Homegrown Tea: An Illustrated Guide to Planting, Harvesting, and Blending Teas and Tisanes

Product Description Homegrown Tea explains how to grow a large variety of plants in your own garden, on a balcony or even on a window sill could become your tea cupboard. It shows you how to grow your tea from seeds, cuttings, or small plants, as well as which parts of the plant are used to make tea. Liversidge lays out when and how to harvest your plants, as well as information on how to prepare the plant, including how to dry tea leaves to make tea you can store to last you throughout the year. As a guide to using tea to make you feel better, there are nutritional and medicinal benefits. Finally, there is an illustrated guide to show how to make up fresh and dried teabags and how to serve a delicious homegrown tea. It is sustainable way to look at a beverage, which is steeped in history and tradition.Sample drinks include well-known plants such as rose hips, mint, sage, hibiscus, and lavender, as well as more obscure ones like chicory, angelica, apple geranium, and lemon verbena. From Booklist Tea is the new coffee. When such global shops as Starbucks drink up smaller tea concerns and when national “drink me” retailers appear in neighborhoods, then Londoner Liversidge (author of Pasta Sauce! Grow Your Own Ingredients, 2013) is right on trend. Her book acts as a reference tool primarily for those harvesting from seed or plant, although, obviously, anyone tea inclined will find it useful. She covers leaves, seeds, fruits, flowers, and roots—43, in total—with such information as reaping medicinal and nutritional benefits, growing, harvesting, and preparing the brew. Although the format is somewhat repetitious, and the photographs are not the sharpest, her wisdom is demonstrated on every page. For instance, sidebars called “Teabag Friends” and “Tips” respectively identify complementary tea tastes and alternative uses (as well as occasional caveats, like don’t confuse African violets with violets). Both the book’s introduction and its finale are well filled with facts, ranging from notes about teapots and water to advice on plant gardening and tea drying. --Barbara Jacobs About the Author CASSIE LIVERSIDGE  was born in the UK and studied Fine Art at Plymouth University. She grew up on her parent’s plant nursery where her love of gardening began. Her debut book, Grow Your Own Pasta Sauce came from a desire to share her passion for eating home grown food and living in a more sustainable way. She lives and works in London with her husband and two sons, but spends two months of the year in New York.