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.