Tea Herb Gardening – Fresh Tea In Your Own Backyard
While vegetable and flower gardens take a lot of time to grow from seed, you can begin tea herb gardening with very little time commitment at all. Most herbal teas grow extremely fast, often developing from seed to full grown plants full of leaves within four or five weeks.
Why Grow Herbal Tea?
The biggest reason to start growing your own herbs is to enhance your health. Many people are now using naturally grown herbal teas to help combat diabetes and even some forms of cancer. You can even alleviate or prevent the common cold for your entire family by brewing your own herbal teas during the cold season. These benefits come from the antifungal, antiviral, and antibacterial properties of most herbs used for tea.
Happiness comes along with herbal teas, no matter how you use them. By placing containers with mixed herbs directly outside a sunny window you can bring a sense of happiness to everyone who walks by the window or sits inside to look out. Also, bringing bouquets of herbs into the home and placing them in vases will deliver aromatherapy benefits, especially with lavender. Similarly, you can take advantage of aromatherapy as well as mood enhancers by brewing your own chamomile teas, or other herbal brews.
Specific Uses for Herbal Tea
Wondering exactly how you combine and use herbs to enhance your health and your home? Consider just a few ways you can do this right from your own backyard.
Heart Burn Remedy – Combine peppermint leaves, fennel seeds and lemon balm leaves for this potent remedy to minor heart burn. Measure out and boil some water, adding about 1 teaspoon of the herbal mix for each cup of water. Reduce heat and allow it to simmer for five minutes. Finally, turn off the heat and let it sit covered for about another ten minutes and strain out any floating tea particles.
Whooping Cough Remedy – Brew up some marjoram tea using two tablespoons of the herb (chopped) for every two teaspoons of water boiled. After steeping for 15 minutes and draining out any large pieces of tea remaining, it can be consumed twice daily at room temperature until the cough subsides.
Diabetes Remedy – You will need to grow fenugreek seed if you want a potent diabetes fighting tea. Make the tea with one teaspoon of the seed for every cup of water boiled. This one will take more time to prepare as it needs to be removed from heat, covered, and left to sit until morning. In the morning you strain out the seeds and drink it at room temperature. When consumed on a daily basis, this type of herbal tea can be quite beneficial to balancing blood sugar.
Constipation Remedy – To get relief from constipation, use one teaspoon of fennel seed for every half cup of water boiled. It must be covered for a half hour after brewing, and then the seeds can be drained out and tea consumed at room temperature.
It is best to go out and collect fresh herbs in the very early morning while they are still covered in dew. This will keep them fresh longer, allowing you more time to enjoy them or use them in your food. It is a good idea to keep a close watch on the weather as well, as you will want to harvest all of your remaining herbs just before the first hard frost kills the plants back.