Help me find a tea I can grow

Factual Questions
1

I live in Southern California, in an apartment that has a minimalist backyard. Not too fertile, but roomy and private enough that I could fit a few pots back there. When I lived in Arizona I read a newspaper article about herbal teas that would grow well there; I lived in a dorm at the time so I filed the thought away until it was more convenient. Well, I live in a pretty decent setup for it now, or so I think–I don’t know a thing about what grows here. So, like the OP said, please help me find a tea plant I can grow, cure and brew myself. Criteria follow:

  • I have pretty limited means; as a liberal estimate I’d say I could spend maybe $20 a month on this, on a good month, after I pay a few things off–this whole project won’t actually be happening for months (at least), I’m just trying to come up with ideas.

  • Stray cats hop over the fence and hang out in my backyard. The stuff can’t be poisonous to cats and it shouldn’t be appealing to cats either, if at all possible.

  • I don’t have a whole lot of spare time and I generally can’t guarantee I’ll be home at a given time every day. And I absolutely cannot rely on my roommate to do any of the maintenance for me if I’m gone. So it has to be relatively low-maintenance.

  • Obviously, it has to grow in Southern California without the aid of expensive technology.

2

You can grow “real” tea in So Cal.

Growing tea at home.

Herbal tea would probably be even easier as most herbs tend to be extremely hardy plants. Do some googling for “homegrown herbal tea” and go nuts!

Plants don’t need daily care. Water requirements vary a lot between species, so learn whether your plants prefer moist or dryer soil. Pots tend to dry out quicker than ground soil, so check them at least once a week.

Mulch is generally cheaper than potting soil, so use mulch and soil from your back yard to make your own potting soil if you grow in pots. I generally use a three to one ratio of mulch to soil. Use a liquid house plant fertilizer now and then and you’re good to go. Once you get things going, your monthly out of pocket should be zero. A little of your time and some water and nature will do the rest. Don’t think you need to go the pots route because of poor soil. Improving soil fertility is easy. Use the mulch the same way you would make potting soil, but instead of putting it in a pot, put it in hole in the ground. Presto.

Have fun!

3

Very cool idea. Living in Zone 5 I don’t imagine I’d ever try it but I envy you in Southern Cal.

4

Tea, actual camilla sinensis, takes a lot of processing before it’s usually drunk. Drank. Drinked. Drinken. Something like that. How green, black and oolong teas are made.

Herbal teas, on the other hand, can often go straight from plant to pot, which is really nice, or easily dried on some brown grocery bags or (heaven!) a food dehydrator for storage and later use.

I like self-watering containers, myself. They’re big pots with a special gap on the bottom that pools water away from the roots, yet it can evaporate upwards when needed. Or something like that. I’m not sure of the actual mechanism, but they don’t rot the roots, and they let me get away with a 2 week vacation in July.

Do you have any particular health issues you would want to see addressed by a daily tea? Or is this for drinking pleasure only?

Some of my favorite drinking plants would be:

Lemon balm (Melissa officinalis). Yes, it tastes lemony. Nice and gentle, and good for nervousness, hyperactivity and ADD and ADHD in kids of all ages. It’s got no contraindications and is safe for anyone without an allergy to it (which I’ve never run into, but you never know.)

Hibiscus. Beautiful flowers which make the “zing” in “Zinger” teas. Tart and a little sweet and bright red.

Chamomile. The perfect nighttime tea, and one that most people will be familiar with and not think you’re a crazed hippie for picking out of your yard and consuming.

Peppermint. This one should be in a pot even if you improve your soil quality. Otherwise it will take over your whole yard. Good for digestion, for a little “pick me up” and just plain yummy. If I was doing it, I’d plant one planter half peppermint, half spearmint and make Doublemint Tea!

Lavender. This is a sort of sweet perfumey plant. It’s good as part of a mixed tea, but I wouldn’t drink it solo. What I would do with it is pick the flowers, tie them in some cheesecloth and run a bath over them. Aaaahhhhh!

**Rose **hips are yummy in teas, and a great source of Vitamin C, but I don’t know if roses tolerate pots or not. All roses leave hips behind when their flowers die off. Rugosa variety make the biggest and yummiest rose hips - I make those into jelly just like crabapples.

