We love our simple garden tea parties. We pick a selection of flowers, leaves, roots, fruits and shoots straight from the garden around us and create taste sensations. Hugh in particular loves experimenting to create new blends.
It’s a fabulous way to celebrate and enjoy the garden you have created, and to share this joy with your family and friends.
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| Maia and Hugh love iced rosella tea – very refreshing after working in the garden. |
Today we enjoyed rosella, lemon myrtle, lemon, ginger and honey iced tea after a productive morning of planting, adding companions, seed-sorting and seed-raising.
Young Hugh’s blends are so good he’s going to start making Hugh’s Herbal teas for Maia to serve at her monthly Owl’s Den Cafe. These two are a dynamic duo!
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| Hugh’s creation today was so enjoyed by everyone. |
Hugh’s Rosella, Lemon Myrtle, Lemon and Ginger Tea
Ingredients
- 5 Rosella Calyces – remove seed pod
- small chunk of ginger sliced
- juice of one lemon
- a few leaves of lemon myrtle
- spoonful of honey to taste
Hugh’s Method
- Harvest rosellas, lemon, and ginger
- Chop the base off each rosella calyx and remove seedpods (Hugh was delighted to find a good use for his newly purchased multi-tool)
- Place the red parts in a plunger
- Juice the lemon and add to the mix
- Scrunch the leaves of lemon myrtle
- Chop or bruise the ginger
- Fill plunger with boiling water
- Let sit for 5 minutes
- Pour and enjoy, perhaps with a spoonful of honey
- Lovely too as an iced tea – simply add ice cubes
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| Rosella caylces and Hugh’s healthy tea blend |
There are possibilities of making different blends just about every day. My other favourites are:
- mint and lemongrass,
- lemon myrtle and tulsi
- turmeric tulsi and honey
- straight chocolate mint
I have to say though I really am enjoying the current rosella season. To extend this a little, Hugh has dried some rosella calyces. We have been on the search for friends with more rosella too so we can dry even more. We think we have found someone and will exchange this for some of our turmeric surplus. Next year, I have decided I will plant even more Rosellas.
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| Rosella sabdariffa |
A little about Rosella:
Rosella is a hardy and easy plant to grow in the subtropics. It is an annual shrub up to 1.5 metres. I love the splash of colour it brings to the garden, and the amazing flavour sensation from the leaves and calyces. They are extremely hardy, but for a good crop, they do need to be well watered.
All parts of the Rosella are edible. Rosella (Hibiscus sabdariffa) was originally from West Africa but is now used in many countries. Here in Queensland, it is popular to grow for it’s red fleshy calyces (the outer floral envelopes and seed pod protectors) which are often made into jams. I love it most as a simple tea.
Rosella is a colourful, flavourful and healthy drink to share with the children. It has a high vitamin C content – nine times that of oranges.
I also enjoy adding a few young leaves into a salad or cooked dish. In the past few evening, leaves of Rosella have been added to soup, to cheese and spinach parcels, to pasta sauce, to a curry vegetable dish. The green leaves are like a lemony spinach . It is understandable why another name for this plant is red sorrell. The leaves are perhaps the most widely eaten and popular vegetable in Burma.
The stems too can be stripped to make a jute-like fibre – when I try to snap off a branch or calyx without using secateurs, I realise how strong this could be!
My girls love making tea from the garden too – their favourite at the moment is lemon balm and stevia. We'll have to give mint and lemongrass a try.
That sounds delicious – we'll give that one a go. They are growing side by side in our garden.
nice garden
Thanks William!
Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on this topic. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him. So I should thank you for the free lunch I got.
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