After my last post about increasing success in the greenhouse, i noticed a big problem: leaves turning yellow, in some cases so pale they are almost white:

Some possible causes:

1. too much water, not enough water
2. too much nitrogen, not enough nitrogen
3. some other nutrient lacking which is needed to make chlorophyll

Interestingly, it is almost exclusively the YM (Yutaka Midori) that are experiencing the problem.  Yabu and Beni that were potted at the same time in the same soil, and the same water/fertilizer treatment, are fine.

I figure i can rule out 3, and since i’ve been giving them all plenty of water and fish emulsion recently, i’m gonna guess that it’s probably 1-2 “too much”.  So, i’ll be holding off some of the water and all the fertilizer for my YM for a while.  Hopefully they’ll survive; the palest leaves are likely to die and fall off, maybe taking the whole plant with it.

My tea in the field is growing very irregularly, and i can’t figure out why. Some plants are healthy and growing great, others not. In some cases, it is the same cultivar, planted at the same time, in the same soil and the same amendments – yet one plant is booming and the one next to it is barely alive.

I got one possible clue, when i dug up a failing tea plant, to replace it. The soil around the failed plant was totally full of tree roots. I’m not sure exactly what tree it is. There were a couple mystery trees in this field that i chopped down before planting, and a koa and an avocado which are in the same field but probably too far to be responsible. Take a close look, the failed tea was completely choked:

I didn’t think tree roots would be a problem, because i’ve heard of tea being “shade grown” in other parts of the world.  Maybe the species of tree matters.  Maybe these particular tree roots are allelopathic to tea plants.  Maybe i didn’t dig a big enough hole when i planted in this spot the first time.  Maybe the roots of the dead stump nearby are still growing?  Or maybe it’s not the roots themselves, but something related or indirect like an elevated population of nematodes due to the dead tree’s roots.  Agriculture is so complicated with so many unknowns!

Tea planting continues slow and steady. We’re trying to keep costs low, only buying a few rooted cuttings on occasion. There are around 250 plants in the ground.

My greenhouse tea are doing better than ever before. Here are a few things i found, over the past year, that seem to help them:

• Spraying dilute neem oil (“bio-pesticide for organic farming”). Aphid and scale problems seem to be gone.  Even the mite-infested cuttings i got did not spread or cause any trouble.
• No compost in the potting mix. For whatever reason (pH? tannins?) the baby tea doesn’t like it. Dunno what’s up with my compost, i will be testing it.
• More fertigating, primarily with dilute fish emulsion, and now also a little kelp meal. Apparently over-fertilizing is less of an issue than under-fertilizing – you can lay on the nitrogen, even for baby tea plants.

This is how my rooted tea cuttings looked a while back, when they were just potted:

Six weeks later, half of them are big and ready to go into the ground.  That’s better growth than i’ve ever had before.