Donnie

Isn't this pretty! This is the first batch of tea for 2020. I call it shade grown baby bud. It is very favorable and rather strong for shade grown. With global warming this has come a couple weeks early this year. I already have plucked another batch after this one with many more pickings to come. I am still sold out of tea and likely will not bag these early batches but save for special occasions, like when all our family comes over for our annual Easter Egg Hunt. All the bushes are budding out now and it will be soon I take the "NO TOURS TODAY" sign off my driveway. My neighbors think it is because of the COVID-19!

  This is how the Chinese taught me, in the early 1980's, to protect new tea plants from the sun.  They now use greenhouse shade cloth and nylon rods but the concept is the same.  This has to be in place for almost a year, until next years new growth starts.  Then you slowly cut [...]

This is one of four areas I have growing tea.  It is all cleaned up and the new spring buds are just starting to swell and burst forth.  This is the time of the year I pull briers and weeds and just ignore them the rest of the year.  I need to make tea soon [...]

We plant our tea plants in the fall after the first cold snap.  I only planted about twenty feet in a row this year where the lawn mower got too close.  I have so many tea bushes I really do not need any more. We have lots and lots of two year old seedlings which [...]

We have installed a scarecrow here at Fairhope Tea Plantation to keep the crows out of the tea.  So far, it has done well as we have not seen any crows. He kinda looks like me, doesn't he?

Mr Weijin (Tom) He, pronounced Hay,  visited the Fairhope Tea Plantation for a couple days this week and helped make a batch of green tea.  Tom's family are tea makers along with several of his friends.  He has moved to the Washington DC area.  Donnie and Tom discussed intently the processes of making green tea.  [...]

Yes, I have bought a tea rolling machine in hopes it will help our arthritic hands while processing tea.  It had gotten where we just stopped hand rolling our teas.  It is a Chinese machine but I bought it from Table Rock Tea Company in South Carolina who specializes in food processing machinery.  We do [...]

For the first time we are selling the Fairhope tea at a local grocery store: Fairhope Market.  We have not done this before even though we have been ask repeatedly to allow shops and stores to sell it.  Our driveway sells are going very nicely but our production is up so we just might see [...]