Tea and Weeds

Yup, another Italian church interior. I really enjoyed them.

Congratulations are due in the bird world. The Grackle children, as well as the Hairy Woodpecker child have learned to eat on their own. H.W. is chowing down like a pro. Grackle children are still screaming for food, but realize it is a lost cause. One brave youngster is trying to figure out how to get suet and seed from the feeders.


Weeding for tea lovers. This is right up our alley. If you have some pesky weeds in your sidewalk or driveway, put the kettle on, boil up a pot and go out and pour it on those pests. It will kill them, root and all and is organic, to boot. One caveat, don't do this near plants you want to keep or they will also be affected. I have done this for year and it works, even on bindweed.


The wild orange day lilies are in bloom. They are so common, no one gets too excited about them, but they were practically the only flower we grew when I was young, aside from some very sweet smelling pale pink roses. I welcome them and realize I need to get some. Abandoned acreage, here I come.


If you are still concerned about Japanese green tea and pollutants, you need to know that the government is checking it all before it comes into the country for different sorts of radioactive materials.


Today I am having a tea I reviewed before, nothing new. It is Czar Nikolas ll, which I got from www.therussianshop.com . It is soo good. Very inexpensive, kind of heavy and fruity and really the best of the Russion style teas I have had, although all of Kusmi's are pretty darn good.

Tea and Gardens in the Snow

It is astonishingly beautiful here this morning. We had about 5" inches of snow last night and almost all of it has stuck to the branches of every plant. It is so thick I can't really see very far into any of our woods and spinneys. The sky is that really brilliant dark blue we rarely get in the winter, the sun is out and it is gorgeous! Definitely a day for an appreciative walk.

First, let's have tea. I have read much about (Big) Red Robe Oolong tea and finally decided I had better try some, as it sounded so tasty. I got some in my sampler I bought from the puriTea. The leaves are a reddish black, a mix of spirals and chunks. My first impression is it smelled like the good brown bits from homemade mac and cheese, with a bit of smoke. It brewed up to a medium amber with a kind of raisiny, floral, charred wood scent, which followed right along into the taste, which was sweet, floral and the tiniest bit smokey.

The second infusion was a bit lighter, more floral, not a bit smokey, but had more of a raisin character to it. Not sweet in the usual sense of the word, but carrying that impression. It is quite complex and as it cools it becomes somewhat peachy tasting. I found it to be every bit as interesting cold as it was hot.

This tea is also known as Da Hung Pao, "the Emperor of Tea" and comes from the Wuyi Mountains in Fujian Provnce, China. The trees are over 400 years old. One of the charming myths about these trees is that a Ming Dynasty emperor's mother was ill and a tea made from them cured her. To honor and protect the trees, the emperor sent his imperial red robes to put over them.

For those of you who are Kusmi Tea fans, they have opened a NYC store. It is located at 1037 Third Ave., near 61st Street. I now have a huge list of NYC tea shops and vendors I want to visit next time I can go there.

I am going to hop over to India to review a tea I don't want to forget. It is from Teas Etc and simply named Nilgiri. If you remember, Nilgiri is named for its origin in the "Blue Mountains " of very southern India. The leaves are small and a mix of black and brown. They give off a very pleasant prune smell, which sits well with me, as I love prunes. As it brewed the scent shifted to a baked fruit and fresh outdoor aroma. The tea was definitely no disappointment. It was light and toasty and fruity and sweet. Yum.

This made me think ahead to gardens. When we first began to garden in earnest we were faced with brick-building red clay. What to do? We had read about no-weed, deep mulched gardens put forth by Ruth Stout [sister of mystery writer, Rex, author of the Nero Wolf series] and tried it, never looking back. By the third year we had deep, wonderful soil. The trick is to mulch the soil about 1 foot thick with hay and just add to it every year. We did our potatoes by laying them on the ground and covering them with hay. We'd shove the hay aside to make rows. Yes, there were a few problems. The main one was slugs, which we dealt with by going out in the evening and salting them. Considering the damage they did, we were absolutely heartless. And we had wonderful crops that we did not have to weed nor water. One garden we did have to rake clear for the ground to warm up, but that was minor.

When we were making new flower beds, we were a bit more discreet. In the fall we would lay down a thick layer of wet newspaper and cover it with a "prettier" mulch. By Spring we would've killed the grass and started the process of soil improvement. You see, not only am I a lazy tea lady, I am a lazy gardener.

Russian in the Rain

Today is a rainy day, a perfect day for tea. I have some Kusmi Bouquet of Flowers I bought to lift my spirits. This is a French company whose origins as Kousmichoff began in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1867. When the Russian Revolution began in 1917, one of the owners of the company fled to London and then Paris and continued their tea company there. I love their tins, which are short wide rounds, decorated with curlicues and arabesques – very old world looking. Their older line, originally for the Russian market, I assume, also seems very old world to me, as well. Bouquet des Fleurs (the French name)is one of those.


The dry leaves are on the small size, very dark, with almost a green wash over them. They give off a slight floral smell. I brewed them at 212 degrees for about 3.5 minutes. This is a blend of China and Ceylon teas, scented with bergamot, citrus and flowers. You can pretty much taste and smell them all, but it is so completely blended that I cannot sort them out one by one. I can smell and taste that the tea is fresh and perhaps the citrus dominates, but the flowers are not lost.

I really am sure there is some sort of secret ingredient that conveys “Russian” to me, as most teas that are labeled that way have a certain heavy undernote that just says that to me, even if it is not a tea by Kusmi. I find it pleasant and it immediately takes me across the sea to sit by a samovar, drinking tea from a glass, perhaps with a sugar cube or a spoonful of jelly.

Kusmi Russian Breakfast

Another windy, rainy day. Another excuse for some good black tea
- as if I needed one. I recently got a tin of Kusmi's Russian Breakfast no. 24 and hadn't tried it yet, so I thought this would be perfect. It is billed as a blend of China black, Ceylon and Indian teas. It certainly is black, with a few bits of gold thrown in to highlight it. The dry leaves really had very little scent to them, which surprised me, as Russian teas often have a heavy scent. I brewed it up in our "all-day "pot - the big ugly green one, as I was in the mood for a lot of tea. There still wasn't a lot of scent but I could distinguish what I think of as China and Ceylon teas. I can't tell you how they are different, but they smell different to me. The tea had a very pleasant taste, not at all heavy, but very fresh and bold, definitely one deserving a touch of milk and if you are so inclined, some sugar or jelly. It was good with and without the milk and drinkable for a good bit of the day. Definitely good for breakfast, when I like a plainish black.
I really love Kusmi Tea tins. They are nicely decorated and they stack up well. Many other companies tins do not stack well and are forever falling all over each other. Of course, I may have too much tea, but we won't go into that. I can't say that I love all their teas. Some of them are too heavily scented or flavored with what I think are rather odd flavors. These are some of their older teas, probably made more specifically for a Russian clientele, as Kusmi was originally a Russian company, which fled to Paris during their revolution. I don't know this about the earlier teas, so please don't quote me.

The photo today is of one of the many jitneys one can take to tour Vienna. It struck me as "olde worlde" enough to go with Kusmi tea, since I have no Russian photos. I did see one a long while ago that I have always remembered, generally as the world begins to lose color. It was almost black and white, and shades of gray, taken on a winter's day. There was one bright spot - the woman in the picture was carrying a glass jar of borscht. It was stunning.