Growing your own tea

As a Brit I’m expected to drink tea all the time and I try not to disappoint. Though I no longer drink the hard (caffeinated) stuff, I do drink a variety of herbal teas regularly. It’s a deeply ingrained habit and my books would probably never have been finished without their soothing companionship. I discovered the value of growing my own tea by happy accident, when I suddenly had an abundance of peppermint in the garden. Rather than lose it all I dried it and left in a tin in the kitchen. The following winter when I ran out of tea bags (and money to buy them) I started using the dried stuff and found it actually tasted much better than the stuff I was buying. This also led me to realize that growing your own tea can save you a surprising amount of money (at $4.00 for 20 bags the savings can add up quickly). It also reduces your ecological footprint in that you are no longer paying to have your beverage shipped half way around the world.

Like most home grown foods, the herbs you grow yourself tend to be better than the stuff you buy (mostly because they are so much fresher, but also because you can use superior cultivars). After I ran out of my dried Peppermint I tried to go back to buying commercial tea bags and found they were almost undrinkable, with only a faint and not very pleasant flavor. I had become accustomed to a far superior product and found it hard to go back. Fortunately most tea herbs are pretty easy to grow (and useful as groundcover) and if you have the space there is no reason to not plant them. In many cases they grow so well you may have to worry about controlling them.

The most obvious place to put your tea herbs is close by the kitchen door, so that getting enough for a cup of tea doesn’t take more than a few seconds. The nice thing about using it fresh (apart from its freshness) is that you can just use a whole sprig of plant, you don’t need to mess with teapots, strainers or teabags. Use a glass cup and the amber liquid and floating green leaves look very elegant.

If you drink 3 or 4 cups of tea a day you will need quite a lot to get you through the whole year and will have to grow more than just a few plants by the kitchen door. Fortunately most tea plants are very vigorous and perfectly happy to grow out in the wilder parts of the garden, where there is plenty of room for them to spread freely (they do well at the edge of the forest garden). The more independent types will thrive without any help, though I do water them as it improves their flavor (moisture loving herbs like mint taste inferior when growing in dry conditions).

You might also think about creating a tea garden somewhere in a suitably pretty spot. Pick a place with a view (maybe near water), provide comfortable chairs (or cushions) and a table and grow a selection of your favorite tea plants. You can then prepare and drink your own tea out in the garden, maybe invite people over for an adult tea party. To enhance the whole thing bake some of your own cakes (using your own fruit) to drink with your own tea.

If you want to have tea for the winter you will have to dry it. The best time to harvest the leaves for drying is just as the flower buds are starting to appear, as the plant is highest in aromatic oils at this time. The books say that morning is the best time to harvest, after any dew has dried off the leaves. Most teas are easy to dry, just pick whole stems and put them in paper grocery bag. Leave this in a warm dry place until the leaves are totally crisp. I then remove the hard stems and store the leaves in a glass jar or metal can. It is absolutely essential that they be fully dry, otherwise the whole thing will eventually mold (watch for any condensation inside the jar, which indicates that the leaves still contain too much moisture).

When you are using your own herbs you can tailor your tea to personal preference. If you dislike watery tea then you can make industrial strength brews. If you find one growing tip isn’t strong enough then try two tips next time, and three the time after until you find the right amount (watch for unexpected medicinal effects though). You can also get creative and blend different herbs together, just as commercial producers do. Add a little Stevia if you prefer sweetened tea (not too much, it is pretty sweet).

Many tea plants are so easy to grow and taste so good there is no reason to not grow them. The most obvious are the Mints (I much prefer peppermint), Lemon Verbena (a tender shrub), Lemon Balm, Chamomile (a self sowing annual), Fennel and Catnip. You might also try growing real Tea, which is a fairly nice looking evergreen shrub. We think of tea as being a tropical plant, but it only grows in mountains in the tropics and actually prefers cooler weather. If you can grow Camelias you can grow tea. You only use the tender new growth for tea (it contains caffeine of course). Stevia has become another essential in my garden as its leaves provide a sweetener that enhances the flavor of many other teas (you would be surprised at how many so-so herbs come alive with a leaf or two). It is also very easy to grow, and is actually a deciduous perennial in my garden (in cooler areas you can grow it as an annual or keep it in a pot over the winter). I divide it in spring when it first appears, and usually get 4 or 5 vigorous new plants from each one.


It is surprising how easily you can train yourself to like a flavor, you just need an open mind. For years I didn’t use any of the Lemon Verbena in my garden, even though it grows very well here (I planted it for my wife and didn't really like it)  However when I ran low on peppermint I decided to give it another try and before long I was really enjoying it.

