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 [...]
Our tea plant sales are going rather briskly. I invite tea plant customers to come see us at the farm during the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas as this is the best time to move evergreens. This gives the new seedings time to get established before facing the heat of summer. I have been scheduling [...]
Like the other camellias in our yard, the tea blooms in the winter time. I guess that touch of global warming has them blooming just a tad early this year as they usually peak around Christmas time. Its also the time I usually prune the tea bushes and I think it a shame to just [...]
It has gotten a bit cooler which is better than the 95 degree days we have had. Its also hurricane season. It was only two years ago when we lost 340 big trees, which are still laying out in the woods around us. We can relate to the devastation and sense of hopelessness we see [...]
Here is a photo of 10 pounds of very hot black tea. I had a batch to start to spontaneously combust. I took it out and dumped in the compost heap and the next day the compost heap was on fire! It took twice hoseing it down to put the fire out. I know exactly [...]
The end result of picking and pruning the tea bushes is to have the plants forced into this flat shape. Although my photos do not show well what I'm trying to show, this shape will throw up a crop of buds and two leaves every three weeks or so. This puts the perfect tea at [...]
You can not really see very well in the attached photo how I am doing something different this year. This past winter I was just looking at photos of the tea rows at the Great Mississippi Tea Company and noticed how their bushes were fat and loaffy like tea bushes you would see on Sri [...]
I was asked about growing tea in the shade so here are my thoughts. My horticulturist brother, Dr. J. E. Barrett, III, told me 25 years ago that the best tea grown in Costa Rica was grown in the shade. That is when I started planting my shade grown garden which took three years to [...]
