In the last year I have given up caffeine completely. No more green or black tea, the last remnants of a lifelong caffeine addiction. I still love having a cup of warm tea as my drink of choice and so began to more seriously experiment with what combinations I wanted for a particular day. Each month it changes, and I’ve started to make larger batches of tea mix so it’s easier for me, particularly in the morning, to make my tea when I have other things going on.

It’s nice to have so many options with not just flavors but how the tea will make me feel. I have a morning tea and a bedtime tea, both fairly different. I don’t always drink the sleepy tea (catnip, lemon balm, chamomile) but I always drink tea in the morning. Lemon balm is now one of my favorite herbs, it even has its own sweet lemony taste, perfect for tea.  It gives you mental clarity while physically relaxing you. What I had wanted more then anything was to wake my brain up in the morning without the jitters in my body. Lemon balm is also said to give you more of a sunny disposition, so I think of it sometimes as drinking sunshine tea. Peppermint I found out has a mild stimulating effect, helping me to wake up and feel refreshed without that boing! feeling of that first hit of caffeine. Red raspberry leaf is a staple of mine, a general tonic that surprisingly is a good source of iron, and the ginseng also helps to give me a nice boost.

I will usually drink my tea with a little bit of agave nectar, my new sweetener of choice. My whole life I have wanted some kind of sweet boost when I first wake up. When I was in high school, it was a caffeine soda of some kind, cold in a can, just to get me to the bus stop at 6am so I could then sleep for the next hour-long bus ride. Cold soda continued to be my morning drink of choice until about seven years ago when I started to try and untangle myself from that habit. Hot coffee with lots of sugar and soy milk became my morning drink for many years, taking huge stainless steel thermoses of it with me to work to last throughout the day. Ya, this didn’t help my stomach, or my nerves, or my blood sugar very much.

A few years ago I stopped the coffee, had a brief interlude of fresh carrot juice with super food nutrition powder as my morning drink but went back to wanting a hot caffeine boost during my day. Black tea for a while, again with the sugar but that had the same affect on me as coffee did and I’m one of those people that will drink a ton of it to get that supercharge boost to make up for not getting enough sleep. Switched to caffeinated green tea for a while, with lemon because I found out without lemon my stomach couldn’t handle that either. Sick of the stomach problems just from trying to get an energy boost, I stopped all caffeine completely.

This year I gave up on trying to cheat my sleep cycle. If I don’t get enough sleep now, I’ll maybe make some fresh vegetable juice to give me an immediate energy boost, but then I’ll just deal with feeling sleepy so that when it’s later time for me to go to bed, I can actually sleep and make up for what was lost the night before. It’s forced me to be kinder to myself, my body, my mind. I realized, after no longer depending on caffeine to get me through the day, that I was using it to be able to push myself too hard and to try and do too many things which was just leading to more stress, less good sleep etc. I was trying to cheat. This year, I finally came to a real breaking point with all of that, and now enjoy my mornings a lot more. And my tea.

It turns out I wasn't the only one impressed with Borage. Some bumblebees have recently taken up residence outside our house and as you can see from the above picture, they love these flowers. It's magical to go outside and see a fuzzy little bumblebee dancing around a flower you helped to grow.

I first found out about Borage when I was researching edible flowers for salads. It came up as a beautiful blue star shaped flower with edible flowers and leaves. My plants are completely organically grown from seed, no pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or chemical fertilizers, just home compost and soil from the yard. If you are frustrated with wanting to eat organic but not always being able to afford it, growing some Borage is a great way to cheaply and easily start to grow some of your own food and experience a truly fresh addition to your meal. The recipe below is a salad I made with mixed greens from the store along with fresh picked Borage and collard greens, just to give you an idea what I use Borage for.

According to Plants for a Future, Borage flowers and leaves are edible. The leaves are eaten typically raw in a salad, as a pot herb, or pureed into soups. Rich in potassium and calcium, the leaves have a salty, cucumber flavor. It is recommended that you either chop up the leaves finely since they have a fuzzy texture if you’re eating them raw, or you can puree them for soups. The leaves and flowers should always be used fresh because they lose their flavor and color if dried. The flowers are eaten raw, as a decorative garnish in salads and summer fruit drinks. They have a sweet, slightly cucumber flavor. You can also make a refreshing tea from the leaves and/or the flowers. An edible blue dye can also be obtained from the flowers and used to color vinegars.

I was glad to find out how easy it was to grow Borage They prefer semi-shade or full sun, can grow in nutritionally poor soil, and are drought tolerant. Even though it does not transplant well, as a prolific self-seeding annual, once Borage is established in a spot it pretty much takes care of itself, year after year. The growing plant is said to repel insects, though it is pollinated by bees who are attracted to its sweet nectar. Borage makes a great companion plant for most plants, including strawberries and tomatoes. In fact, it’s known to actually improve the flavor of tomatoes it grows close to. In my experience, Borage seemed to grow best in semi-shade, but the Florida sun can be harsh sometimes. I was surprised at how big the plant got, with a thick stalk that needed some kind of support, either from other plants or sticks, to keep it held up.

Borage Salad and Homemade Dressing

I eat some variation on this salad almost every day. Quick to make and satisfying with lots of room to adapt.

The Salad

• Start out with a bowl of salad greens, I usually use mixed greens.
• Add a couple handfuls of nuts. I have a preference for raw pecans, almonds, and/or walnuts. Use whatever you want, it’s just nice to have some crunch in a salad
• Fresh Borage cut into small thin pieces. I used about a handful of leaves in my salad.
• Any extra stuff like fresh-ground black pepper and other edible flowers and leaves you have on hand. I put only one Borage flower on my salad as a garnish since there weren’t that many flowers left I didn’t want to take them all from the bees.

The Dressing

This will make enough dressing to fill one standard size salad dressing bottle (I just reuse one from the store) and enough left over for one large salad to use when you make it.

1 c olive oil

1-2 Tbs apple cider vinegar

1-2 handfuls of nutritional yeast

juice from half a lemon

1 tsp Braggs liquid aminos or soy sauce

sprinkle of garlic powder

other spices like oregano, basil, etc to taste

• In a small bowl,  mix all the ingredients together until well blended
• pour into cleaned salad dressing bottle/jelly jar/etc