My food garden

Even though I write about gardening to make a (meager) living my garden isn’t all that impressive as yet, just a half-finished jumble of all of the things that interest me (impressing people has always been fairly low on my list of goals). However it already does what I want it to perfectly, which is to provide me with food, give me a place to experiment with plants, provide a place to relax, and to keep me entertained, exercised and inspired. I spend a lot of time out there, though not very much of it is really working, mostly I’m just doing whatever I feel like. The garden is essentially a motley collection of edible plants, which reflects the fact that using and growing food plants has been a passion for all of my adult life. If it’s edible I’ll try to grow it even if I know it won’t produce anything, just so I can see what it looks like. I’m particularly interested in food plants that grow themselves and don’t require a lot of effort on my part (though I’ve found it sometimes takes a while to get to know them before this happens). As a result of my experimentation and playing around, my garden contains hundreds of edibles. The exact number is hard to determine because gophers and other critters are always working to reduce it, and because I sometimes overlook things and forget about them for years. It includes every food plant I have been able to get my hands on and haven’t killed: most of the common fruits (trees, shrubs, vines) and vegetables, as well as many rarer food plants (annual, perennial, aquatic), wild edibles that pretty much grow themselves and of course the inevitable edible garden weeds.

My property (land as a human possession is a silly anthropomorphic conceit, but that’s what we say) consists of 2.4 acres in the Santa Cruz mountains, of which over a quarter is covered with a dense stand of Poison Oak and is rarely visited (I’m extremely allergic). The soil is deep and fairly fertile, the climate is fairly hot in summer and quite mild in winter (though at 2400 ft the winters are much colder than in Santa Cruz on the coast only 9 miles away). As a rule we have anywhere from 30-90 inches of rain, falling from November to May and essentially none at all from June to October (though this year has been weird with rain in June and July). The winters are mild enough to grow mandarins and lemons, allow tender perennials (such as Stevia, Taro and Tobacco) to survive in the ground and for many hardy vegetables to keep on growing. However they are also cold enough for apples, strawberries and blueberries to get enough winter rest and do well. Summer is hot enough for okra, melons and sweet tasting oranges. Trees in general grow like crazy, often putting on 6 – 8 ft of growth in the long growing season (which is somewhere around 240 days). Vegetable gardens are fairly thin on the ground in this relatively thinly settled area, so we are blessed with relatively few insect pests or diseases. To make up for this there is a host of animals: deer, rabbits, raccoons, mice, gophers, wood rats, quail, jays to stop us getting too complacent. When I read gardeners in other parts of the country talking about struggling to keep certain plants alive through the winter, or when attacked by plagues of insects and disease, I realize that this area is actually a plant lovers paradise. It allows me to grow an unusually wide range of edible plants, from almost tropical to almost arctic, and this is the reason why I still live in this very expensive, dog unfriendly, car choked area.  

Before I came to this area and bought my property I had created gardens in various parts of the country, but I left them all behind when I moved on. This has been the first time I have been able to create the kind of garden I have always wanted, secure in the knowledge that I can stay here until I want to leave it. I began working on the garden about 8 years ago after I finished building the house, but didn’t take it very seriously until about three years ago. It has been a slow, intermittent, trial and error process as I like to take my time, working when I feel like it and stopping when I don’t. I have a natural affinity with the late Masanobu Fukuoka and his philosophy of do nothing farming. I generally only do the minimum necessary and try to use natures processes to get things done (and try not to transgress her laws too much).

I look upon the garden as something that should be physically created by its owner and a measure of sweat and blood is required to bond you to the earth in that place. Simply paying someone to create a garden for you is not the same thing at all. Doing it yourself means that you spend extended periods of time in the garden thinking, which helps you to solve problems and learn about the site and how things work. It also gives you the opportunity to observe nature (while I was working on my patio I suddenly realized that jays were pecking my apples to see if they were ripe, this then attracts wasps who eat the fruit, when I thought it had just been the wasps by themselves). Of course doing it yourself also means that things take longer, because you have a life to live in between gardening. My garden is still nowhere near finished, I still have plants to move, things to build, improvements to make, areas to expand into. In fact I don’t expect to be finished until I move or die (creating a garden is a process and learning experience, not a race).

