Drinking The Leaves of Your Garden

There's nothing better than sitting in your flower garden watching the birds, butterflies and bees flying in to enjoy the flowers! Did you know that in addition to drinking tea in the garden, you could be drinking tea made from the leaves in your garden? Plant a Chinese evergreen plant of the Camellia genus and watch the flowers of white petals bloom. Guess what? This is the same plant that produces the leaves that we process into "tea".

I received a tea plant as a gift which I planted in my flower garden but it didn't survive! I'm thinking about trying it again.
Look for tea plants at your local nursery or buy them online!

In mid May buy a tea plant from Camellia Shop
or Camellia Forest Nursery

Next project after ordering the plant and planting it is to find out how to process it at home!! Any ideas?

World Tea Expo 2008

I have a lot of information about the World Tea Expo so I will be blogging about different things in the next couple of weeks.  

I counted 285 exhibitors on the show floor.  Most of them were tea companies selling tea.  There are so many it is hard to choose one tea vendor.  Since I have a small business packaging, variety of teas and small minimums are important to me.  I don't want to purchase a huge amount of tea that might spoil before I sell it!  I tasted so many excellent teas it is hard to remember which was the best without taking detailed notes!

I will be telling you which teas won awards and links to the tea sites where you can purchase the tea.

Today I brewed one of the tea bag samples that I received at the Expo.  I am really curious to sample organic teas because I know that many young people are into organic or "green" products.  I brewed an Organic Mango Ceylon tea with vanilla.  It was a standard tea bag with small pieces of black tea but the tea was smooth with just the right amount of vanilla.  It tasted much better than other teas that I have tasted in the tea bag.  If you are interested in this tea go to their site www.choiceorganicteas.com.  I would take this tea to work or traveling but prefer larger pieces brewed loosely in a tea pot.