I don’t know about toxicity to cats, however. Maybe **vetbridge **can help with that part. You could always throw some catnip seeds into your neighbor’s yard so they don’t come into yours! :smiley:

5

Thanks for all the info. daffyduck, I had no idea I could grow camilla sinensis here. Sounds like a lot of work (thanks for the link WhyNot) but very cool for an even later project.

Drinking pleasure, although I’m hopelessly addicted to caffeine (which I realize nothing but camilla sinensis helps with) and I have a recurring sore throat and drinking anything hot helps me feel better.

Lots of good info about the herbals. Of that list, I’ve only ever drank chamomile and peppermint tea (actually, I have a chamomile/valerian/peppermint tea I’m rather fond of). I’ve had jamaica too, which Wikipedia says is hibiscus tea served cold.

But I like the cats! Actually they’re afraid of me right now (I think my roommate shoos them away or something), but I’m working on getting them to hang out with me.

6

What a wonderfully strange combo! Two sedatives and a stimulant! I suppose that could balance itself out into just a yummy middle ground. If, like you and me, you like valerian. I think it has a wonderful earthy sweet smell and taste, but most people think it smells like sweaty gym socks and tastes worse.

Valerian is also very easy to grow, and has a pretty Baby’s Breath like flower. It gets rather tall - up to six feet, so it’s great up against a fence as a backdrop to your other herbs. The roots are harvested and dried before use in the fall of the second year, after the flowers have dropped off and the stems have died back. It’s a perennial, so if you don’t harvest all of it, it will keep coming back and seed its own babies for you. (It also has serrated leaves, which means morons will mistake it for marijuana, but it really doesn’t look anything like cannabis if you know what you’re talking about. picture)

Valerian is very attractive to cats, and affects most of them just like catnip. So if you really want furry friends, it’s a great choice!

For sore throats, try some plain ol’ thyme. Thyme makes a really spicy tea, though - I usually combine it with licorice and nettles, and sometimes red clover - but those are for taste more than anything else.

(If you need somewhere to buy good herbal seeds, I highly recommend Horizon Herbs . Family owned and operated (started with Richo and a shoebox full of seeds under his bed), the owner often answers the phone himself and is happy to chat about herbs and growing recommendations all day long. Their seeds are great, well controlled and always fresh with germination guarantees on pretty much everything. Nearly everything is organic, and what isn’t (maca root, for one) is on its way there.)

7

I can grow valerian here, so you probably can grow it there. I also grow peppermint and spearmint as well as a variety of other herbs–I probably should add “tisanes” to the thread on “things you make rather than buy.”

8

Peppermint is a stimulant? That’s news to me. Anyway, the stuff (the combination) knocks me RTFO–I suspect it’s the valerian more than anything else.

WTF–do people really mistake that for weed? Apparently these folks have never seen weed plants…

9

Well…it’s not a stimulant like coffee is a stimulant, but it has “up” tendencies, if that makes sense. It’s referred to as “too stimulating” for pregnant and nursing moms or little little children, for example. I bet it’s in your tea to mask the valerian taste, though.

In my experience, idiots will mistake anything with a slender serrated leaf as marijuana, even if they don’t form a “hand” or cluster. You should have seen the uproar at my last job when I had mugwort seedlings in the front window to catch some sun. I even had some of Chicago’s finest pay me a visit, 'though luckily they believed me when I showed them some pictures.

10

To make matters worse, the end product looks like bud to the uninitiated. My first semester of college, my group of friends had a couple of hookahs that we’d set up outside the residence hall and hit throughout the day; generally we were just smoking shisha, but sometimes we would toss a little weed in (never enough to be smellable). Every single time we set it up, no matter what we were smoking, at least one cop would wander over and question us about it before we were finished. They especially asked questions about the bag of (dried, etc.) mugwort that we carried around sometimes, but they believed us when they saw that the bag had a label and the store’s address and, gee, the stuff didn’t smell like dope. My dad, however, confiscated both my mugwort and my wormwood when he found out about my possession arrest. He threw away a sizeable chunk of my tea collection, too, which I was rather proud of at the time. I was pissed.

Now that I think about it, I haven’t been to an herb store or collected tea since then. Must’ve been some unconscious negative association…I’ll have to jump back into that.

Edit: I guess the uninitiated must think that the popular marijuana leaf image is simplified. When I first saw young plants growing, it amazed me just how much they looked like the graphic.