herbs

Garden Project of the Day: Sage, Rosemary, and Mint Tea

The garden is blanketed in snow and the growing season is done for the year. Even the hardy herbs that held out for Thanksgiving have lost their leaves, but I still have dried herbs taken in the late summer and early fall to play around with. And lately, that has meant making herbal teas. Here is the most recent:

This is a mixture of 4 herbs: sage, mint, lemon balm and rosemary. I love the flavor. It is savory and complex, minty and full-bodied. It warms the body and the spirit on a cold winter day. The sage and mint together leave your breath smelling sweet after drinking. The mint will sooth the nagging stomach upset that comes with poor eating decisions this time of year, the lemon balm is relaxing, and the rosemary may act as an immune booster. All around a great combintation for the season!

I’m sharing a “recipe” for how I like to prepare this tea. Nothing about this is set in stone. If you don’t like one of the ingredients, reduce the amount you use or leave it out. If you love one, feel free to add more of it. This is how I like the tea – it doesn’t mean you have to make it the same.

Michelle’s Sage and Mint Herbal Tea

  • 4 parts sage leaves, dried
  • 2 parts mint leaves, dried (I used a combo of spearmint and apple mint)
  • 1 part lemon balm leaves, dried
  • 1 part rosemary leaves, dried

Break the sage, mint, and lemon balm leaves into small pieces – maybe a quarter inch across. This does not need to be exact. If you’d prefer a more uniform look, you could pulse them in a food processor or coffee grinder – I personally like the way they look when they are hand processed. Combine with the rosemary leaves and store in an airtight container.

To drink, steep for 10 minutes.

This is enough for one small pot of tea, but you can (and probably should!) put together more than one serving at a time. You can store the dried tisane in an air tight container so you have it on hand whenever you’d like a cup. Enjoy!

As a side benefit, Sage tea is said to be good for your skin, gums, digestion, and memory. Some sources say not to drink more than two to three cups a day, as it can induce seizures or kidney damage in high doses. If you have any left over after your 2 cups, consider using the rest to rinse your hair. It’s said to be a good natural dye for covering grey hair!

Garden Project of the Day: Sage Pear Herbal Tea

It’s getting seasonably cold here in Wisconsin, and the little flashes of green that remain in the garden are rapidly fading. One of the last plants that is still plugging along is the Sage, which often manages to stay green and lovely through Thanksgiving, when everything else in the garden except for the evergreens has long lost its leaves.

Before it is too late, I’ve been cutting as much sage and drying it in the dehydrator as I can while still leaving enough out there for Thanksgiving dinner. The house smells lovely, and I’ve been dreaming up ways to use the beautiful gray-green leaves while their flavor is still at its best. I think I’ve finally found a favorite! Paired with dried pears that I put up from our trees and a little candied ginger, the sage makes for the perfect tea to warm up with as the days get colder. I find the dried fruit and ginger add just the right amount of sweetness to the drink, but if you like a sweeter tea you can also add honey.

Michelle’s Sage Herbal Tea

Break the sage leaves and pear slices into pieces approximately 1/4 inch long. Mix together with the ginger pieces.

To drink, steep for 10 minutes.

This is enough for one small pot of tea, but you can (and probably should!) put together more than one serving at a time. You can store the dried tisane in an air tight container so you have it on hand whenever you’d like a cup. Enjoy!

As a side benefit, Sage tea is said to be good for your skin, gums, digestion, and memory. Some sources say not to drink more than two to three cups a day, as it can induce seizures or kidney damage in high doses. If you have any left over after your 2 cups, consider using the rest to rinse your hair. It’s said to be a good natural dye for covering grey hair!

Permaculture in Practice: Obtain a Yield

What motivates you?

Even more importantly, what motivates you to do something that other people might think is too hard?For most of us, the answer is that we get back something, either tangible or intangible, that makes all of the hard work worth it.

That “something” is the yield. In many cases it is going to be something tangible. Heads of lettuce. Pounds of tomatoes. Fresh herbs. Eggs. Wool.

Sometimes it might be intangible. The knowledge that you’ve improved the habitat for wildlife in your little corner of the world, or have made a spot where a threatened plant thrives.

Regardless, the yield is important. It is what makes the effort sustainable for you. If it is a tangible yield, it is what cuts down on the outside resources you need to bring in to your life.

In the west, we tend to think of yields in terms of profit. Yield is something that is created and earned over and above the amount of energy that went into the effort. One person puts in 8 hours of work and gets back $100. Another puts in 8 hours of work and, almost like a magician pulling something from think air, gets back $10,000. We see the second person as more successful and their yield as better. Why? Where does that extra yield come from? Is it sustainable? Or is that person depleting other people or systems in order to get such an inordinately large yield?

It goes without saying, I think that the goal in permaculture is a sustainable yield. Instead of creating something out of nothing, permaculture attempts to create value while keeping inputs and outputs in balance. We try not to build a system that borrows value from other people or places, and we try to build a system that returns as much to the environment as it takes from it. We create energy loops.

With that in mind, here are some photos of my recent yields from the garden. Enjoy!

The pepper and tomato plants are growing strong! The tomato plants were all started from seed by my sister, whose dining room doubles as a greenhouse in spring. The pepper plant was purchased from a local garden center. Onions and cilantro (in a separate bed) and waiting for the salsa making to begin.

Calendula and dill reseed themselves in these beds every year and require absolutely no effort to sow or maintain. Calendula can be used as an effective salve and dill is delicious on just about everything. Obviously, it goes great in pickles, but also is delicious on potatoes, salmon, cheese, and can be added to stir fry or soup as a vegetable if you have large enough quantities of it.
The cucumber vines are starting to grow up one of the makeshift trellises in the veggie garden. Growing the vines upward keeps the cukes clean and easy to harvest.

Garden Projects: Expanding the Raised Beds (Part 2)

I’ve finally managed to complete the new garden beds I started several weeks back. I’ve spent the time in between gathering supplies:

  • Tons of paper shopping bags and cardboard, most of which came from local liquor stores who were happy to get rid of it.
  • 2 yards of garden compost and ~2.5 yards of mulch, purchased for approximately $250. Not cheap, especially with the increase in delivery fees from the company that delivers it in bulk. The compost is very high quality, though, and I know those beds will go well and start out weed free.
  • Herb starts from around the garden. I wanted the mulched beds around the veg beds to become two herb gardens – one for herbal teas and one for culinary herbs. Because I currently have a lot of different types of herbs tucked in her and there around the flower gardens I have been saving small herb seedlings that I have found popping up out of place as I clean up the flower beds. They’ve been shoed in to the veg garden beds waiting for the new herb garden space to be ready.

Here’s what the beds looked like as I was installing the mulch. You can see several layers of carboard over the grass. Over the course of the summer, that grass will die and become compost. Where I had enough unfinished compost to do so, I also added it under the cardboard to add nutrients to the soil underneath as it breaks down. My compost bin is now basically empty and ready to start filling again. The same layering happened in the raised beds, where plant material and cardboard lie under 10″ or so of garden compost.

When the beds were finished, they looked like this:

Because it is still getting down into the 40’s F at night, I’ve done limited planting in the new beds so far. The raised beds will hold tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and squash. The mulched beds will become herb gardens (one herbal tea garden and one culinary herb garden, although there will be overlap between the two).

I’ve started planting the tea garden with rosemary, thyme, lavendar, bee balm, horehound and calendula. I am debating whether to add chamomile and/or sage in the remaining spaces. I generally avoid annuals wherever possible in favor of perennials, but calendula and chammomile may be the two exceptions for this garden. Here it is so far.