today I'm going to show you how to
make the best herbal tea for the deepest night's sleep so coming up in this
episode I'm going to take you through the whole process of creating this Sleepytime
herbal tea I'm going to be showing you which herbs we're going to use and why
I'm going to show you how to put them together and blend them and of course how
to make them up into your nice bedtime tea so what we're going to do here is to make up
about enough for one person for a week or if there are two of you and you both have trouble
sleeping then we can do that for maybe three or four days with the amounts that we've got here
so first of all introducing our herbs the main herb in the mix is going to be passion flour
lots of scientific evidence to back up passion flower as a sleep tea and the nice thing about
passion flower and the reason it's our main herb is because it's effective for almost everyone so
it's a good General herb tea for sleep to that we're going to add our second herb which is skull
cap skullcap is I've chosen basically because as well as being relaxing and a good sleep remedy
it's also strengthening regenerating and restoring to the nerve system so while you are merrily
sleeping away it will be working to strengthen up nourish and restore your nerves as well as just
relaxing them next up we have California poppy now this is quite a strong herb it's not the sort of
thing that you you would want to take just before getting in a car so we're going to use moderate
quantities of this any of these herbs by the way by themselves would make great sleep teas why
we're blending them is because the causes of poor sleep are different from different individuals
we're all different so whilst we could in the right circumstances use any of them for anybody
what we're going to do is blend them so that they're more generally appropriate to pretty much
anybody who would like this kind of assistance so we've got our California poppy again a
well-known sleep relaxant slightly sedative herb this one so as I said we need to be careful
about the qualities we don't want to knock people out next to that we've got chamomile obviously
a very well known remedy very good for children for example but maybe not strong enough for the
average stressed out adult so we're going to put a little bit of that in it's a kind of warming herb
it's comforting it has a nice taste obviously so it's going to contribute not only because of its
relaxing properties but also because of its color which is always nice to look at something colorful
and its taste as well next herb to that is quite similar this is lavender and again lavender
would make a great sleepy time tea all of its own but if you want to make it a really strong
tea too much lavender has a very bitter taste so you maybe wouldn't be the best thing to be going
for just before you go to bed so we're going to use a moderate quality of lavender just for that
lovely Aroma that lavender can give and of course Lavender is also very well known for helping
us sleep just by its smell so it's going to contribute in that way as well next to it this is
my secret ingredient this is rose petals now rose petals have an absolutely phenomenal fragrance as
you probably know and my students at the college also refer to rose petals as the hug a herbal
hug so this is kind of a warming and kind of comforting mood enhancing ingredient that we've
got going here and lastly but not least we have Valerian now this is a herb you've probably heard
something about it's a very powerful sleep aid but again we don't want to use too much of it one of
the reasons for that is that in herbal medicine we say this is a heating herb so it's very warming
so if you have a cold or chilly Constitution it's fantastic for you but if you're a little bit hot
yourself then it's probably going to be working in the wrong direction in fact if I have too much
Valerian before I go to sleep it's going to keep me awake so very moderate quantities of that
as we'll see now we've got exactly 20 grams of passion flour here and that's as I said is going
to be our base herb we've got exactly 10 grams of skull cap here and that's about right so I'm
going to start by adding the skull cap straight into the passion flower and then we're going to
go for our other herbs starting with California poppy now we've got five grams of California poppy
in here so half of the skull cap and as I said we don't want too much of it but five grams is fine
so we're going to tip the whole lot into the mix but when we come to our next herbs we're going to
be measuring them a little more precisely so here we've got our chamomile herb our chamomile flowers
and that I reckon we're going to need about two teaspoons so just two fairly fairly full teaspoons
just like that and now we come to Lavender now lavender again has these very strong essential
oils of volatile oil properties so it's quite a strong plant you can smell it you know the smell
of lavender it's quite powerful very powerful for Sleep actually you don't need all that much of
it again so we're going to just take one heaped teaspoon of lavender flowers and that's going to
be quite enough and when we come to Rose we've got a similar thing going on very fragrant but we
don't want it to totally overpower the mix so the one thing about rose petals is they are extremely
light so if I take a teaspoon of that's probably going to be about half a gram so I'm going to put
a little bit more than that here we're going to get a teaspoon and maybe a half in there and our
final herb is Valerian and this again is quite powerful again you can smell if you know Valerian
you know it has a very very powerful smell again we don't want it to overpower our herbal mix so
we're going to use just about a level teaspoon or half a teaspoon of valerian in that mix
and that's all we need so let's mix this up need to do this several times because as you
can see it can tend to sort of Clump together what we're trying to achieve here is a really even
mix and there we have our finished sleepy time tea blend so as you see we've stored our Sleepytime
tea in a sealable glass jar you could in fact use a brown paper bag if you wanted it's very easy to
get very simple just pack it up nice and tight put it in the back of a cupboard cool dark place so
we're going to go forward and make our infusion now so we've got a kettle freshly boiled and our
infuser teapot now this is a special design for making herbal teas very very useful for a herbal
therapy and it has this mesh which goes into the middle which allows the herbs to Steep and also
release their properties into the water so we're going to make just one cup so this is a one
person dose when we're making a herbal tea we want a medicinal tea we want a medicinal action
we want more than just the amount that we would dispense for a normal beverage so we're going to
use a couple of teaspoons and by the way some of the ingredients of this may settle in time so
just give it a quick stir round before you put any of the herbs in the teapot so now dosage I'd
say two teaspoons but you could use more if you have a real problem so you can get judge that on
how bad your sleep problem is but I'd say between two and four teaspoons is about right we're going
to use two heaped teaspoons in here there we go that's for one cup and then about half the teapot
would be around the right size uh the right amount of water here there we go now the other thing
about making a herbal tea is that we steep it a little bit longer than we would for an ordinary
beverage so this is going to stay here now for about a minimum 10 minutes maximum 15 minutes
so let's see what this tastes like we're going to pour ourselves a mug right here this has been
brewing for 15 minutes now so it's nice and strong absolutely beautiful a really
nice blend so there we have it my ultimate sleepy time herbal tea
don't forget to subscribe to our channel for future episodes and I'll join
you on one very soon meantime sleep well
