Even though we are isolated on our farm now, it is not at all unpleasant. It is rather a pleasure picking the young growth off 25 year old sinensis bonsais'. We are not conducting tours or going to the gym but putting our focus on tea production. We pick, process, dry and pack about five [...]
This past October when Mr Weijin visited our farm he told me how to make yellow tea. So I ran a batch. Here you can see it compared to our black tea and there is quite a color difference as well as a taste difference. It taste like white tea to me, very light and [...]
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 [...]
In the past 30 years I have never SOLD OUT of tea. I made just under 200 pounds of tea this past year which is twice what I did the year before. This past September I was sitting on 120 pounds and only having a tea party for guests once a week. I thought [...]
Yes, it is the "dead of winter" here even though it is 70 degrees outside. We are not picking tea now but are involved in many tea field activities, almost every day. It is like a Christmas tree farm that is active all year and not just at Christmas time. We are doing lots of [...]
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. [...]
