Happy Sunday! 🍵 What's everyone drinking today?

Is it a single herb, a homemade blend, something you foraged yourself, or a favorite from the tea shelf?

I'd love to hear what's in your cup and why you picked it today.

Feel free to share a photo if you have one. It's always fun seeing what everyone is brewing. 🌿☕️

Modern urban life has a different training program:

• ultra-processed food
• chlorinated water
• disinfect everything
• antibiotics whenever possible
• chronic stress
• sleep deprivation
• indoor living
• polluted air
• fiber deficiency

Then we wonder why resilience has become so expensive.

My today insight I got during meditation: keeping a diverse, resilient microbiome today sometimes feels less like good habits and more like an elite sport...

The meeting agenda:

1. Rule out another disease.
2. Add another medication.
3. Refer to another specialist.
4. Repeat in six months.

The deer remains on the agenda for next year. Mostly because nobody's job description includes looking at the whole room.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

A slightly philosophical post about decisions about tea. Pictures are random from everywhere, please don't mind any particilar products as they they are truly random.

Imagine you are standing in front of a supermarket shelf full of herbal teas 💭☕️🍃

You didn't come for something specific like chamomile or peppermint. You just want to try something new.

What makes you pick one box and not the others?

- Ingredients?

- Single herb or a blend?

- Organic label?

- Brand you already know?

- Nice packaging?

- Price?

- Claims like "Sleep", "Digest", "Immune"?

- Or just some herb you've never heard about before?

Do you have some kind of strategy or you just go with your feeling?

I realized I probably have my own decision making pattern, but never really thought about it before. Curious how other people do it.

Hi, I felt like sharing this zero-waste elderberry life hack: after straining my elderflower syrup, I don't throw the blossoms away.

Instead, I transfer them to a glass jar with just a little of the remaining syrup and keep them in the fridge. Whenever I want a cup of tea, I simply spoon out some of the blossoms and pour hot water over them.

The tea is lighter than fresh elderflower tea, but it's still pleasantly floral, and it feels like getting a second life out of the same harvest.

I'm curious:

Do you reuse the blossoms after making syrup?

Do you make tea with them?

Compost them?

Turn them into something else?

Please share ideas - they can help many tea lovers

Weekend edition 😊

What's everyone drinking today?

🌿 A single herb?

🍵 A blend?

🌸 Something you're trying for the first time?

Feel free to share a picture if you have one. I always enjoy seeing what everyone is brewing.

Water comes first, of course. But if you had to choose one gentle herbal tea, which herb would you trust most—and how would you prepare it?

No known food allergies or specific health problems that might create obvious limitations.

I'm curious what different cultures and families use.

This picture is from last year and I'd love to prepare for the season by knowing what I'm going to do with the different parts of the plant.

I know that root decoction makes a traditional medicine like many berberine-containing plants. They have a long history of use as:

- Digestive bitters

- Antimicrobial herbs

- Liver and gallbladder support herbs

- Skin-support herbs (especially psoriasis and eczema in traditional herbalism)

Though I'm extremely interested in berries for their antioxidant value and I assume a few standard recipes of root decoction I know are a tiny portion of what there is on this plant in the world. Please share your thoughts, tips, recipes, warnings, predictions. All are welcome 🌿

Not necessarily your favorite herb - but one you think deserves far more attention than it gets.

Maybe it's a traditional local remedy, a forgotten folk or family tea, or simply something that rarely gets mentioned despite being genuinely enjoyable.

Some examples that come to mind:

- Damiana

- Cedrón (Lemon Verbena)

- Jiaogulan

- Oatstraw

- Skullcap

- Fireweed / Ivan Chai

- Dandelion root

- Coriander seed

- Fenugreek seed

What makes your choice special? Taste? Aroma? Tradition? Wellness benefits? A personal story?

I'd love to discover some underrated herbs, roots, seeds, flowers, and leaves from different parts of the world.

Thanknyou in advance! - I'm happy and grateful you've read it till here!

A friend of mine contacted me recently with a question "How do I recover memory which deteriorated immensely after years of smoking weed?". ​

Disclaimer: I never smoked myself, but I am a 4th generation herbalist, so I decided to take a look what experts have to say about this from my area of interest: herbs and herbal tea. ​

After the study I made I'd rank common tea ingredients roughly like this: ​

1. Lion's mane (not exactly a herb, but it is claimed to be useful when the mushroom used was properly grown, dried and stored). Btw, I'm a big fan of mushrooms, too. ​

2. Rosemary - traditionally used for memory and mental clarity, and some studies suggest it may support cognitive performance. ​

3. Gotu kola - in most supplements today it is used for focus, circulation, and nervous system support, wach of which directly affects memory quality ​

4. Sage (Salvia officinalis) — often overlooked but has surprisingly good evidence for memory and attention. I read a study about improved cognitive function in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease - for me it is an impressive result and I see no reason for ignoring it ​

5. Peppermint - doesn't sedate people the way lemon balm, chamomile, or passionflower can. Instead, it usually reduces mental fatigue while increasing subjective alertness - quite a combo in my pov ​

