Skip to main content

Calendula petals for tea

Since I got my food dehydrator, I've been drying herbs for cooking, and also some for making herbal tea.  As I don't drink caffeine, I usually stick to herbal teas.  So far I have dried mint, peppermint, thyme, taragon, lemon grass and lemon myrtle leaves for tea.  I keep each one in a separate jar and then mix up a little of each to make a jar to take to work and I use a tea ball to brew my tea.
calendula flowers in my garden
On ingredient that I've been hoping to add to my tea is calendula, and it is finally flowering in my garden.  I have been picking the flowers and letting them air dry in a jar (as it is very dry here at the moment, I don't need to use the dehydrator).  When the petals are dry I pull them off and put them in another jar, ready to add to my tea.
drying the flowers

It does take a lot of flowers to make enough petals for tea as they really shrink when they dry, but they aren't hard to grow or dry, so I don't mind having a few in a jar until they dry.

dried petals ready for tea
There's lots of information about the benefits of calendula.  To be honest I don't know how much to believe, but it doesn't hurt to add something different to your tea!

Comments

  1. That must create the most beautiful coloured tea! What does it taste like?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have just been drying my rosellas for tea - such fun! I found the best way is to spread them out on one of those foil window shades in the back of the car! I am going to have to grow some calendula now.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My calendula is flowering too so this looks like a fun use for it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. oh yum, I have some Rosella tea at the moment, and I was thinking of growing some too, that's a good idea for drying them :) I usually mix the calendula with mint, lemon grass etc, so you can't really taste it or see a colour from it, just something that was in a commercial tea that I bought, so I thought I would try adding it to my homemade tea :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Garden Update - July 2013

This month I'm joining the Garden Share Collective , which was started last month by Lizzie from Strayed from the Table , to allow vege gardeners to share their successes and failures and generally encourage everyone to grow more of their own food organically.  This first month, I'll give a detailed update on everything that's growing in my garden, for anyone who hasn't been following for long.  I'll do my normal farm update on Tuesday as well. If you've just joined me, welcome to my vege garden.  I recently wrote about gardening in our sub-tropical climate , so if you're wondering about the huge shade structure, that's for protecting the garden during our hot, humid summers.  At the moment though, the garden is full of brassicas, which grow best here in winter, and are suitably frost-proof.  The garden is about 12 m long by 5 m wide, and surrounded in chicken mesh to keep out the chickens and the bandicoots.  The garden has spilled out around the edg