eggs & tea blog

Last night a got a call from Takahiro saying he had a few tea cuttings for me, from his own plants! This is really wonderful and unexpected. I quickly dashed over to pick them up, and he told me a little about the cultivar, Benikaori.

I had tried looking for any information about it online, but found none. The USDA Tea pamphlet says only “in Japan [..] used for black tea production”. That’s mysterious, as Japan does not drink black tea – why would they grow it? Takahiro explained that after WWII, when Japan was economically devastated and looking for things they could export, ‘Benikaori’ was developed as a cultivar that could be grown in Japan and made into good black tea for export. It’s still pretty mysterious how it ended up being grown in Hawai’i (which has a really different climate).

In any case, Takahiro gave me a bucket:
I managed to get 86 cuttings from that little bucket! He said that even cuttings from the totally green tips of the plant can sometimes root, so i extracted every bit of material i possibly could.

Related posts:

1. 40 Benikaori, 4 Bohea, 2 Yabukita On Saturday we went to Hilo and picked up another...
2. First successful cuttings! Here they are. I know it may not look like...
3. Potting Today was another good day of potting. Jim went to...
4. Tea cuttings not making roots Like many of the tea growers on the island, i’ve...
5. Tea cuttings – at 4 months Out of 424 tea cuttings started back in September 2008,...

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 12:19 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.