There are many edible herbs and flowers that can be found in suburban yards. Today, I’m making homemade herbal tea with Marigold and Stevia. Marigold tea is supposed to be good for indigestion and menstrual discomfort, but I just like the idea of drinking my yard.

1. The first step in making herbal tea is to WASH your plant parts.

For marigold, chamomile, pansy, viola, echinacea, or other flower teas, pluck the flower heads. For stevia, lemon balm, and mint, use the leaves:

I soaked these flowers in water with a few tablespoons of vinegar. It took about four washes to get clean a rinse. Then I rinsed them with water a few times to remove the vinegar.

2. The second step is to DRY the flowers/herbs.

I laid them all out on a rack on top of the microwave to dry, planning to do this post next month.

Then TL informed me that it would go much faster if I put the flowers IN the microwave.

Ah, yes.

It took three-five minutes to dry them, depending on how many I nuked at once.

I wanted my tea pre-sweetened, so I picked some stevia leaves, an herb about 30 times sweeter than sugar, which I washed and nuked until I could crush it easily.

(STEVIA. Not my picture. Mr. Ivory took the camera to work. So, it’s theirs.)

3. Steep in boiling water for five minutes. Strain and enjoy. (I used a porous dishcloth stretched over a coffee cup.)

I nuked a cup of water to boiling and dropped in one whole blossom and 1tsp of dried stevia in a cup of boiling water to steep. Ummmmm….I don’t recommend this. TOO sweet and TOO much flower smell. I felt like I should be allergic to my cup.

So, I regrouped and looked up a recipe at Crazy for Tea. It said to use one teaspoon of crushed, dried marigold.

Ah-ha.

Turns out the “whole blossom” tea is for POTS, as in THREE POTS FROM ONE BLOSSOM, as in NOT AN 8 OUNCE CUP. See?

(Again, not my pic.)

So, you can make THREE POTS OF TEA from what I put in a coffee cup. No wonder it was a little strong….

Anyhoo, my flowers weren’t dry enough to just crush and I was tired of running the microwave, so I pulled out my handy-dandy coffee grinder (which you’ve already seen me use for non-coffee grinding here and here) and buzzed two blossoms for a few seconds. I scooped one tsp of it into boiling water along with 1/2 tsp of crushed stevia.

VERDICT: I will definitely make my own tea in the future. Very fun. Very easy. I look forward to drinking new and different things from my yard. And I LOVED the stevia. Pre-sweetened tea with no calories and no cancer? Yeah, man. However, while the properly made marigold tea tasted wonderful, the aromatics still made my nose itch. Then I saw this bit beneath the recipe.

Ah-choo!

Ivory