This year in the garden has seen us expand into other areas beyond simply preserving vegetables and fruit. We’ve been working on proteins with some success—we got a ton of black beans but next to no mushrooms. But the other focus this year was juices and other drinks.

So far this year, we’ve done:

• Apple juice
• Tart cherry juice (which I’ll use for wine)
• Rhubarb juice
• Tomato juice
• Dandelion root coffee
• Mint for tea
• Chamomile for tea

We’ve also done a handful of other things like start up a half dozen different types of wine, and in the past I’ve made a Bloody Mary mix for drinking too.

But of all of these, the exciting new project was chamomile.

Enjoying a calming cup

Chamomile is one of my favourite teas. I have to be careful about how much caffeine I consume because it can cause stomach issues, and that’s always presented a problem. Decaf coffee is still somewhat caffeinated, same with decaf tea, so they are both no-go when I need to limit caffeine, and most caffeine-free herbal teas just don’t appeal to me.

Strangely, chamomile has always been an exception. When I tried my first cup, I immediately fell in love with the flavour.

My husband likes to end each night with a mug of Sleepytime tea. I took a look at the ingredient list of the brand we buy and the first two items were mint and chamomile, so he now drinks a homemade variation on Sleepytime that comes right from the garden patch at the side of our house.

I find homegrown chamomile considerably stronger than storebought. Perhaps it’s because it’s fresher or because it’s been jostled around less, but whatever the reason, I have to be careful when I drink it because on the right day it can put me out like a light.

Growing chamomile

We had tried to grow chamomile from seed a few times but really gotten nowhere with it. We generally don’t have luck with starting seeds indoors, and then rarely have luck with direct planting flower seeds in the garden.

This past spring, though, I found chamomile at a local greenhouse and snapped up three seedlings.

Once they established in our garden, they were prolific. They grew to about knee height and were completely decked out with little white flowers with yellow centres. They seem to be a pretty easy-to-care-for plant; we water daily when it’s hot and dry and every other day when it’s a little milder out, and rarely did these plants look droopy.

Harvesting chamomile

When harvesting chamomile, you want the flower heads and not much else. While that’s a relatively easy task, it becomes difficult when you’re dealing with dozens or hundreds of flowers. And with chamomile, the more you harvest, the more it grows, so you do want to harvest as much as you can.

I got in the habit of going out every Saturday and picking everything that looked like a decent size. I tried different methods—scissors (way too laborious and unnecessary), plucking them individually (best way, but at a flower at a time it takes a long time), and eventually settled on my preferred method. If I “rake” my fingers through the flower and then gently press my fingers together, locking the flowers in my hand and then gently pull up, the stems snapped and the flowers remained in my hand. I would get some stem attached to the flowers still, but usually not much. If it was a long stem, I’d trim it off, but if it was shorter I’d just leave it.

Drying chamomile

Drying chamomile is particularly easy. You just lay the flowers out in a tray or dish and let it sit for seven to ten days.

My routine was to harvest on a Saturday and put them all in a baking dish and leave it on the counter. The next Saturday I’d harvest a new batch and fill a second dish, moving the first dish to the right, so I could keep track of which was newest and which was oldest. And on the third Saturday, I’d empty that first dish of dried flowers into an airtight jar and reuse that dish for that day’s harvest.

Letting them dry is a hands-off activity. Sometimes if the dish was particularly full, I’d shake it or stir it once or twice a day to ensure that air was circulating past all the flowers.

Making tea from dried chamomile

A good rule of thumb is to use a teaspoon of dried flowers for a cup of tea, adding more or less based on your preferences.

You can use a tea infuser for this. We also have a Brewt (identical to this), which is a handy device for looseleaf tea, and T-Sac teabags meant for looseleaf tea—both of these work great too.