I planted another 6 Yabukita yesterday, bringing the field total to 38 plants. It’s a nice sunny day and the cherry trees are blooming, so i took some pretty pictures. Had to lay flat on the ground to get that baby Yabu with the sakura behind it.
Those are macadamia nuts husks spread between the rows as a mulch. A lot of macnuts come from farms with heavy herbicide use, but we got ours from a neighbor who husks them for people with organic farms, so they’re clean.
I got some great advice from experienced tea growers on the tea pests and diseases i wrote about before. To summarize, they said that if young tea plants are in a greenhouse, they are likely to have more pest problems. So, we’re now trying to get them out into the ground as soon as possible.
It’s been slow going. Choosing the plants, mixing the fertilizers, lugging it all out to the planting site with tools and compost, digging and weeding and more digging, blending the soil, measuring out the planting spots, spreading mulch around, dragging long hoses for watering, putting everything away. It’s a surprising amount of work!
After an afternoon and full day, there are now 32 plants in the ground, 22 Bohea and 10 Yabukita. Pictures from the planting:
