Weeky Homestead Photography Contest Entry - Rose Mint Tea

This is my entry for this week's #homesteadphotography challenge by @knowledge-seeker. This weeks challenge is: Goods Made on the Homestead. To Enter the challenge you can find the details here.

Here's a photograph of my rose mint herbal tea. Growing edible plants and herbs, drying them and creating beautiful medicine, food and skincare is probably what I like to do more than anything else. I find the whole process deeply satisfying not to mention therapeutic.

The making of this tea begins in the summer and ends in the late autumn. The rose that I grow is 'Snow Pavement' (Schneekoppe). It is a Rosa rugosa hybrid. Very hardy and a repeat bloomer. It makes a lovely and dense hedge and provides large rose hips in the fall. I also have several large bushes of Rosa rugosa 'Rubra' in fuchsia.

Over the summer I take time each day to gently run my hands over the roses and gather the petals that fall. These go into drying racks and are then stored in glass canisters. The morning after the first frost, I collect the rose hips. Preparing rose hips is a bit of a process. Once they are dried you need to break them up and then sift them really well to remove all of the small hairs inside the hip. These hairs are extremely irritating to the throat and skin.

I enjoy the fact that this tea costs me nothing but time to make and it is 100% pure and organic. They charge so much money at the fancy tea stores for such a small canister of tea. I feel quite spoiled each time I have a cup.