My garden is somewhat experimental in that I wanted to see what could be accomplished with little money and a minimum of resources (home and landscaping magazines are often filled with horrendous examples of how to waste natural resources and spend lots of money). I wanted to grow as much food as possible with the minimum of labor and resources and found that if you have enough energy and ingenuity (necessity being the mother of invention) you really don’t need very much money. Money actually isn’t all that relevant in the garden, it’s main value is in saving time (you can buy bigger plants and have materials delivered). If you have to grow plants from cuttings or seed, or go out foraging for materials, then things usually take quite a bit longer. I have accomplished a lot with very little money by doing all of the work myself, propagating my own plants and foraging for free or cheap materials. Being a carpenter for years meant I often got salvaged building materials, as well as the opportunity to borrow cuttings and seeds from other peoples’ gardens. I also made no effort to make my garden beautiful, because I wanted to see if it would come naturally and found that here is enough beauty in the plants themselves.

Though I love my garden and its plants I am not tremendously attached to it. Over the years I have developed a certain zen-like detachment and losing plants doesn’t usually disturb me for more than several bouts of cursing. I’m not sure this is where I will spend the rest of my life and sometimes think about moving again. Of course this would means abandoning the garden and starting all over again, but that doesn’t concern me, it would just means another challenge. I would just need time to collect seeds and root cuttings (these are much more mobile than larger plants) and would probably move more plants than furniture. A lot of my garden is actually within me, in the things I have learned from it. 

How I stumbled into the food garden

The first garden I ever looked after was traditionally landscaped, with patios, lawns, ornamental shrubs, stone walls, gravel terraces and a swimming pool. It was my first serious exposure to the activity of home gardening and I quickly grew to love spending time there, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this type of gardening involved a lot of work for not very much gain. After a full days’ work in the garden (pruning, weeding, mowing, trimming) it would look nice for a couple of weeks and then it would start to get messy and would require exactly the same jobs (pruning, weeding, mowing, trimming) to be performed all over again. Most people just accept this as normal (like getting a haircut every six weeks), but it reminded me of a treadmill where you have to keep running just to stay in the same place. Keeping things as the garden designer had intended actually meant continually fighting against nature; trying to keep ecological niches open while nature was trying to fill them. This gardening-as-constant-battle-with-nature seemed like a contradiction and didn’t make any sense, as I had always thought that gardening was supposed to be about communing with nature, not suppressing her.

I still enjoyed working in the garden and kept at it, but eventually reached the conclusion that it’s main function was to keep the gardener busy. This wasn’t what I was looking for at all, I really resent wasting my time and energy to no useful purpose (I’m no puritan devoted to finding backbreaking work to suffer so I can feel righteous), so I began to think and read about ways to make the garden more productive and less labor intensive. I didn’t realize it at the time but that garden had actually planted a seed in me, and over the years my idea of what a garden should be and do has changed radically. I eventually decided that the primary purpose of the garden (or at least any that I would want to be involved in) should be to grow food. This should not be just any food though, but the healthiest and most delicious food it is possible to get. I also wanted a garden that looked good, and would produce a wide a variety of foods and other products, while requiring a minimum of external resources to establish. Ideally it should also comfortable, efficient and function with a minimum of maintenance (and be self-sustaining in fertility too).

I eventually discovered that the kind of garden I was looking for wasn’t really new (very little in gardening is), in fact fairly similar gardens have existed for a long time in many third world countries (Guatemala, India, China, Tanzania, Nepal), where country people use a small piece of land to produce most of their own food. Often known as “Home Gardens”, they consist of several layers of productive plants, in an apparent jumble (though often carefully placed) of fruiting trees and shrubs, vines, perennial and annual flowers, herbs and vegetables. In addition to supplying food they also produce medicinal herbs, fuel, craft materials, animal feed and building materials (and often extra income from the sale of any surplus). The original European cottage gardens were similar to these home gardens in many ways, because they were the result of similar circumstances. These were found around the houses of better off working people (mostly self-employed artisans such as weavers), who owned a small patch of land and used it to provide food and other necessities

These kinds of gardens aren’t (or weren’t) primarily designed to be attractive (though they usually are), they are made to be productive and local knowledge and custom helps determine the most efficient placement of each component. The crops are mostly vigorous and easily grown species, carefully placed to maximize productivity in a small area and growing in informal plant communities that are often self-sustaining to some degree. The whole area is commonly enclosed by productive hedges and taller trees that alter the microclimate in beneficial ways, as well as protecting the garden from animals.  Any new useful or attractive plant that comes along will be given a chance to establish itself; if it grows easily it will stay, if it doesn’t it will die out. Those that thrive will eventually be passed around to neighbors and will become common. Often there are also chickens, bees and even other small livestock. This kind of garden isn’t just a place for production though, it is also living space and provides somewhere to sit and talk in the evening, somewhere for the children to play, a place to dry laundry. The toilet is in the garden and the ‘night soil’ and urine eventually used as fertilizer.

