Growing Tea in Home Land - Part 1

My father works in a tea estate for 35 years. Which means I born with tea! Our land wasn't that large. It is about 1/4 acres. But within the whole land, we have green different kinds of crops. Most of them give us economical values. Most of the land cover with tea. In between tea, we have grown coconut. We have also grown pineapple but can not sell because they don't give fruits at the same time. But very sweet and tasty to home use.

This is about tea. We are growing tea for a very long time. My father loves that not because it gives a high income to us, but because he likes tea. It doesn't give us a large income but my father keeps continuing it for the last 20 years.

Sloppy nature of our land best fitted to growing tea. One half of the land has old tea plants while other half has new plants. Usually, it is a best practice, not to replace the whole plants at once with new plants. As they take time to grow, we replace half by half at a time.

There are three things we must do right. First, you must pluck tea on time. Second, must add fertilizers at a suitable time. Also should use dolomite to reduce the acidic nature of time. Dolomite that includes Calcium and Magnesium give better results according to my father. The third factor is pruning trees. I will discuss these things later.

Plucking Tea

This is something that everyone aware of. Usually, this happens once a week. But in theory, they say it takes 9 days to mature a leave so that we should pluck once 9 days. There are different ways to pluck it. In our case we pluck as follows. Else some are plucking one leave above than that.

Fertilizing

As we pluck tea buds every time, tea need Nitrogen included fertilizers. As I said above Magnesium and Calcium also important. There are some famous kinds of fertilizers we apply to the crop.

Until 2 years to the estate, it is approved to apply a fertilizer called T-200. Until first pruning it is approved to apply T-750. Not only them, sometimes add fertilizer according to issues of different soil content. The important fact is Nitrogen amount is very important for the crop.

Pruning

It is important to prune tea accordingly to give fresh life to the plant. In our crop, we prune it after 1.5 years as my father said. This shouldn't be done in a highly rainy season nor in drought. Must do in an intermediate season. There are different techniques of pruning but I'm not going to discuss.

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We give plucked tea to a collector and they give payment to us monthly. It can vary but on average 105LKR in our case. We can request a packet of tea instead of money. We are getting fresh and unflavored tea from the father's estate. So we never purchase tea from the market.

Our crop is used to produce black tea mainly. There are different kinds of grading for tea. The grading is given after the fanning process. I will write a separate article about processing tea if I get a chance to visit the tea factory.

There are so many facts to discuss about tea. The second part will be published tomorrow about the quality of tea.