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 small 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 on Medicinal Herbs.

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, ensure they have drainage holes or stones at the base. 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 high-quality trimming scissors, such as Joyce Chen's Original Unlimited Scissors is a great idea.

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, such as rose, lavender, and chamomile, are best suited 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 herb snippings is simple. But when the nights are cool, having a storehouse of dried herbs and flowers for tea is a treasure.

Air drying works beautifully for hardy herbs like rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, and lavender. For delicate herbs - mint, lemon balm, lemon verbena - which have higher moisture content and can mold before they fully dry, a faster method works better.

Oven drying: Strip the leaves from the stems and spread them in a single layer on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Set your oven to its lowest temperature, around 170°F, and check after 15 minutes. Most delicate herbs are done in 15 to 20 minutes.

Dehydrating: Set the dehydrator to 95°F and arrange herbs in a single layer on the trays. Two to four hours produces consistently dried herbs with good color and flavor - this is the method I use most often now that my garden has gotten ahead of me.

Microwave drying: For small quantities in a hurry, place leaves between two paper towels and microwave on high for one minute, then in 30-second intervals until the leaves crumble easily. It works especially well for mint and thyme.

To store: pack dried leaves loosely into a glass jar or airtight container and store in a cool, dark pantry. Label with the herb name and date. Properly stored in airtight glass jars, dried herbs hold their flavor well for up to a year.