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 [...]
We have picked over the farm to gather in the tea's first growth. I have picked it very early this year and picked it most every day in April. I have made yellow, green and black teas from these batches. I hand rubbed lots of it as just a few minutes in the tea roller [...]
Yesterday I made the front cover of a local magazine. This is a rather fun looking photo that I had no idea I would be on the front page. The pictures in the article makes me look old. But wait, I am old. One of my family joked saying I was just a "cover girl [...]
The first flush has arrived, and we have started plucking. We are picking the baby buds now and are making our first yellow tea. Yellow tea is a green tea that you produce without heat sources or sun. You have to make it in small batches because the time it takes to get up a [...]
Last year and this year we see the first tea buds open on March 15 - the Ides of March, beware! This marks the beginning of a new tea year with the first flush. As we did last year, we took down the wintertime scarecrow to mark the season. The scarecrow, quite battered and faded, [...]
Right now the tea bushes don't look to green and lush. We have pruned the growth off that was not picked last year down to what is called the knuckles. In a few short weeks these sticky, dead looking branches will be covered with a soft light green mat of new growth. Then the work [...]
Yes, we have pruned off the tea rows in anticipation of the first flush which now is happening around the middle of March. The first growths came last year when the air temperature was not warm and for the first time I had to use artificial heat to help process tea. The first sprouts seem [...]
