far, this year’s planning is only going to take me 6 pages instead of the 18 that I started off with last year.

Give this Garden Plot a shot and let me know in the comments how it works for you!

Also let me know what other information you keep records of when you are gardening.

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Garden Planning

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Would You Like a Cuppa?

It’s funny how beverages of choice are so regional. For example in the United States, there has historically been a continental divide between coffee drinkers and tea drinkers. Tea has been pretty regional for the East Coast and Coffee the West.

The history of this divide started around the foundation of this country. We all know about the Boston Tea Party and how they threw tea over the sides of the ships, all over a 3 cent rise in taxes. (I find this historical fact both interesting and funny in the context on how there has been upwards of 14% inflation on so many products across the grocery shelves.)

Coffee started making its footprint in the United States with the colonization (and yes, even subjugation) of the Caribbean Islands and South America. But it found its biggest consumers with the people who moved west, not just the Mid-West but also the West Coast and upwards into Alaska.

In fact, before Starbucks became established and took over every major street corner, I grew up where you could tell whether your family was West Coasters or from back East. If your family had spent a few generations on the West Coast, you had a coffee pot in your kitchen. I grew up with many people whose grandparents drank tea, but their parents, coffee. Those were my New England transplant friends. And then in High School I made friends with a transfer student, who came from Virginia. She hated coffee and only drank tea.

What is funny is what the transition from tea drinking family to coffee drinking family looks like.

A set of grandparents came up from the Texas area. One was Texan, coffee drinker, and the other was from the Deep South. The only tea that was in this grandparents’ house was sun tea. And there was only ONE way to make it–so obviously a tea drinker. Every summer there was sun tea that was made, that beautiful dark golden brew. There is really nothing like it. Mind you, this isn’t the sweet tea that you will find in the Deep South, where verbal wars can be started on the proper summer time tea. Just good strong, dark, rich sun tea.

Now my parents were both coffee drinkers. And yet almost each summer growing up, my mom would brew at least one sun tea.

This dedicated coffee drinker, I’m a very picky tea drinker and it was only this summer, when the sun finally came out that I caught myself thinking “I need to make some sun tea”. You can imagine the “What the– where did that come from?” moment I had because I don’t make sun tea. And yet this summer was it.

So that prompted me to ask on my social media for recommendations and recipes from my tea loving friends who have the tea that even a coffee lover would love. Obviously the majority of my friends and acquaintances are coffee drinkers because I only had a few responses. But the responses that I received shocked me because I never knew about these teas and they never crossed my mind.

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Mint Sun Tea

One recommendation sent to me was:

  • 1-2 Regular Tea Bags
  • 3-5 Bags of Mint Tea OR Fresh Mint Leaves

Add the above tea bags into a glass gallon jug of water (which you use to brew your sun tea). Brew for 2-3 hours, in the sun, or longer if you want your tea stronger or you’re sun is hiding behind clouds.

When finished brewing refrigerate.

This friend also said that she adds honey into the tea before refrigerating.

I was excited about this recipe because my absolute favorite tea is Stash’s Moroccan Mint Green Tea. If I’m craving tea, this is the one I hunt for because it has the world’s best flavor. I’ve tried to get into the Green Tea fad, but I find the vast majority of green tea either tastes like grass or soap. (I’ve recently learned that the majority of people who don’t like cilantro is because of it tasting like soap. There is actually a chemical compound in these green that to certain taste buds taste like soap. So this is real and there’s a reason!)

Moroccan Mint Green Tea

If you’re like me, and not a green tea person, seriously try this one. It’s not just me. I have a friend who use to be a Japanese tea distributor, says that she’s extremely picky, and assures me that this tea is one of the greatest to make a sun tea with!

This friend is currently cooked with brewing Chai with Hojicha, Green Tea with Self Healing and fresh mint from her garden.

Strawberry Tea

This one surprised me when a friend suggested this. I don’t know why I never thought of fruit sun teas. Fruit just makes sense because of summer. Strawberries are appealing because I’m growing them and I love strawberries. And the recipe passed on is super simple.

  • 6-8 Strawberry Tea Bags
  • Strawberry Puree

In your glass gallon jug of water (which you use to brew your sun tea) add the Strawberry Tea Bags. Brew for 2-3 hours, in the sun, or longer if you want your tea stronger or you’re sun is hiding behind clouds.

Once your tea is done brewing, remove your tea bags and chill your tea. If you can’t wait, pour your tea over a glass filled with ice. Mix in strawberry puree for a stronger strawberry flavor. If you like sweet tea, add sugar to your liking.

Strawberry Sensation

Sweet & Spicy

This one was recommended by two different friends, one from Tennessee and one from Texas.

Sweet & Spicy

This tea I found intriguing because the ingredient list reminds me of staple recipes from Asia. In fact, reading the ingredients made me start craving Thai!

I’ve been assured that these tea bags alone are all you need for some of the best sun tea you’ve ever had. And since I grew up on sun tea made from plain Lipton tea, I can see how this is going to be amazing!

Along this line of tea, I was also introduced to the idea of Cinnamon Tea. This blew my mind!

I’ve never heard of Cinnamon Tea before. And I learned that 2 cinnamon sticks in about 4 cups of boiling water will give you a nice tea.

