How to Grow Chamomile From Seed (And Make Your Own Tea)

Chamomile is a staple herb, a beautiful flower to add into your garden this season. And it's really easy to grow. So we're going to show you exactly how to do that in today's video. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. I'm standing here in my container garden with this beautiful stand of chamomile. I have even more in the back. You're not going to believe how much there is, but I really want to show you from seed all the way to harvest. And at the very end of the video, I will show you how to dry it and make your own chamomile tea. So you know what to do, cultivate that Like button. And then I will personally give you a botanical blessing of plus 50% chamomile flowers. And let's get into the video. As with many plants, chamomile has a few varieties that you want to watch out for. This one right here is German chamomile. It's going to grow about one foot to three foot tall. I have some pretty big ones in the backyard right now. These are about a foot or so. And it has more of like a wispy sort of look to it. It can stretch out in the shade, might need a little bit of support. I've noticed in the heat they can sometimes flop a little bit, but it is the one that's more commonly used in the garden. And it is the one that is more commonly used for tea. On the other hand, you also have Roman chamomile. That's the other major variety that you could grow. I would say most people don't grow it. It's more of like a matting creeping ground cover. You can again, use it for tea, but it's really not the one that most people would use. So if you're trying to get some tea out of this, then definitely grow German. The final two are St. John's or Dyer's. These ones are much more rare. Not a lot of people grow them, but the whole flower is yellow. So it's really interesting, kind of a nice look, less contrast, but more bright yellow if that's something that you want to do. And you can use them for tea as well. So if you can find one, then go ahead and grow it. But let's figure out how to start these from seed. All right, we have our chamomile seeds and we've got our tray. This is the Epic 6L tray. One of my favorite trays of all time. We offer it in the store. But what you want to do is grab some seedling mix. This is a Smoma seed starter mix pre-moistened because we're going to be surface sowing the chamomile. So you want to just grab it, put a decent little bit of pressure in there. You can compact it down slightly. So I'm a little, you know, I'm a little sloppy with it. I have to be honest with you, but it gets the job done. So chamomile, light dependent. A lot of seeds actually want darkness. Chamomile we should be surface sowing. And it's a very small seed so people can get a little bit particular and you know, they get like a little scared that it's not going to germinate. So we'll show you exactly how we do it. Give it a nice little tap here and smooth things out. When I said the seed is small, that's what I mean. I mean, this is a minuscule seed and it's sometimes a little scary to germinate these seeds because you just don't really know, okay, how is that possibly going to grow up into this massive plant? So let me show you what we do. So I like to not even remove the seed packet. I'll just do a little scatter just like this, just a little scatter. And there's a ton of seeds. You don't need to be super precious about, you know, saving all these seeds, tons of seeds. So there you go. We've got our seeds in there. With a dry finger, I like to just compress it down so they don't stick to my finger and come back up. So you want to get a little bit of adherence to that soil mix. Just press them down like that. You're not covering these up. We're just going to let them be, right? And then you can hit them with a spray bottle for a little bit of extra moisture. Now, if you're a very paranoid seed starter, like, you know, I myself can sometimes be, one thing that really works is vermiculite. What you can do is take a little vermiculite and just sprinkle it over the top here. If you're really paranoid that the moisture is going to be an issue, it's going to dry out too quickly, vermiculite will still let light through. Remember, chamomile light-dependent germination. And then it will also hold in a little bit of extra water. So if you're very paranoid, then this can be a good mix, just a good little thing to add in. But it's, again, I want to stress, it's not necessary. So we'll go ahead and sprout with a little bit of water. And now we wait. And here is what you will find. So we've obviously thinned these out a little bit. So we've just kept it to one per cell. You could also break them apart. So let's say these two right here, you could pop it out of the six cell, just like this, pop it out. Really handy and really nice. And then from there, you could just split this and do a little bit of a division, but it's not a hundred percent necessary. They will still produce if you plant them really close together, they just won't be as big. So we're here in the back patch where this beautiful stand of chamomile, this is only just four plants, believe it or not. That we started a couple of months back, put it in the ground as soon as we could. And it's really just blown up. So as far as care goes, let's talk temperature first, climate. What is it really like? It would prefer full sun. However, it doesn't really want extremely hot temperatures. It can handle them, but it would prefer a more cool, temperate climate, which means it's a perfect spring crop for sure, pushing into summer. But also you may be able to get a crop of it out before fall turns into winter as those days get cooler. Of course, the days will also get shorter. So you have to play a little bit with that. But it works really, really well in the spring. So I would say, start it indoors like we just showed you how to do. And as soon as your ground's workable, get it in the ground and it will do completely fine. Especially when it comes to some of the harvesting techniques that help push it up. But we'll talk about that in just a second. The thing that I will say about many of these sort of herbs, flowers, things like that, a lot of them don't need a ton of fertilizer. And in fact, sometimes fertilizing can be detrimental. So everything in this bed, I've got some sage, oregano, thyme, rosemary. They really don't want a lot of stuff. They'll thrive off of neglect. They still do want some water, specifically chamomile. It can tolerate a little bit of drought, but it would really prefer to have a nice amount of water. What I noticed in this back patch, it was a little bit more stable because this raised bed is connected to the ground. And so it can actually pull water from a bunch of different sources. But in the container green stock garden that you saw at the beginning of the video, those are a little bit more prone to drying out. And we started to see some of the bottom sort of frilly leaves droop down, turn a little bit light green and start to die off. So you really do, if you're growing it in a container, have to manage your watering pretty well, I would say. Throw some mulch on top. It will do just fine. That's really