eggs & tea blog

It has been a very busy time on the farm recently. Last week, we had a friend visit with serious tree skills, who helped us take down several eucalyptus trees that shade the upper area. With the trees removed, we get more afternoon sunlight which means we can grow more crops!

The next day, i spent two hours plucking the tender tips from the entire tea field, our first real harvest. We did some processing steps, working with the leaves throughout the day. By midnight, we had some nice green tea to brew. Although there is so much to learn, it’s encouraging that on our first try we made good-tasting tea:

After the harvest, i set about doing a full pruning and mulching of the entire field:

Really overdue, that’s the problem with leaving the farm for six weeks! The plants look really strong and healthy, growing very vigorously.

A feral pig came in the night and destroyed our bed of white sweet potatoes. That wasn’t entirely unexpected, as we’d been seeing pig damage around and the bed was outside the protection of the garden fence. But, the same night, the pig got under the fence and destroyed our bed of orange sweet potatoes as well!

We reinforced the fence with stakes and a strand of barbed wire, and set a pig trap out to catch it. So far, no luck, but at least it hasn’t gotten back into the garden.

Related posts:

1. Wild Pig Attack! All over the island, feral pig activity has been on...
2. Farm update Many bits of unrelated news this week: To deal with...
3. Farm update, and the state of the world We’ve had nine days of very wet and cold weather. ...
4. First big pruning of the tea field This long wet winter has been great for the tea. ...
5. Physalis – the Poha genus The poha fruit is commonly associated with Hawaii.  It grows...

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 12:35 am and is filed under crops, feral pigs, food, 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.