If you love tea but don’t want to avoid the caffeine from a normal cuppa, a great alternative is chamomile tea.
Drinking chamomile tea has been proven to help improve your sleep, reducing stress and anxiety, improving digestion, and potentially supporting blood sugar management. It’s also known for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, which can benefit overall health, according to Healthline.
But if you’ve ever bought a box of chamomile tea, you might have noticed that it’s not the cheapest kind of tea. So to help people get as much as they’d like, a gardener named Amy Chapman has shared how you can get an abundance without paying a fortune.
“You can grow your own chamomile from a tea bag. Here’s how,” she said at the start of her Instagram video. She then went on to explain how to do it.
Amy said: “Chamomile tea is made from the flowers of the plant, which means any tea bags you buy will contain some seeds too.”
By using these tea bags, you can actually grow chamomile flowers in your garden to then harvest for tea. She said: “To grow your own chamomile plants, just fill a tray or a pot with some compost, and make sure to water it. Rip open a [chamomile] tea bag and sprinkle the contents across the top of the compost..
“You can sprinkle it a lot thicker than you usually would with seeds as the tea bags contain other parts of the plant too, like the petals.”
In the caption of the video, Amy added more top tips. She said: ” I’ve found that cheaper teabags work best for this, as they’re not so picky with what they’re harvesting so lots of ripe seeds get thrown into the mix.”
“Cover with a fine layer of compost and place on a sunny windowsill inside your house,” she urged.
“Make sure to keep your tray or pot watered and then in a few weeks, you’ll have little tiny chamomile plants that you can plant outside, as long as there’s no frost. And soon, you’ll be able to harvest your own homegrown chamomile for tea.”
Her merthod clearly works well – as she showed off her large crop of chamomile flowers.
While you’ll be able to enjoy as much tea as you’d like while the flowers are blooming, Amy recommends also hanging the flowers to dry.
That way, you’ll be able to continue enjoying and endless supply of it throughout the year until the flowers are blooming again.
“Don’t forget to set a few seeds aside for next year, so you never have to buy chamomile ever again,” Amy urged viewers.
People quickly took to the comment section of the video to praise the gardening guru for her clever hack, with one viewer writing: “How interesting, I wanna try this! Thank you.”
A second wrote: “I planted chamomile seeds a couple of weeks ago and they just sprouted yesterday! Super excited!”
And a third added: “Mine are about to bloom. They have self seeded and come back really strongly from last year’s plants.”