How Tea Grows

How Tea Grows

Traditionally, tea plants were grown from seeds the size of hazelnuts, gathered in October and kept over the winter in a mixture of sand and earth. With this method, in spring they are sown either in a nursery area or directly into the field, about four feet apart. After two years the plants, now five to six feet tall, are cut back to about one foot. They are allowed to grow a bit, but after that are pruned weekly to keep them waist high. Plucking can begin at three years, or at five in high altitudes. A bush can produce for thirty or forty years.

Plants can also be started from cuttings or through layering, that is, transplanting of rooted branches. The years since the 1960s have seen cloning, which involves a leaf cutting rather than a branch cutting. The layering and cutting methods are the only ones that yield a true reproduction of a strain, as a plant that grows from seed may be the result of cross-fertilization and unlike either of its parents.

Most tea plants have a flush, or growth, period and a dormant phase. The leaves are plucked when the young shoots, or flush, are coming out. In the hotter climates the plants have several flushes and leaves can be plucked all year round. At higher elevations, there is a distinct plucking season. In most parts of China, harvesting takes place from April to October. Plucking in northern India and Japan is also seasonal.

Leaves from the earlier flushes, usually in spring, are considered the most desirable, with the second flush the best of all. The reason for this is that the sunlight is milder in the spring than in summer or fall. The choice parts to be plucked are the "two leaves and a bud" (the first two leaves and the bud at the tip), a poetic phrase which was used as the title of a fine novel by the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand. they are nipped off by the thumbnail with a downward movement of the thumb. The leaf bud is considered the finest quality, partly for the fine hair, or tip, on the end and underside of the leaf. This, the pekoe (in Chinese bai bao or white hair), is what imparts the finest flavor to the tea. The more white down the better.

Plucking and pruning take a great deal of labor, and labor is listed with acid soil and adequate rainfall as one of the three things necessary for growing tea. In India tea cultivation started on large estates which more easily lent themselves to mechanization. In China tea was produced mainly on small family plots, often in the hills where mechanized cultivation was difficult.

China is one of the few countries in the world still considered to have land that can be opened for tea growing, and large state tea farms as well as smaller plots have been established on unused land. Picking remains one major operation that has never been successfully mechanized, as skilled fingers have not been successfully replaced. Although picking is still done by expert hands, these farms are highly mechanized in other respects, even so far as use of spray irrigation.

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