 Hello everyone, Halle Cottess here with Whole Lifestyle Nutrition. Today we are going to talk a little bit about stevia. And right here what you're looking at is my stevia plant. And what we're going to do is it's fall here in Wisconsin. And we've had one minor frost where I covered these plants. And the stevia likes it gets a lot sweeter, the cooler it gets. However it will not tolerate a frost. So you definitely want to harvest your stevia at the last part of the fall. So my temperatures are dropping down into the 30s here pretty soon. So I thought I'd go ahead and get the stevia up. But what you're going to do is you're going to take the clipping from the base. Let's just see here. I'm just going to try to show you. I'll just show you on a little one. I'm just going to pinch here. You're just going to take it off here. And what you're going to do is you're going to be harvesting the leaves. OK. So we're going to go ahead and I'm going to actually take all the stems off. I'm going to take these inside. And then I'm going to wash them really good. And then I'm going to take the leaves off. And I am going to take them outside on my table. And I will show you and dry them for 12 hours in the sun. It's going to be a nice sunny day today. So anyways, I will show you that process as soon as I get these washed up. OK. So I picked my stevia. And I'm just going to go ahead and fill my clean sink up with water. Filter water if you have it. And then I'm just going to put it in here. And you can see there's all kinds of dirt. It could be bugs. I'm going to go ahead and really clean this really good. And I'm going to take it out, drain the water again, and probably do this process two to three times until the water is clean. So that's what you're going to do. I need to put the whole plan in. And that's how you're going to clean it. I'm just going to take it up and put it in a strainer. And then once it's dry, we're going to go ahead and pick the leaves off and then dry them out in the sun. OK. Now you're going to go ahead and you're going to take your stevia plant that's dried from being washed. And you're going to go ahead and you're going to start taking the leaves off. These are where this sweetness is all held. And you also want to keep in mind that you want to take your tip off. There's a lot of stevia in there. So just pinch the tip off and just work your way down and pull all the leaves, leaving this stem because we're not going to make that into stevia. And just pick. Now what you're going to do is you're going to go ahead and put them. If you notice, I have a screen here. It's an old windows screen. It's going to allow air to get through the underside. You could also use this table. You see there's slits in it. And that would allow air to get through as well. So you don't necessarily need the screen. I just happen to have an old one that I kept around for gardening purposes such as this for this kind of project. And you're just going to take all your leaves all the way off and then you're going to dry these in 12 hours of sun. Now you're not wanting to go more than 12 hours. It should be dry. If for some reason you do not have a warm day and it's cool outside, go ahead and just take the stem, hang it upside down like this and put it in your pantry for a day and it should be dry by the next day. And then just take the leaves off at that point. So there you have it. You're just going to go ahead and you're just going to spread these out and let them dry. I'm going to finish the rest of these. I'll be back in 12 hours to show you the dried product and we'll go ahead and make stevia from there. Hello everyone. I'm back and I just got my stevia from outside. It dried for about 10 hours anywhere from 8 to 12 hours depending on how warm it is in the sun. And I just have these wonderful dried leaves that I'm going to show you how to make pure stevia powder as well as liquid stevia, which a lot of people like to use liquid stevia. But before I do that, I'm going to go ahead and zoom in. I'd like to show you the difference between store bought stevia and your garden stevia. And there's quite a few differences. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so you can get a close up of what it looks like. Okay. I wanted to show you the two different stevias. The one right here is from the store and it is extracted from a water extraction method which leaves the powder white. It is semi-processed but I wanted to show you that this is up to 300 times sweeter than sugar. And I love this little spoon. It's called a smidgen and that's pretty much all you'll ever need. It's just a smidgen of the stevia. So anyways, that's what that looks like store bought. Here is stevia that I, this is actually harvested from last year and I made this last year. Look how green it still is. It's just so nice and color. Now this is out of my garden. So what, and I'll show you the smidgen this are here, but this is the green stevia. It's not as sweet as the stevia on my left, but still plenty sweet. If you're using stevia out of your garden, you can pretty much replace, if a recipe calls for one cup of sugar, you can use three to four teaspoons of pure stevia powder out of your garden to replace the one cup of sugar. It's not as bitter as your pure stevia that you get out of the store. It's a lot more mild and flavor and it really is good. So that's the difference between store bought and garden stevia. Okay, so here's the stevia out of my garden that I dry and it's really nice and crisp. I don't know if you could hear, they're nice and dry. So what we're going to do here, you could either just take one leaf and crumble it up and that could be your pure stevia, but I like mine a lot finer. I like it to be a powder. And what I found that works best, a food processor would work, but what works best is a coffee grinder. I have two coffee grinders, one for black pepper and spices and then I have one for stevia. You could possibly wash it out and have this just be your one, but that's your choice. So anyways, you're just going to take some of the stevia leaves, you're going to put it into your coffee grinder. And you just want to grind it to a really fine powder. You can upside down, oh you can just taste the sweetness. I mean be careful because it's very powdery. You're going to get this beautiful green powder. Just show you like that. This is pure stevia and it's just wonderful. Very very sweet, like I said I can just taste it just from the powder. So that's how you make pure stevia, that's simple. So if you want to make liquid stevia, what you're going to do is you're going to go ahead and take a fourth of a cup of pure stevia. Okay, and you're going to go ahead and take one cup of warm filtered water and one fourth cup of pure stevia powder. You're going to put it in a glass jar. You can either stir it or shake it up a little bit. Look at that green liquid stevia. And you're going to let this sit out for 24 hours and kind of let it marinate if you want to say that. But anyways, after 24 hours you put it in your refrigerator and when the rest of you cause for pure stevia powder, you can use this. You can make lemonade with it. The only thing is it might tense your food green because you can see it's a pretty dark stevia powder. I'm sorry, liquid stevia, but this is pure liquid stevia. So I hope you enjoyed this segment. Doing your own stevia is super easy, affordable, easy to grow and a nice alternative to the store bought. Oh, I got something I want to say hi. Our latest adventure is this Gemma. Just a bunch of men want to see her and check it out. Oh, I know, you're so cute. I told you next time, how I got this.