Every year we have small memorial service where we ceremonially remove the scare crow from the tea field and retire him to be dissembled, only to be rebuilt in a slightly different form and returned next year. This years funeral looked more like a ride to the barn. I will usually put the scarecrow out [...]
I have actually written a tell-all book about how I learned to grow and make tea. I wrote on it seriously for three years. It records the many experiments and failures I had along the way and even covers where the original Lipton tea plants were found and how my family tolerated my unusual hobby [...]
Spring comes fast to the tea farm. We are busy pruning off the large amount of growth from last year and cleaning up dead weeds and removing volunteer trees that are not needed. We clean up the tea rows this time of year because soon all of our efforts will be put into producing the [...]
I just realized that I did not post a photo of this years tea farm scare crow. We make one every year to keep the crows out of the tea field and take it down with the first flush. Its a fun tradition. We are in the clean up the tea field time of year. [...]
Here is a sketch of the detour to the tea farm. The county has closed the road within a mile of our farm and this is confusing our guest who visit the farm every day. Where you usually turn onto Co Rd 11, they do not have a sign there saying the road is closed [...]
Yesterday my wife and I celebrated the last picking of tea for the season. We called it "the last pull." It was about three bushels of leaf to make a batch of green tea. Late season green tea has a different flavor than earlier in the season green tea. We made more black tea than [...]
This is me with 17.4 pounds of freshly roasted black tea. The aroma of this is wonderful! I wish I could share this as few people ever see this much tea at one time and very few folks get to enjoy the delightful smell of fresh, hot roasted black tea. We are busy every [...]
We are having a huge bumper crop of tea this year. Last year I went for long periods with nothing to pick but this year it is growing faster than I can pick it. I shoot for 300 pounds a year and did not make that last year. We almost sold out by spring, before [...]
We were delighted to have the staff from The Copper Kettle Tea Bar come visit the tea farm to learn about tea production. This tea bar carries over a hundred and thirty types of tea but boast they like serving Fairhope tea the most. They are located in Foley, Alabama on Chicago Street on the [...]
This photo is the first tea we picked and processed this new year. This was taken on April 8 when the solar eclipse was at about 75%. It is in my dry pen, drying out in the sun, a drying technique I learned from the Chinese. The dry pen keeps the wind from blowing on [...]
