Gardening Recipe: How to Make Mint Tea
Ornamental container gardens are beautiful to view and fun to cultivate, but there’s nothing like having a fresh tomato from your balcony garden or some fresh herbs in a salad. And no herb is more soothing than spearmint, especially when it is brewed up into a cup of hot or iced tea.
Spearmint is an easy plant to grow in a container garden, and it is even easier to make spearmint tea. Peppermint (a hybrid of spearmint and watermint) can also be used in this recipe. Learn how to grow spearmint by reading the Spearmint Plant Fact Sheet.
Hot Mint Tea Recipe
Makes 3 cups
Cut about 15 spearmint leaves off of your plant in your container garden and put them into a tea strainer or a tea infuser. Pour 3 cups of almost-boiling water into the pot and let the leaves steep for 3 to 4 minutes. Remove the leaves and let the water cool slightly. Then pour the tea into several mugs and enjoy.
Iced Mint Tea Recipe
Makes about 6 cups
To make iced spearmint tea from the container garden, double the leaves in the recipe above to make a concentrated tea. Let the tea cool completely after removing the leaves. Then place the tea in the refrigerator for an hour or in the freezer for about a half an hour. Pour a half a cup or more into a glass and add ice cubes.
Iced mint tea is a refreshing drink for a cold day.
Mint Benefits
Spearmint has many benefits. It helps to freshen breath, settle stomachs and improve digestion. It is also supposed to relieve stress, fatigue, headaches and respiratory problems, and as a benefit for women, it also supposedly prevents some unwanted hair growth. And it is even caffeine-free!
All of these health benefits sound too good to be true, but even if spearmint does none of these things, it smells and tastes wonderful, and it is an attractive, aromatic and easy-to-grow container plant. Spearmint tea is easy to make and tastes great. So brew up a cup of tea, sit back and relax!
