How to Grow a Tea Garden and Brew its Tea

Growing Gardens

If you’re looking for more ideas on gardening, see How to Start a Vegetable Garden for Beginners. If you love growing herbs, you might like Easy Herbs to Grow that Every Cook Needs for more ideas.

For those of you looking a bit deeper, Saving Seeds from Your Garden is helpful and informative and Three Sisters Gardening is always a popular read.

Tea Garden Roots

The tea garden is typically a smaller plot or even a container garden dedicated to growing herbs and flowers for steeping in hot water. Thus, herbal tea.

Did you know that herb gardening has ancient roots in modern botany? In fact, The New York Times says that according to “The Gardener’s Companion to Medicinal Plants,” the “study of herbal medicine can be traced back 5,000 years, to the Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia, who listed the names of hundreds of plants — including fennel, mint, thyme, sage, myrtle, and marjoram — on clay tablets that were later rediscovered in what is now Iraq.”

If you’re interested in medicinal gardening, you may enjoy my series of Medicinal Herbs.

How to Plant a Tea Garden

“While it is possible to grow your own black tea (camellia sinensis) in northern climates, without the warmth and abundant sunlight the plant needs to thrive, the effort is unlikely to be worth the negligible yield,” writes Aimee Farrell for NYT.

By comparison, an herbal tea garden is far more manageable, especially in small spaces.

If you’re new to gardening and love herbal tea, a tea garden is absolutely the best place to begin. If you’re a pro at gardening but haven’t grown a tea garden, this just might be your year.

I love the idea of growing my own herbal teas, making tea blends, and infusions that can last into the winter.

Choose Your Location

The most important tip for growing a successful tea garden is deciding where to plant.

“Many herbs are Mediterranean, and so they need at least six hours of sunlight a day and they want to be dry,” says Deborah Needleman, tea gardener in New York’s Hudson Valley

Growing Tea in Containers

If you’re planting in pots, make sure they have drainage holes or stones at the base and, if they’re outdoors, Needleman advises moving the herbs to sunny windowsills during colder months.

Create a Pleasing Tea Garden

When arranging pots or when planting directly in the soil, Needleman suggests utilizing corner plots. And to design the tea garden as you would a floral display; “juxtaposing the various colors, shapes and textures of different species. Low-lying plants such as lemon thyme look nice along a border, while the chartreuse tones of lemon verbena create a vivid contrast against dark leaves.”

Harvesting a Tea Garden

Herbs grow best when they are trimmed. The more they are trimmed, the more they will grow. Investing in trimming scissors is a great idea, like Joyce Chen’s Original Unlimited Scissors.

Harvest leafy herbs like mint, lemon verbena, lemon balm, and thyme before they flower. Needleman says that “once a plant blooms, the leaves lose freshness and become bitter.”

Floral herbs, like rose, lavender, and chamomile, are best for tea when dried. She says,

“It’s good to harvest in the mornings, after the dew has dried, but before the plants get stressed by the sun — that’s when they’re at their most fragrant.”

The rule of thumb is to collect around 5 percent of a plant’s total volume each time you trim. Carefully wash the harvest under running water and gently pat dry with paper towels.

Drying the Tea Garden Harvest

When the garden is flourishing, making tea from fresh snipping of herbs is simple. But when the nights cool, having a storehouse of dried herbs and flowers for tea is a treasure.

My post on Preserving Herbs has more helpful information about drying herbs.

Needleman likes to gather herbs into small bunches and hang them upside down in cool, darker areas where there is good air ventilation.

For preserving flower heads, like chamomile, she spreads them in wicker trays or baskets and rustles them up periodically to get air into the leaves. The drying process, she says, can take up to a few weeks. When they are crumbly, they are ready to store.

How to Store Dried Herbs and Flowers

Once the herbs and flowers are completely dry, the storing process can begin, which involves striping leaves and flowers from their stems and stalks.

Store dried herbs and flowers in airtight glass jars.