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The Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast, produced and presented by Emma Cooper, is all about growing edible and useful plants in an environmentally-friendly way. It is completely free to download and listen to.
Tea plants
I’ve been thinking a lot about tea lately, as it turns out that the majority of tea bags aren’t entirely compostable after all. I guess it’s just evidence of the problems of the industrial cup of tea. We could all switch to loose leaf tea or grow our own herbal teas – which would get us much closer to the permaculture cup of tea. The PFAF list of possible tea plants is huge.
But how easy is it to grow your own real tea? In this episode I’m looking at three varieties of plant:
- Camellia sinensis is one of the main plants to provide green and black teas
- The flowers of Jasminum sambac, the Arabian Jasmine, are used to flavour green tea
- Manuka, Leptospermum scoparium is most well-known as a forage plant for honey, but it can also be used to make a herbal tea similar to honeybush.
If you were looking forward to an episode on gifts for gardeners, try the one from last year :D
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The Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast is released in good faith with Creative Commons BY-NC-ND terms. You are free (and encouraged) to share, copy, distribute and transmit the podcast episodes providing you attribute them to Emma Cooper, don't use the episodes for commercial purposes and don't modify the episodes.For a full explanation of the licence, please see the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence details.