Fireweed Tea Preparation

The leaves are best to get before the flowers bloom because all the energy from, you know, the sun and the water is going to the leaves. But once the flowers come out, more of that energy is going to the blossoms. So if you're gathering leaves for tea, ideally before the fireweed blossoms. If you use the leaves for tea in particular, It's a mucilaginous plant, so it's really good for stomach or digestive issues. There's vitamin C and A in it, so it's good, good medicine, good healing medicine.

These are the leaves that we gathered, um, and you can prepare them two ways, but we're just gonna do the fermented way today, kind of like similar to a black tea. And so I just rinse the leaves just to give them a wash. So pat those dry. A lot of people just like to roll it in between their hands, kind of like this, and so it gets kind of rolled up like that. And then we'll just pop them right in the jar.

So we're kind of breaking up this midvein. That helps the fermentation process. If you had a rolling pin, you could kind of roll, roll them to speed up the process. I don't have a rolling pin, but hands work just fine. It has a kind of a light floral scent.

And then I'm going to leave them in this jar and flip them over once a day and just kind of check for mold, make sure there's no mold growing in there. We'll do that for about 3 days and then I'll take them out and dry them again for— it'll probably take just a few days after that and they'll be kind of black and then the tea will be ready to drink. So when you take them out, you just kind of want to fluff them out a little bit so that they dry and the moisture doesn't stay stuck in the middle. But that's it. So we'll check these once a day, flip them over, and then take them out to dry in about 3 days.

And this is about what I would use for a cup of tea, like maybe, this is probably 4 or 5 leaves. I just use a tea kettle or boil hot water on the stove.

I like to let it steep for like 10 to 15 minutes depending on what you're making the tea for. If you're dealing with stomach issues, longer steep time, but if you are not, like 5 to 10 minutes is good. Timer just went off, so our tea is ready. This one just drops the liquid out of the bottom, but we can see the leaves have unfurled and Yeah, we got a nice kind of rusty yellow color with our steep. It kind of has like a little bit of a floral flavor, almost a jasmine green tea.

It's very earthy. That's— yeah, it tastes like home.