eggs & tea

Jim went to Hilo this morning and picked up another batch of rooted tea cuttings, from the USDA, rooted by Aileen Yeh. Look how pretty they are! So green and strong and healthy. Aileen does great nursery work. The ones on the left are CSO, which are a special kind from Taiwan which is more difficult to grow but makes an Oolong with a good reputation. You can see the leaves are smaller, less shiny, and more bluish:

They are delivered in little sponge cubes. There is a lot of different (conflicting) information about what potting soil to use for tea. The Indian textbook (Tea Cultivation : Comprehensive Treatise) says to use the “clean subsoil” of the site they will be eventually planted. The nursery professionals say to use normal commercial potting mix. Other people caution against using rich soil, apparently the little plants do better if they have to work harder! Here in Ahualoa we have acidic soil (which supposedly the tea likes) with very little nutrients. I just can’t see using this soil directly, so i mix it with some of our rich dark home-made compost. I used to mix 1:1, now i mix 1:2 compost:soil. The buckets have, top left: our compost, top right: our local redish acidic clay soil, bottom: the mix.

Related posts:

1. 40 Benikaori, 4 Bohea, 2 Yabukita On Saturday we went to Hilo and picked up another...
2. First tea plants in the ground! Thursday was my 36th birthday. Friday, we invited over friends...
3. Tea update, planting and propagating There’s been lots of progress on the tea recently. Lots...
4. Tea Update Tea planting continues slow and steady. We’re trying to keep...
5. Cuttings in shade structure, after 1 month Here is the results after one month, the percentage of...

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 8:17 pm and is filed under tea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.