The first time I had tea—any tea from camellia sinensis, I mean; I’d had herbal teas—I was twenty years old, and I had it at a restaurant outside Milton, Florida, a tiny town on the Florida Panhandle just east of Pensacola.

 

It was uninspiring, but I don’t like soda, don’t like sweet tea (sorry everyone from the South), and there wasn’t anything else on the menu except water. I’d been told it was “rude” not to order a drink because of some reason I didn’t really understand, and was in the phase of tearing down walls around the things I had been taught as a kid (which included, don’t drink anything with caffeine in it). So I ordered tea.

 

It was black tea. Liptons. A single tea bag, in hot water. I thought, “huh, it’s okay but I’m not missing much.” Years went by. I did continue to order tea at restaurants because I don’t like things that are too sweet and I don’t like coffee at all, but I wouldn’t say it was an obsession.

 

Eventually, I went to graduate school in Berkeley. Here, a few things ran together. My boyfriend at the time really liked tea. And one of my housemates took me to Chinatown in San Francisco—one of those places that has about seventy different metal jars of tea labeled with things I couldn’t read. 

 

I had never had loose leaf tea. They let us smell the teas, and my roommate picked out a few things, and since I was there, I did, too, and I bought my first teapot, and I got really into green and oolong teas.

 

But black tea? Black tea was a vehicle for milk at breakfast. It was the base for sugar-saturated sweet tea. It was boring leaf water, not the alchemical magic of a fragrant oolong. There was a time and a place for black tea, of course—when you couldn’t get anything better, for instance.

 

The thing I had not learned, though, was that most tea in bags is not actually leaf water. It is low grade leaf dust water.

 

It has been delightful to learn otherwise. The right black tea can be fragrant with the smell of summer fruits. It sings with warmth, and comforts from the first sip. This particular black tea is $5.50 for 25 grams, which makes it about 3x more expensive per weight than Lipton, but if you consider how often it can be rebrewed, is probably almost the exact same cost per cup. It is a lovely black tea, and I think about the time I lost to not realizing how good tea could be and…

 

Well. It’s nice to learn new things. Oh, and that teapot I bought in Berkeley for my first real tea adventures? That’s the one in the picture above. I still have it. I still use it. We’ve been together through a lot of learning about tea.

 

Thanks for being there.

Scarlet Floret is from white2tea, who is finally able to process US orders again during the tariff…pause? Do we call it a pause when there are still 30% tariffs? But whatever. Tea can be purchased. Whee!

Speaking of things that date from graduate school: this is the first time I have had a vegetable garden since 2001, back when I lived in the Bay Area.

 

It’s not really the first gardening I’ve done: we’ve gone completely xeric with the front yard (at this point, our only watering is a small amount of supplemental plant-by-plant watering as we add in a few more xeric plants and give them enough to get them established). We planted fruit trees the first year we lived in our house, too, and we sometimes get an apocalyptic amount of fruit. And I’ve had two herb boxes on the patio that have given me chives and dill and basil and lovage and the like during spring and summer for the last five years.

 

But vegetables? No. The last time I tried to grow vegetables, I lived in an apartment in El Cerritos, California, and I bought planter boxes for our patio. I was really excited about growing vegetables. The boxes weren’t very deep, thought, so I was like, what can I grow? Radishes. Of course.

 

I really enjoyed growing radishes: watering them every day when I came home and whispering to them that they should GROW and cheering them on as they got bigger and giving them names, which if you do not know is not a thing you should do to plants you intend to uproot and consume.

 

Because pretty soon you have these cool fat little radishes, red and round in the ground, doing their radish thing, and you’re supposed to pull them out. While they’re LOOKING at you.

 

Eventually, after they’d stayed in the little planter pots long enough to turn bitter and woody, I pulled them up, feeling like a mass murderer, and sliced them up, and…

 

Uh, have I mentioned I don’t really like raw radishes? I don’t really like raw radishes. At the time, I didn’t know any other way to use them except raw on salads, so I kept choking down bitter spicy woody radish and feeling like some kind of evil, horrible person, and finally the remaining radishes in my fridge, laid out in little corpses, started to shrivel and dry out and I was like “wow, this was such a bad experiment.”

 

I ended up being a little shy about vegetable gardening for many years. This time, though, I’m being smarter. I am not naming the vegetables. I am not saying, “hello, radishes!” when I get home. I am only planting things I like to eat. I am not naming the vegetables.

 

This includes a certain number of radishes, because I know now I like them pickled and I like them braised. I have now had three separate meals with vegetables from my garden—at this stage of things, it’s basically been thinnings added to salads or scrambled into morning eggs on toast.

 

But it is still very exciting. I pulled out a juvenile radish, washed it, and ate it raw, and I didn’t have the slightest twinge about it (I still don’t like radishes raw; I was just checking.) There are greens and there are lettuces and there are carrots and there are onions, and none of them have names because I learn from my mistakes!

 

And I now have the world’s tiniest green tomatoes growing on one of my cherry tomatoes, Sunny. 

 

What? It’s fine to name vegetables if you don‘t have to harvest anything but the fruit, right? Right?

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