Unlike modern gardens with their constant demand for fertilizer, labor and other inputs, these gardens can actually help us to reduce our impact on the earth. We use less energy and water to grow our own food, and they help us to reduce, reuse and recycle our waste products. They can also supply many of the materials needed for their own construction (and perhaps for crafts and other purposes). Of course they can also be just as beautiful as any ornamental garden, as well as being more pleasurable because of all of the other things they produce. This last point is extremely important, as the garden should be a refuge, a place where we can reconnect with nature and soothe frazzled 21st century psyches.

I’m not pretending to be the first person to think about reinventing the garden to make it more productive. This is an idea whose time has come and innovative productive gardens have been growing up all over the world in response to problems in the way food is produced. Edible landscaping, permaculture, forest gardening, natural farming, intensive vegetable gardening (and others) are all parts of the solution and I have used ideas from all of them in the creation of my own garden. I like to think of my contribution as helping to demystify some of these things and to provide some hands-on guidance from someone who has dirty, calloused hands.

What this blog is about

As an author I have heard over and over that maintaining a blog has become an indispensable part of being a writer, as it gives you a place to publicize yourself and sell books. I could never write a blog solely for the purpose of promoting myself or making money (for one thing I don’t want to spend my life on the computer, I grew up before everyone was attached to them 24 hours a day and have never really learned to love them), however I am passionately interested in food gardening and this gives me all the motivation I need. I don’t want a blog where I write and people passively read though, I want it to be a two way street where readers give feedback to enrich the posts and we thereby educate each other. I would also like it to become a fairly personal community for committed food gardeners, a place where we can get to know each other, pick up new ideas, share solutions to problems and generally learn from each others mistakes.

Each If you have read my latest book it should come as no surprise that the emphasis of this blog will be on creating (and living in) the food garden and growing various edible plants (though I won’t neglect the topics of earlier books – using wild plants and vegetable gardening). My food garden has given me so much pleasure over the years that I want to encourage other people to do the same. I define the food garden as a garden created primarily to grow food (fairly obvious). It differs from a vegetable garden in that a much greater range of plants are grown and they take up the whole garden, rather than just a portion of it. I still have a vegetable garden area for growing conventional annual crops, but nearly everything I have planted in the rest of the garden is edible too. I have food growing all over the place and in much greater quantity and variety (walnuts, chestnuts, Oca, nectarines, watercress, taro, honeyberries, Quinoa, Kiwi fruit, lemons, mulberries, Chinese artichokes, water celery) When you really get into creating and maintaining this kind of garden it becomes an important part of your life and enhances it in many ways. This kind of hardworking whole food garden is still fairly unusual at the moment (which is why I am writing about it here), but it makes so much sense that I think it will eventually become the normal everyday garden. I predict that one day people will look back and laugh at the absurd concept of an “ornamental” garden; it will sound as silly as the idea of an “ornamental house” (one that’s beautiful but not actually meant to be used).

My food garden has been evolving for a few years now and in the process of creating it I gained quite a bit of practical experience as to how these kinds of gardens naturally come together. I wrote my book The New Food Garden to explain how these gardens might be created more quickly by identifying the key elements, functions, priorities and plants. I intend to use this blog to expand on what I wrote there (and in my other books) and share more of my ideas and insights. I have an inherent antipathy to excessive theorizing (it’s a far too common affliction amongst overly sedentary intellectuals) and an equally great appreciation of the value of genuinely practical advice. I will mainly focus on practical ways to make your garden more productive (how to integrate food plants into the garden, the best ways to grow food with minimal work and how the ultimate food garden might look and function). I will also talk about growing unusual food plants in various conventional and unorthodox ways and about my favorite edible plants (both domesticated and wild).

It is now August, which is a bad time of year to start a writing project because the garden is bursting with activity, the weather is beautiful and I would prefer to be out working in the garden rather than sitting at a desk, writing about working in the garden. To solve this I decided to take my laptop out on to my recently created patio (I’ve been laboriously hand making it for weeks), where I can sit on the Adirondack chair I made (from parts of an old redwood water tank) under the Kiwi arbor I built (from an old redwood deck I demolished) and write about gardening from there. At least I will be out in the garden. Ironically just after I wrote the above I injured my foot and now have to stay off my feet for a while. This is very frustrating when there is so much I want to do out there, but it does mean I can actually spend some time getting this blog going (it also means Comfrey poultices).