Herbal Sun Tea
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lee lemmon wrote:
> My own preference is something that hereabouts is called
> an Arnie Palmer, one-half lemonade, one-half iced tea.

What I do now is make "sun tea"(a fad a few years ago) on my back step in the summer, tea bags in a gallon glass jar of water, all day, which makes it strong, with some of my own herbs, especially mints, and especially lemon balm if I have any (one of the mint family, very lemony)(much cheaper than buying lemon juice or lemons) in the water.

The herbs don't come out as strong that way, so sometimes I make a pot of very strong lemon balm and-or mint tea and mix it with the china tea when pouring out of the gallon jar into refrigerator containers (pitchers and plastic jugs).

I say "if" on the Lemon Balm because it's not as hardy as the true mints and dies out more easily, and some winters I lose it all, and have to buy new plants or start new from seed, which takes a long time to grow enough to crop, where I always have my nice survivor-type "weedy" mint. I saw some of that sold in a nursery as "Kentucky Colonel Mint", but haven't heard of it by that name otherwise, so I suspect it was some nurseryman's idea to tag an appealing name onto the plentiful kind to make it easy to sell. I suspect that it _has_ a proper name, but I don't know it--should do some web research into the mint family, now that I can. I bought my original start years ago from a catalog as "spearmint", but the taste doesn't resemble true spearmint, and the plant doesn't resemble true spearmint, other than as mints in general resemble each other. Its best virtue is that I _always_ _HAVE_ some, without any trouble or nursing.

I both envy and excoriate a friend in the Pacific Northwest, who regards Lemon Balm as a weed, and spends whole days weeding it out of his mother's flower beds and yard--apparently the climate there is ideal for it.