Tea Quest Blog

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A Couple Months Later

Since my last update in late March, a lot of things have transpired.

My tea plant wasn't getting any better and the few leaves he had left just kept falling off.  I took him to a nursery and showed him to a lady that had a tea plant of her own.  She recommended I re-pot him and water him more.  I was hesitant about watering him more due to the blight from over-watering him earlier.  That same day, I discovered that he had fungus gnats which were probably the culprit all along.  I re-potted him with clean soil, but it was too late.  Within a couple days, he was gone.  His bark started turning black and all his leaves had fallen off.

I found another website that sold pre-grown tea plants and ordered 3 more (I would have ordered 1, but 3 was the minimum order requirement).  They arrived on April 23, much larger than my first plant, so I have more of a chance with these guys.

I also got some better soil from the nursery I went to.  They make it themselves and it's all organic.  I checked it for gnats, and it was clean.  I also got a better bug spray called Elementals Insecticidal Soap.  It's made for edible plants, and it's working SO much better than the last bug spray I got.

[One day I'll stop taking ghostly big-foot pictures with my phone and start using my real camera.  Sorry everyone!]

The last bug spray I had seemed to have absolutely no affect on the different bugs I was experiencing on both my tea and my mint.  I would spray my tea with it, and the aphids he had would go away for about a minute before they'd make home in the soil again.  On my mint, the whiteflies just seemed to like it, and never really left at all.  I even sprayed daily even though you're not supposed to.

With the new spray, I sprayed once on my mint, and I haven't had whiteflies for two weeks now and counting.  I never had a chance to use it on my old tea plant, but I haven't had any bug issues on my new tea plants, and I only sprayed them once the first day I had them.  I am officially an advocate.

Speaking of mint, those guys were getting so out of control, I didn't know what to do.  I still haven't been cooking with them or using them in drinks very much.  The mint "tea" that I made a couple times wasn't very pungent and it was pretty boring honestly, so I just never went back to it.  So I started searching around online for a way to make better, more flavorful mint "tea".  I found something that said if you dry out the leaves first, you'll get exactly what I want.

I immediately went outside and harvested a TON of leaves from both plants.  I filled up about 1/4 of a colander while still leaving the leaves on about half of each plant.  I washed them in the colander, patted the leaves down the paper towels, and laid them on paper plates to dry for 3 days until they were crispy.  Then I found some containers that I was keeping powdered drink packets in and put the dried leaves in them for storage.

After the leaves dried, they shrunk down by a significant amount.  They're about 1/3 to 1/4 the size they were when they were fresh.  They also look more like tea now than they do mint.  Here's my pineapple mint:

I also ended up getting a little lavender plant the day after my new tea plants came in.  He is very strange.  He's the only one of my plants that actually gravitates toward the sunlight.  And he does this often... several times throughout the day, I will check on him and he's in a new crazy position.  A couple days ago, he was reaching to the right side of the patio as far as he could, then a couple hours later, he was reaching toward the left side in this weird loopy angle.  By the end of the day, he was standing straight up again like a normal plant.  Here's a picture of him in the first position:

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of him in the second or third position.

He's growing pretty quickly like the mint and he's already starting to bloom.  I'm really excited to see the flowers.

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Fertilizer, Bug Spray, and Blight

A couple weeks ago, I was reading some gardening blogs and found that fertilizer is a really good idea for tea plants.  (I know nothing about gardening, and this is my first attempt at growing anything.)  I've also noticed that I have these little white moth/butterfly things... they are TINY... all over my mint plants, so I decided to get some bug spray too in case they're not supposed to be there.  I couldn't find anything online about it, so who knows.

Anyway, here's what I ended up with:

These actually weren't terribly priced.  Well, the bug spray was the only spray that I could find that's okay to use on edible growth anyway.  The fertilizer is 2 tablespoons to a gallon though, so it will last for freaking ever.

In other news, my tea plant has something called blight.  There are two kinds of blight: grey and brown.  Unfortunately, my little guy has both as you can see here:  

(My camera phone skills stink, I know, but you can still see where the plant is infected.)  This stems from over watering, so I figured the best thing to do was to cut back to nothing for a while and let him dry out a little bit before watering him again, then take it slow.  I have always been an infamous accidental plant killer.  I hope I'm doing the right things.  :(

My mint plants on the other hand are so lenient, I don't think anything I do will kill them at this point.  I've even done some major pruning, and they're just going nuts growing back:

I pruned that stem two weeks ago, and he's already grown back to normal and then some.  Eventually I'm just going to have a couple mint bushes.  I really need to find some good recipes to use them in quick.

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Mint Garden Update

Exactly two weeks ago, I harvested leaves from my pineapple mint and spearmint plants.  Today, I'm going to show you their progress.

This is the branch that I harvested from:

And this is a branch I harvested from today just to show you what that same branch looked like two weeks ago after I harvested the leaves:

As you can see, for two weeks, he's doing really well regrowing the leaves.  A lot faster than I expected.

As for my spearmint plant, I'm pretty sure he's taking some sort of plant steroids behind my back, because well, seriously:

Sorry the picture is blurry.  My phone camera isn't so great.  But as you can see, my spearmint is pretty much exploding totally out of control.  This is fine with me since it just means more leaves and more herbal tea (and more cooking/baking with him if I so choose), but this is a good reason to keep mint in a contained growing space as I said in my first post.

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First Mint "Tea" From My Garden

After the first day of growing my mint, I had already started noticing the growth, but thought I was just hopeful and possibly crazy.  By the second day though, my husband mentioned it, and since he really doesn't care, I got really excited.  My spearmint is getting so tall, he's having a hard time keeping himself up, so I decided to take some of his leaves today.  The pineapple mint is flourishing outward slowly.  I only took a few leaves from him before my hand got too full and I went inside to heat some water to create this:

And now I know that my hand does not hold enough leaves to create a sufficient mint flavor.  I probably need two handfuls per 8 oz.  This was pretty awesome for my first time though!

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Growing My Own Tea

My husband bought me a tea plant (camellia sinensis) and two mint plants (pineapple mint and spearmint) for Valentine's Day.

After looking online to figure out how to care for each plant, I went out and bought some potting materials.  I don't have a garden as I live in a condo, so I had to purchase a pot large enough to allow the tea plant to grow into.  Apparently tea plants will grow to about 5 feet tall and above unless you trim it to keep it from growing taller.  I also bought a window box for the mint with enough space so that they can grow outward, giving me more leaves to work with.  Mint is an invasive plant, meaning that unless it is contained in a pot, it will grow anywhere it can, much like a weed.  It's definitely not a plant you want to grow in the ground if you are working with an outdoor garden.

There are types of soil out there that have chemicals, pesticides, etc in them that are not good for growing consumable plants.  I didn't want to take my chances, so I bought a few bags of Supersoil, which came highly recommended by other more experienced gardeners on multiple forums.  Afterward, I went home and potted the plants.

(Above: Tea/camellia sinensis; Below: Left - Pineapple Mint, Right - Spearmint)

After potting them, I watered them enough to moisten the soil well.  Mint apparently needs a lot of water, so they need to be watered 1-2 times a day, keeping the soil moist at all times.

All three plants grow well in zone 8 and above, lucky for me, since I'm in the Phoenix area.  They all need direct sunlight or partial shade.

I also found that you should not begin taking leaves from your tea plant until it is 3 years old.  Unfortunately this means I have a long way to go before I can start making my own tea.  I'll have to stick with home-grown herbals until then.