This is definitely on my list to make once fall comes. I love cinnamon, but I’m on a kick with my mint right now. However, my Chocolate Mint might need the cinnamon to bring it to the next level. It’s still missing something for me, and this might be it!

Natural Sweetener Alternatives

There are various reasons why people choose an alternate to sugar for sweetening foods and beverages. I’m personally leery about many sweeteners because the last thing I want to do is add more chemicals into my diet. So when it was brought to my attention that Stevia is a plant based sweetener, this product had my attention.

I’m hooked on the idea now that I have located stevia plants to add to my garden. So I will soon be growing this and learning how to make sweetener.

My mom has cooked with stevia and says it does well with baking. She also used it with alternate flour sources.

I’ve used the packets of stevia and sprinkled in my large water cup and 4 leaves of mint. So with nothing to hide, I was able to taste the stevia. I didn’t notice any off flavors that I’ve noticed with other sugar alternatives. The flavor is slightly different than sugar, but not enough of a difference for me to say it’s “different”. The huge bonus I can say about it is that I like how stevia melts into the water. If you’ve added sugar in cold water you know how much of a gritty feeling there is until the sugar has been well stirred and sat for a while. That’s not the same experience I had with stevia. I only had to give a good stir and I was good to go. No textural difference.

When my mom gifted me stevia, I seriously wondered what I was going to do with it. Other than just keep it in my cupboard for when my mom visits. Now I know what I’m going to do with this natural sugar.

I recommend giving this sugar alternate a chance.

Here is the packets:

Stevia packets

And the bag:

stevia bag

Looking for an alternative to tea?

I know that there are still some people who just do not lean towards tea drinking at all. Or maybe you’re looking for a tea that is kid friendly. There is one more option I have for you.

Infused Water

While waiting for some good leads for sun tea, I instantly ran across a post from on of my favorite bloggers. She just got me hooked on putting fresh mint leaves in my chilled water!

I have a 36 oz. water “cup” that I use to make sure I get my daily water in. The only thing I add to my water is 4-6 leaves from my mint plant of choice. Before you put the leaves in your cup, stack and roll them up, crush the leaves in your fingers, and then add them to your water. By crushing the leaves, you break open the cell walls of the leaves and release the oils within.

The best part about using fresh leaves from your garden (or produce stand if you haven’t yet planted fresh herbs at your home) is that you are not only drinking something tasty, you’re giving natural medicine that give your body the building blocks to bring you back into or keep you in health.

What I recently learned is that by putting mint leaves in your water, it can help combat ailments such as GERD (Gastro-esophageal Reflux Disease). I personally am not afflicted with GERD, but summer heat does a number on my body. Not only is my appetite affected, but I’m more prone to upset stomach. In fact, my stomach was upset when I first put mint in my water cup. By the time I finished drinking that cup, my stomach was back to normal. And since I’ve been using the mint daily, it hasn’t returned.

Anyone who works with herbs will tell you that the mint family does have properties that benefit your gastrointestinal system. I love learning about these things, because I try to keep off of as much over other the counter or prescribed medication as I can.

Here are some ideas of what mints you can use:

  • Mint
  • Chocolate Mint
  • Pineapple Mint
  • Orange Mint
  • Lemon Balm
  • Spearmint
  • Peppermint

And there are other types of mint that you can find at your local nursery for produce stand that sells starts. Better yet, maybe your neighbor has a mint they are growing. For example, I have Chocolate Mint and Spearmint. I had Orange Mint, but this crazy spring may have killed it. (I thought it died on me, but I recently saw a new sprig come up from the soil. I’m waiting for it to grow a bit bigger before seeing if it’s Orange or Chocolate.) One neighbor has Lemon Balm. Another neighbor has Pineapple Mint. And I only found out what my neighbors were growing by telling them about what I’m growing and what new projects I’m working on with my herbs.

Here are the flavors of the mints that I’ve tasted.

Chocolate mint just tastes like mint to me. The reason why it got its name is because when you crush the leaves, it stains your fingers brown like milk chocolate. I mentioned before that I’m very particular about my tea. I found my pickiness kicking in on putting this mint in my water. A tiny sprinkling of Stevia was just enough to pull this infused water around to allow me to drink this. Even though I found I could drink this, none of my kiddos liked this flavor. Instead, two of my boys leave my water alone if it has mint, because of this one. So mamas, if you want your water left alone, this one may do it for you!

Pineapple mint really does smell like pineapple. I can’t wait to get this in my water, because it smells like a Piña Colada. My neighbor just gave me a few sprigs this evening so I’m excited to try them tomorrow!

Lemon Balm, I swear it tastes like lemon! I usually don’t keep lemons in my house because they turn on me before I use them. However, I’ve used lemon balm in my chicken broth and it tastes just like I squeezed in some fresh lemon. You better believe that I have a new friend in my kitchen. I’m so using this herb instead of lemon or lemon zest.

Spearmint brings back so many fond childhood memories of incessantly chewing Wrigley’s spearmint gum. And yes, I’ve almost picked my spearmint plant bald for my water. And this is the infused water that my youngest will still steal my water. So this mint gets my recommendation if you’re looking for an herb infused water that is kid friendly.

I so hope you’ll join me in dressing up your water this summer!

What’s your favorite water infusion or Sun Tea?

I’m still looking for new ideas on sun teas in particular. But I want to hear what everyone is drinking right now to stay hydrated. Please comment below!

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