In early September I collected rosehips from the many wild rose plants on our property.
Most of the hips I used to make syrup but I painstakingly cleaned some to use for rose hips tea.
I left them like this air drying for about a month.
The next step was to grind them down using my mortar and pestle. They were very hard and quite small so it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
I put the ground pieces into a small plastic storage container.
Knowing I wanted to use the rose hips in tea, and not owning a ball tea diffuser, I decided to make some tea bags.
We have #4 coffee filters left from when we used to use a coffee percolator. These are a perfect size for making tea bags.
The first thing you need to do is fold it in half.
Next snip off about 1/4”from the curved side to make the whole thing more rectangular.
Open it up and put in the tea leaves or, in this case, 1 Tbsp of dried rose hips.
Fold the whole thing in half with the two cut edges meeting each other.
Fold the cut edges towards the middle three times.
Carefully adjust everything so the fold is in the middle of the packet. This was the trickiest part.
Bend the two ends up and together.
At this point, I tried to make a triangle top like a store bought tea bag but found it was quite difficult to hole punch through.
Instead, after making a few, I just opted to fold the end down twice and then punch the hole.
I tied some crochet cotton string to the tea bag then tied the string to a small piece of folded cardstock.
Sadly, my tray of rosehips only yielded me nine tea bags with 1 Tbsp of dried hips in each.
I plan to gift these tea bags to my parents. My dad really seemed to really like the taste of my rose hips syrup and they also drink a lot of tea.
These tea bags would work for anyone that grows their own herbs like mint, lemon balm, chamomile or lavender.
After foraging on our property next summer, I plan to make more teabags with dandelion, pineapple weed, nasturium flowers and rose petals.
How thoughtful. ❤️