Growing Your Own Tea Garden: The Guide to Growing and Harvesting Flavorful Teas in Your Backyard (CompanionHouse Books) Create Your Own Blends to Manage Stress, Boost Immunity, Soothe Headaches & More

You love to drink tea. Why not grow your own?

• Over 60 diverse plants that make great tea, including the classic tea plant and dozens of flavorful leaves, flowers, fruits, and roots
• 9 fun garden designs, including immunity-boosting, headache-soothing, relaxation-inducing, and hangover-curing
• Best cultivation practices and how to plant, maintain, harvest, and enjoy a productive backyard tea garden
• Recipes for teas to make from your new garden, such as Calendula Sun Tea, Refreshing Hibiscus Tea, and Sleepytime Tea
• Tea 101, from learning the differences between green tea and white tea to how to properly dry and store your bounty

If you've ever considered raising your own tea, this comprehensive guide is the place to start!

Growing Your Own Tea Garden is packed with inspiration and practical instructions for cultivating and enjoying delicious teas from a variety of plants in your own personal tea garden. You don't have to be an avid gardener: Author Jodi Helmer, a food and farming journalist, provides all the information you need to plan and plant a healthy, bountiful backyard tea garden, with nine suggested garden designs and useful cultivation advice. She shows you how to choose the right crops for your soil and climate, starting with the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) and going on through a survey of tisanes (aka herbal teas). Explore a directory of over 60 ingredients, including medicinal herbs like milk thistle, chickweed, rugosa rose, burdock, and more, with notes on their active properties and purported health benefits.

Discover how to grow the full range of plants that make wonderful teas and herbal infusions, from flowering chamomile and lavender to chicory roots, rose hips, lemon verbena, peppermint, aromatic bergamot, and more! Jodi shows you how to harvest, dry, and store your tea to enjoy all year long, along with brewing tips and creative recipes specially formulated to provide natural remedies for headaches, upset stomach, and stress.

An included plant index shows you how to grow dozens of crops that make marvelous tea drinks, herbal infusions, and decoctions. Included are instructions for growing tea in container gardens and raised beds; understanding the differences between black tea, green tea, white tea, and herbal tea; harvesting, drying, and storing your seasonal leaves for consumption on cool autumn days; and how to brew the perfect cup of tea.

You'll also find tea garden designs to help you grow a garden that works for your lifestyle and can help address common ailments, offer immune support, provide a natural and nourishing health boost, and support stress management. Do you suffer from tension headaches? Try growing the Headache Tea Garden with its vibrant tufted violet and trumpet honeysuckle. Do you enjoy a good party? Try the Hangover Cure Tea Garden! Are you stressed out and having trouble unwinding or falling asleep? Try the caffeine-free Relaxing Tea Garden or the Sleepytime Tea Garden. If you're feeling tired, sluggish, or just need a burst of energy to fight that afternoon slump, skip the coffee: the Fatigue-Fighting Tea Garden will put some pep in your step! There are designs for an Immune-Boosting Tea Garden, Tummy Troubles Tea Garden, and more!

Don't buy store-bought blends when homegrown is so much better! You'll find everything you need to know to start growing, blending, and brewing your own high-quality tea inside Growing Your Own Tea Garden!

"Never settle for store-bought, premade blends again! With beautiful images and detailed instructions for growing, drying, and brewing, passionate tea drinkers at every level of gardening experience will love this book."
—Allison M. Sidhu, Managing Editor, Gardener's Path

What a fantastic resource! Specific information on a range of plants to grow for using in tea, along with instructions on how to harvest and prepare the plants and many different recipes. Really excited to try some of these. -- Beth Borman, Little Free Library, Englew

Growing Your Own Tea Garden by Jodi Helmer is fabulous. -The Daily Meal

With the help of this book, most anyone can plan a successful tea garden, then grow and create their own customized tea blends. Start now, and you can have a plenty ready in time for the next gift-giving season that will be here before we know it. ―WFA Eats

"...a guide for steeping the perfect cup of tea from your harvest." ―Booklist

As someone who can’t live without her tea, I couldn’t wait to open this book when it arrived. I was truly blown away by all the wonderful knowledge and how many fruits, and parts of fruit plants could be used to create various kinds of tea. This is one of the first times I have ever seen a book approach making tea in a fun, information, and easy to follow way. Probably the most challenging section is learning about the most common teas – black, white, green, and oolong – and what you need to know before you start growing. Overall though, after finishing Growing Your Own Tea Garden: The Guide to Growing and Harvesting Flavorful Teas in Your Backyard, I recommend that every tea lover and gardener go out and buy this book! -Budget Earth Consumer Blog

