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 [...]
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 [...]
