Book Review: Tea Gardening for Beginners: Learn to Grow, Blend, and Brew Your Own Tea At Home by Julia Dimakos

Tea Gardening for Beginners: Learn to Grow, Blend, and Brew Your Own Tea At Home by Julia Dimakos is a gardening book for tea lovers. What’s more satisfying than brewing the perfect cup of tea? Brewing it from tea you grew yourself! Create your own tea garden with help from this beginner’s guide. It walks you through every step of the process, from planning your garden plot to preparing delicious tea blends. This book will help readers know understand the tea varieties, build a garden, discover and learn about plant profiles, and build up the skills to grow and make your own tea blends for your own preferences and needs. 

Tea Gardening for Beginners is a detailed and informative read for anyone serious about growing their own tea ingredients. I have been growing gardens full of herbs and vegetables for as long as I can remember. I have thought about increasing the percentage of herbs and dabbling with growing tea for awhile, in fact this is the second book I have read on doing so that I have read, but I have yet to take the plunge. I think that growing your own tea takes a focus and dedication that I tend not to give my gardens. I am much more a 'plant this and see what happens' kind of gardener with a bit of gardening knowledge to make good initial choices thrown in. I am lucky enough to have parents very into gardening, enough so that me first 'job' was replanting seedlings in the family greenhouse as a kid. I learned a bit about some of the plants I grow, and those I want to grow. I think the idea of growing my own tea is more about the actual tea plant rather than the herbs that I would also use, as I am not in the correct zone to grow tea leaves without moving plants in and outside- which I lack the space and motivation for, to be honest. However, I think this book offers readers the information and tools they need to grow their own tea ingredients successfully, and to know whether they have the time and dedication to devote to doing it right for the best results. I can think of many people that could and would, I just need to admit that it is not me. Thankfully I can, and do, grow many of the fruits, herbs, and flowers included in the book and have some great inspiration for next year's planting and recipes and techniques I would like to try. 

Early Book Review: Grow Your Own Tea: The Complete Guide to Cultivating, Harvesting, and Preparing by Christine Parks; Susan M. Walcott

Grow Your Own Tea: The Complete Guide to Cultivating, Harvesting, and Preparing by Christine Parks; Susan M. Walcott is currently scheduled for release on September 1 2020. Consumer interest in tea has grown rapidly in recent years and continues to climb. Worldwide there are 25,000 cups of tea consumed every second—more than billion cups per day. For tea drinkers interested in the freshest flavor, growing the leaves at home is the ideal solution. Lucky for them, tea is not an exotic, hard-to-grow crop—it can be successfully grown anywhere that camellias can be grown. In Grow Your Own Tea, readers will learn how to cultivate, harvest, and process this venerable crop. Parks and Wolcott share details on how to get started; describe cultivation, long-term maintenance, and harvesting; show how to grow tea plants in containers; and describe how to process and store harvested tea leaves. This book includes information on how to produce white, green, oolong, and black teas.

Grow Your Own Tea caught my eye as soon as I saw it on Netgalley. I am an avid tea drinker and an avid gardener, so this book was right up my alley. I already grow many of my own herbs and have used my own mints and other herbs to flavor loose tea, but was interested to learn more about the cultivation and drying process. I had read about the different types of tea before, but I leaned even more about the history and diversity of tea in this book. I thought I was too far north to grow tea, but was thrilled to discover that there is a variety of tea I just might be able to cultivate and use. I found the information to be very well organized, accessible, and interesting. Everything a tea grower might need is covered, from how to plant, to how to harvest and make use of the results, and everything in between. I cannot wait to put my newfound knowledge into action, and to share the results with the other tea drinkers in my life. The resources and information at the end of the book was helpful as well.

Grow Your Own Tea is an informative and valuable resource for tea lovers. I am planning on buying a physical copy of this book for my own reference library.