Does any of that sound good to you? They're homemade beverages that are mostly free for the taking. If you have dandelions in your yard, don't poison them, make coffee. If you have strawberries, don't quit harvesting when the strawberries are all gone, make tea. And if you grow, buy or otherwise obtain sweet corn, don't throw out the silk!

There are more: Rose hip tea, barley, wheat and rye coffee and many mints and medicinal herbs that provide not only medicine but a tasty tea or coffee. All of these are either easy to grow yourself or inexpensive to buy and prepare at home.

Many teas are made from leaves, like strawberry tea and mint tea, but some teas are made from flowers, like chamomile tea, and others are made from fruits, like rose hip tea and yet others, like ginger tea, is made from roots.

Whether a drink is a "tea" or a "coffee" is not a settled matter. Often, a coffee is darker with a more robust flavor, but some call the drink made from dandelion root tea and others call it coffee. Whichever it is, is up to the drinker.

You can grow many teas yourself and harvest others from the wild, while you may have to buy grains for coffee.

Grains - coffee. Buy only organic. Dry roast the grains in a heavy skillet or a medium oven, stirring often, until the color changes to a slightly darker brown. Cool, grind in a coffee grinder or put in a cloth bag and smash with the flat side of a hammer.

Boil or percolate it to make a drink. Rye, wheat and barley are the most commonly used, but try whatever you have on hand or can get. It takes around a tablespoon for a cup of grain coffee, so it's cheap to experiment and you might find a drink that suits you perfectly.

Strawberry, blueberry, rose leaves - tea. Gather any time and dry to a crumbling texture. Use one tablespoon to a cup of boiling hot water and steep 5 to 15 minutes. Be sure of the identification. If you want to use fresh leaves, about a half cup will be needed per cup of tea.

Rose, blueberry and strawberry leaves, are harvested from plants that are usually grown for other things. Wild plants as well as their domesticated cousins can be used for tea.

Mint - tea, either hot or cold. Any variety can be used. A mint plant has a square stem, bluish to white blooms in clusters. Leaves may be used either before or after flowering. Prepare for tea as for leaves above.

Mint plants of any kind are very easy to grow, even indoors. If you plant them outdoors, either find a place where you don't mind them spreading or keep them in a container and keep the bottom of the container in a saucer to prevent the roots from taking hold in the ground.

There are many others for both coffee and tea, far too many to cover in this article, but if you do some research, you will no doubt come up with something that intrigues you enough to try it.

Oh... about the corn silk - For each cup of corn silk tea, add a handful of fresh or dried corn silk to water and gently boil for about 15 minutes. Use a little more than a cup of water to make up for what will steam away. It's delicious.