Donnie

I had a five year old tourist said he was relieved that my scarecrow was not too scary.   He was likely thinking how circus clowns are depicted today.   This years scarecrow has a lighthearted, almost comical look.  I leave the scarecrows up until the first flush of tea then we celebrate the spring with a [...]

Our tea farm was featured in the Foley Local magazine with me on the cover.  The article was really good and most complementary but it mostly told the story of how I sell seedlings to other farmers who want to get in the tea business.  It did not tell the story of how I make [...]

This photo is a picture of a new invasive plant that is quite new to our area.  It is called Tropical Bushmint (Cantinoa mutabilis).  This plant now covers our fields, roadsides, all around my barn and all over the tea bushes.  It is a strong growing perennial and spreads like invasive wildfire on steroids.  It [...]

This is how much tea I managed to pick yesterday in the 95 degree heat.  Doesn't look like much but it will be a few pounds of green tea.  I work carefully in the fields, working in slow motion and drink water constantly.  My tea growth has been very slow this year and I am [...]

We have had this web site for years and I can not believe how much traffic we have had - thousands of readers.  I have included all sorts of tea growing advice and tea making information, but the most response ever has been to these few old pictures I have posted.  I appreciate the jokes, [...]

Here is a picture of me when I first went to China to learn how to make tea.  How do you like those Mark Spitz hot pants?  I look like a mindless grengo from far away photoshopped into a hundred year old photograph.  This was when getting a sun tan made you look healthy.  I [...]

This years funeral for a scarecrow was a somber affair with a little sadness and ceremony.  My wife, Lottie wanted to leave it up but the clothes were faded and field mice had kicked out most of the straw.  So we brought him back to the barn and took him apart and maybe use some [...]

Here is another old photograph.  This 1993 picture shows the first cold frame green house I built when moving my tea farm out south of Fairhope on Lyter Lane.  A cold frame is used in the winter and the cuttings are placed in trays of vermiculite and placed on the ground.  The heat of the [...]

This photo was taken in 2000, where I started planting the tea plants in 1979.  I had left this site some ten years before and bought a farm twelve miles away to enlarge my operations.  These bushes in the photo are the original plants and clones of the original tea plants I recovered from the [...]