all there is to it as far as chamomile care goes. The rest is either a problem you might run into or the pruning and harvesting phase. So let's take a look. We'll dive in with me and look at the flowers close up. I'll show you the exact point at which you want to harvest your chamomile and some pretty hilarious ways on how to do it. So let's take a closeup look at the different stages of growth. So here would be a very young flower that really doesn't have a whole lot going for it. Here's actually an even younger cluster right here. You can barely just see the center of the flower here. You just see a couple of little nubs right there. What about this guy right here? Does this look like a good one? Well, I used to think so, but actually this is a little too early. You don't want to be harvesting it at this phase. The perfect phase to harvest would be at this phase right here, where the flower petals have completely opened up. They've started to flatten out and they've maybe even started to fall back from the head just slightly. This might even be a little bit too late. But let's just take maybe this guy right here. This could be a good time. This one right here could be a good time. This is perfect. Now you could, like a noob, come through and harvest, you know, with pruning snips and do this. Ooh, I got my chamomile. No, it's way more fun to give it the old boop. So you want to grab two fingers, come behind the petal, just like this and just come off, boop, and it comes right off. And it's perfect. I actually took off a little stem there. You can eat the stem, but it's not ideal. You just want the flowers if you're going to dry it. So you're going to come off, give it that old boop, just like that. Boom. We're good to go. So you want to come through, do this in the early morning, give it that boop. You want to give it a little bit of that beep. We're just harvesting here guys and it's very fun and it's very peaceful and it is very enjoyable and you get to, you know, reap what you sow, quite literally. So we're coming through like this, but I have an even more fun way to do this. If like me, you end up growing a lot of chamomile, I've got a hilarious tool for you. I think this is a blueberry harvester. I personally like to call it the auto booper because it comes through and it just boops up all the chamomile extremely easily. So you can just come through, do this, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's gone. It's honestly the most fun tool to use. And you try to get the mature flowers, of course, like we've talked about, but it's way faster. It is way more fun. And honestly, sometimes that's what it's about. We just want to come through and grab as many of these cause we're going to dry this out in just a second here. And I'm going to show you how to make chamomile tea and we'll also talk about some of the problems that you might run into. So let me boop a couple more here. Let's get to it. Boop. All right. So here's some stuff I harvested earlier. We've got calendulas there, but let's just add in what we just harvested. And now we'll talk about drying it and using it. So for drying these guys, first of all, take a moment and actually enjoy the smell of them because they smell like a green apple candy. Oh man. It's like a medicinal green apple candy. Really nice. You can even eat them just like this if you want to. See what they taste like. It's sort of like a lightly medicinal, lightly tart type of flavor. I wouldn't say it's my favorite thing on earth, but you do have to dry them if you want to use them for tea. You can use them fresh for tea at like four tablespoons per cup. Seems to be pretty rare that people do that. So what you'd rather do is you'd rather just dry them out. You can dry them just in the air about one or two weeks or so, cool, dry place. That'll do pretty well. You can sundry them but the color fades and it seems like the flavor weakens slightly. So I probably wouldn't recommend that. But then my favorite way to do it would be to dehydrate. So with herbs like this, you want to dehydrate on a very low temp. So I've got a dehydrator in the kitchen. Let's pop that out. And we'll put it on at about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, which should be somewhere around 33 degrees Celsius for about 12 to 18 hours. So it's really pretty simple. We just want to spread them out somewhat evenly. I could have washed these, but I didn't see any bugs or anything weird on them. So I'm just going to let them be. Spread it out nice and even. It would be nice if I had less stems on, but it's really not the end of the world. The stems are technically edible. Let's get those all over there. All right. We'll put our top on and we'll go for quite a while. So it's down at 95 degrees, very low. We're going to run it for about 12 hours. All right. Welcome from the future. We're about 12 hours ahead. You don't really have to go that long, I think maybe like three or four hours is good, but low and slow, 95 degrees Fahrenheit. We've got some nice, beautiful dehydrated flowers here. It seems like everyone has their own ratio of what they prefer to use for chamomile. What I'm going to do is just to do one tablespoon per cup. So let's brew up a fresh little pot. I'm just collecting some of the flowers here. Again, I'm not stressed out about getting some stems in here. We're not growing, you know, some sort of top notch chamomile here. We're doing this at home guys. We're keeping it easy. We're not stressing out. Okay. All right. Let's pack it down a little bit. I want to get some pungency going on. Let's brew this up. All right. Boiled up some water, 212 Fahrenheit, 100 Celsius. Let's fill this bad boy up and we're going to steep it for about five minutes or so. I'll see you in the future. Okay, we've got it. Let's give it the smell test first. It still has that nice crisp apple sort of scent. My favorite part about this particular tea maker is it's that top down little action. And let's give it the taste test. That's good. Oh, that's good. That's good. And that's just pure chamomile straight out of the garden. That's not adding like lemon or honey or any of these millions of recipes that you can look up on the internet. So chamomile tea, chamomile in the garden, extremely easy to grow. You can grow it for most of the year with minimal pest problems. Another benefit that I didn't mention when it comes to the tea specifically is that you can use it to pre-soak your seeds. It's the same as soaking in water except for the fact that there are some studies that show chamomile has antimicrobial and antifungal benefits for the soaking phase. So if you have a seed that's maybe prone to damping off disease, some sort of mold issues, if you've got some leftover tea, I probably won't cause this is very tasty and very delicious. But if you do, you can soak and give that a try. So I encourage you to not only grow chamomile but find a lot of ways to use it and drop your favorite way to use chamomile down in the comments. Cause I'm always looking for more recipes. As you can see, I've got a lot hiding right below me right there that I need to find a use for. So until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.