The ideal do-it-yourself instruction guide and manual for the gardener and tea enthusiast, "Growing Your Own Tea Garden: The Guide to Growing and Harvesting Flavorful Teas in Your Backyard" is packed with inspiration, illustrations, and practical instructions for cultivating and enjoying delicious teas on even the most modest plot of ground. Author Jodi Helmer (who is an experienced journalist who writes about food, gardening, farming, the environment and sustainable living) will help even the most novice of gardeners to effectively and successfully plan and plant a productive backyard tea garden. With sample garden designs and cultivation advice, Jodi shows how to choose the right crops for a particular soil and climate, and starting with the tea plant (Camellia sinensis), then going on through a comprehensive survey of tisanes, or herbal teas, readers will discover how to grow the full range of herbal infusions that make wonderful teas, from flowering chamomile and lavender to chicory roots, rose hips, lemon verbena, peppermint, aromatic bergamot and more. Jodi also shows how to harvest, dry and store tea to enjoy all year long, -- along with brewing tips and creative recipes. It should be noted that sample tea garden designs include instructions for growing tea in container gardens and raised beds, understanding the differences between black tea, green tea, white tea and herbal tea, drying and storing tea leaves for consumption on cool autumn days, and 'Let it steep: how to brew the perfect cup of tea'. Thoroughly 'user friendly' in organization and presentation, "Growing Your Own Tea Garden" is a unique and unreservedly recommended addition to personal and community library DIY Gardening instructional reference collections. Midwest Book Review

This charming paper back is chock full of information on herbal teas made from many of the plants we grow in our gardens, including herbs. And many of these teas have medicinal qualities that can benefit us all. The best news is most teas can be made from fresh leaves and/or flowers, so brewing a cup is a snap. You harvest the fresh leaves or flowers, drop them in a cup of hot water, give them a few minutes to steep and sip away. What could be easier? Helmer gives advice on how to dry and store tea for yearlong use, brewing tips and creative recipes along with growing tips. The chapter that intrigued me the most is Garden Designs. These themed gardens include plants that look good together and make good neighbors. There’s a sleepy-time tea garden, a fatigue-fighting tea garden, a relaxing tea garden and a headache tea garden. For those who like to party, there’s a hangover cure tea garden. Rock on! The Detroit News

This book shows how to plant, maintain, harvest and enjoy a productive backyard tea garden, with a comprehensive survey of all the crops that make delicious tea drinks, plus advice on cultivation, harvesting, drying, storing and brewing.

You Love to Drink Tea.
Why Not Grow Your Own?

If you've ever considered raising your own tea, this practical guidebook is the place to start! Food and farming journalist Jodi Helmer provides all the information you need to plan and plant a productive backyard tea garden. She shows you how to choose the right crops for your soil and climate, starting with the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) and going on through a comprehensive survey of tisanes (herbal teas). Jodi offers useful advice on cultivating and maintaining your crops, along with nine suggested garden designs. Growing Your Own Tea Garden also includes tips on how to harvest, dry, and store your tea to enjoy all year long, plus brewing tips and creative recipes.

• Learn everything you need to know to create a healthy, bountiful tea garden and enjoy high-quality tea and herbal infusions
• Discover more than 60 diverse plants that make great tea, including the classic tea plant and dozens of flavorful leaves, flowers, fruits, and roots
• Explore best cultivation practices and nine fun garden designs
• Let it steep: learn how to brew the perfect cup of tea

"Never settle for store-bought, premade blends again! With beautiful images and detailed instructions for growing, drying, and brewing, passionate tea drinkers at every level of gardening experience will love this book."
—Allison M. Sidhu, Managing Editor, Gardener's Path

Jodi Helmer is an experienced journalist who writes about food, gardening, farming, the environment, and sustainable living. Jodi's work has appeared in Entrepreneur, Hemispheres, Civil Eats, National Geographic Traveler, AARP, Farm Life, WebMD, Health, CNNMoney, and Guardian Sustainable Business. She is the author of five books, including The Green Year and Farm Fresh Georgia. When she's not writing, she grows vegetables and raises bees.