eggs & tea blog

Recently i heard about the availability of Darjeeling seedlings from Mel Herring, a UH horticulturist in Hilo, at 100 seedlings sprouted in a tray at a great low price. Now, everyone seems to say that tea from seed is genetically scrambled, and almost all the focus on this island so far has been on clonals of Chinese/Japanese varieties. But, the island is still suffering from a dramatic lack of tea material to plant… so i thought, why not try this interesting source?! Even if it is genetic lotto, that just means i have to test and cull from a large number of plants to try to find the ‘good’ ones – which is the case anyway with the other ‘mystery’ tea plants around.

Actually ‘Darjeeling’ is a famous tea from the Darjeeling region of India, not necessarily any particular cultivar, so i don’t actually know much at all about what this tea is. From the shape of the leaf, i’d say it’s definitely C. sinensis var. assamica, but beyond that? I’ll ask Mel what she knows of the provenance.

Here’s a flat of 100 seedlings:

I began potting them today into medium-size pots. Some are barely sprouted (i put them in the shade to do more rooting) and some are cute little plants:

Update March 27: Eliah wrote and said the seeds “come from plants grown from the same area where the best Darjeeling has made its name.” As for the origin, we can’t be certain. “Seeds were ordered from Himalayan Orchids, India.”  This is all now detailed in the tea notes.

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This entry (Permalink) was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 8:01 pm and is filed under crops, 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.