eggs & tea

Thursday was my 36th birthday. Friday, we invited over friends and neighbors for a celebratory tea planting, putting 8 Bohea in the ground on the driveway terrace. I made a big batch of lemon-lime tea from our citrus trees.

It was fun! We dug holes in the clay soil, added fine black cinder for drainage, 6-6-6 organic fertilizer, a little aged chicken manure, some slow-release trace minerals, and lots of my home-made compost. By blending in the original clay (which is fairly acidic, but poor in nutrients) i’m hoping the resulting mix is acidic enough for the tea plants, which actually like their pH as low as 4.5. We learned a whole lot about our soils in our farm class – we have highly weathered volcanic allophane soil with tremendous surface area, high CEC, low in many leachable minerals such as calcium, capable of absorbing and holding a great deal of good stuff. And we’ve got the Indian textbook by Ghosh on how tea is grown in several subtropical parts of the world, and advice from CTAHR. But it remains a guess what tea will need to thrive and produce high quality in Hawaiian soils, because nobody has done it yet! To make it even more complex, we’re sticking to certifiable organic methods, unlike the State Ag researchers who are getting fast growth by pumping the fields with high levels of chemically-produced nitrogen.

Pictures L to R: Deb and me measuring out 2′ spacing, our neighbor’s daughter Kôlea sprinkling ‘blessed’ water on the baby plants, Deb and me posing with tea, and a group picture around the completed planting.

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This entry (Permalink) was posted on Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at 10:43 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.