6. Cinnamon - my fave, frankly, though it turned out it does have a reputation for supporting memory and cognition, but the evidence is not as strong as for lion's mane or as extensively studied as some other nootropics. I've personally been using cinnamon on a whole lot of people, starting with myself, for a stimulating "memory massage" ​

Eventually I recommended this tea blend to my friend: ​

Rosemary +

sage +

cinnamon +

peppermint +

lion's mane ​

Pictures: I've prepared a cup for myself (all ingredients except for rosemary - I ran out of it when I cooked Bolognese sauce a few days ago :) ​

Please recommend your variants and blends of tea for someone recovering from cannabis-related brain fog and memory problems 🤯🍃☕️

Please help me recognise the herbs other than rose petal whichbhas a distinctive aroma and chamomile.

Hi healthy crowd, this is my breakfast today: a big cup of tea made of chamomile, wild mountain mint, lemongrass with some dark brown muscovado sugar from Mauritius paired with a wholegrain toast with fresh guacamole. What can I say? The tea was very pleasant, fruity, with caramel touch because of the sugar and very comforting overall. ;

​

About muscovado sugar:

​

1. It is not white sugar 🙈🧊

​

2. Muscovado contains small amounts of molasses-derived minerals (potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron). Fairly speaking the amounts of minerals are generally too small to create major health effects at normal serving sizes - so mo unfair charm on this one ;)

​

3. Main benefit for me: it provides a rich caramel flavor that pairs well with chamomile and lemongrass. This I crave once in a while! 🫶

​

For a daily herbal tea, this is a pleasant and fairly balanced blend. The main medicinal compromise is the added sugar - I admit, but I still went for it because they are damn good together. The amount of muscovado is small 1 teaspoon per mug, so most of the chamomile, mint, and lemongrass benefits are still there. This is a classic calming-and-digestive blend : chamomile is traditionally associated with relaxation, mint with digestive comfort and reduced bloating, and lemongrass with gentle digestive and antioxidant support. I mean this blend is all about comfort 360° :) + the guacamole toast? Just wonderful!

​

What did you have for breakfast today?!

Hi fam, this is my breakfast today: a big cup of tea made of chamomile, wild mountain mint, lemongrass with some dark brown muscovado sugar from Mauritius paired with a toast with fresh guacamole. What can I say? It is very pleasant, fruity, with caramel touch because of the sugar and very comforting overall.

​

About muscovado sugar:

1. It is not white sugar 🙈🧊

2. Muscovado contains small amounts of molasses-derived minerals (potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron). Fairly speaking the amounts of minerals are generally too small to create major health effects at normal serving sizes - so mo unfair charm on this one ;)

3. Main benefit for me: it provides a rich caramel flavor that pairs well with chamomile and lemongrass. This I crave once in a while! 🫶

​

For a daily herbal tea, this is a pleasant and fairly balanced blend. The main medicinal compromise is the added sugar - I admit, but I still went for it because they are damn good together. The amount of muscovado is small 1 teaspoon per mug, so most of the chamomile, mint, and lemongrass benefits are still there. This is a classic calming-and-digestive blend : chamomile is traditionally associated with relaxation, mint with digestive comfort and reduced bloating, and lemongrass with gentle digestive and antioxidant support. I mean this blend is all about comfort 360° :) I hope t

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What's in your cup today?!

Based on a personal pain/story:

What “city microbiome deterioration” means

Urban microbiome studies show that microbial communities in cities are shaped by vegetation cover, built surface, pollution, and climate. Higher greenness fractions and vegetation types explain a measurable share (about 20%) of variation in urban microbial communities across 60 cities worldwide.

A key multi‑site study compared airborne bacteria in five urban parks and five parking lots in an American city. It found:

• Bacterial communities in parks were significantly different from those in parking lots (p=0.023), even though alpha diversity (species richness) was similar.
• Vegetated area within 50 m explained 15% of variation in community composition, with “park” microbiomes richer in typical soil/plant taxa (e.g. Acidobacteriaceae), while parking lots had higher relative abundance of Acetobacteraceae. Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27418518/

When you replace a green patch with a built structure and parking, you flip the local microbial profile from “park‑like” to “parking‑lot‑like.”

In the city where I live with my family for the last several years, between 2020 and 2026, the neighborhood where I work lived through precisely that transition. A pocket park that once acted as a local “microbial reservoir” and buffer – cooler air, more plant and soil contact, more complex environmental exposure – was gradually turned into a construction site and then into a dense building with underground parking and minimal decorative landscaping.

From my daily walks, I could feel that the environment was no longer supporting the same kind of life. Fewer birds, fewer insects, less soil you could actually touch, more sealed surfaces that shed water and dust into the street. The micro‑rituals of health – sitting under a tree, children digging in the ground, playing on the grass and climbing trees, even just walking through a shaded, moist area – were replaced by shortcutting across a hot, dry, paved space.

For me, the pain was not dramatic enough to make headlines: no single acute event, no ambulance, no scandal. But I felt like sharing this here.