Harvesting Mallow Flowers for Tea: Picking, Drying and Keeping the Color

Pick newly opened flowers, in the morning, dry

The flower is the crop. Pick blooms on the first or second day after they open, while the petals are still firm and the veining is sharp. A flower that has been open for four days has already lost pigment and will dry to a dull gray no matter how well you handle it.

Pick after the dew has gone but before the sun is high, typically within a couple of hours of the dew drying. Wet petals will not dry evenly and go brown at the edges. Petals picked in the heat of the afternoon are already limp and lose color in the first hour.

Take the whole flower by pinching the stalk just behind the green calyx. You can leave the calyx on or remove it; removing it gives a cleaner tea and lets the petals dry faster, which is the more important consideration.

1. Pick into a shallow tray, not a bag Mallow petals bruise on contact and a bag of flowers is a bag of heat and moisture. Use a shallow basket or a tray one layer deep, and keep it out of direct sun while you work.
2. Pick every day or two through the flush The plant opens a new set of flowers most mornings. Daily picking gives you the best material and doubles as deadheading, which keeps the plant flowering rather than setting seed.
3. Get them onto the drier within the hour The clock on color starts the moment the flower is picked. Flowers left in a tray for half a day before drying are noticeably duller than the same flowers dried immediately.

Do not wash the flowers. Water dissolves and dilutes the pigment and adds moisture that slows the drying. If the plants are dusty, spray the ground around them the evening before rather than washing the crop after picking.

Drying: fast, dark, warm and moving air

Everything about mallow's color is decided in the drying. Slow drying, in a damp room or in a thick pile, browns the petals. Sunlight bleaches them to a pale straw. Excessive heat turns them a flat gray. The target is dry to the touch and crisp within twelve to twenty-four hours, in the dark, with air moving over the petals.

A dehydrator on its lowest setting is the most reliable tool: around 95 to 105F (35 to 40C), a single layer per tray, and the door of the room closed to keep the light off. Air drying works in a warm, dark, airy space with a fan, spread one layer deep on mesh, but the window is much tighter and a humid spell will cost you the batch.

A properly dried mallow flower is papery, shatters between the fingers, and keeps a deep violet to blue-purple. A batch that has gone brown or gray is still safe to drink but has lost the pigment that makes the tea worth making.

Test for dryness by crushing one flower. If it folds rather than shatters, it holds moisture and will go moldy in the jar within a month. Give it another few hours and test again.

Storing so the color survives the winter

Dried mallow loses color to light, air and warmth in that order. Pack the dried flowers loosely into an airtight jar, keep the jar in a dark cupboard, and do not decant into a clear jar on a windowsill however good it looks.

Handled this way, the flowers hold usable color for about a year, with the best of it in the first six months. Whole flowers keep color far better than crushed ones, so store them whole and break them only as you use them.

1. Fill the jar loosely and seal it Do not crush the flowers down to fit more in. Broken petals expose more surface to air and fade much faster. Use a bigger jar rather than packing tighter.
2. Check the jar after a week Any condensation on the inside of the glass means the flowers were not fully dry. Tip them out, dry them again for a few more hours, and rejar. Left alone they will mold.
3. Label with the season and the drying method When one jar is noticeably better than another, the label is what tells you which method produced it. Note the drying temperature and duration, not just the year.

Why the tea changes color, and what to expect

Poured over dried mallow flowers, cool or lukewarm water draws out a striking blue to blue-violet infusion within a few minutes. Boiling water pulls the color faster but pushes it toward gray-green, so let the kettle stand for a few minutes before pouring.

The pigment is sensitive to acidity. Add a squeeze of lemon and the infusion swings through violet to a clear pink. This is a property of the pigment, not a sign of anything wrong with the tea, and it is the reason mallow is grown as a tea flower at all. The flavor itself is very mild and slightly mucilaginous; mallow is a color and a texture more than a taste.

Leaves and the seed heads

Young mallow leaves are edible and mild, best taken from the top of the plant before flowering while they are still soft and lightly hairy. Older leaves get coarse and the hairs become noticeable. They are mucilaginous when cooked, which makes them useful for thickening a soup and unappealing raw in quantity.

The green seed heads, flat discs of segments arranged in a ring, are also edible while soft and green, with a mild nutty flavor. Note, though, that every seed head you eat or pick is one that will not shed into the bed, which matters more than the eating does.

1. Pick leaves before the plant flowers Take the top three or four leaves from a shoot. Once the plant is flowering, leaf quality drops sharply and you are also removing the plant's working foliage during its busiest period.
2. Never pick leaves showing orange spots Orange pustules on the underside are hollyhock rust. Do not eat rusted foliage, and do not carry rusted leaves around the garden. Bin them where you stand.
3. Use leaves the same day Mallow leaves go limp within hours of picking and do not revive in water. There is no useful way to store them fresh; pick what you will use in that meal.

What to record about the picking season

Drying is where batches differ, and the difference is invisible unless you write down what you did. One season of notes will settle your drying method permanently.

Weigh the fresh flowers and the dried result for at least a couple of batches. The ratio is stable and tells you at a glance how much bed space a jar of tea actually costs you.