Like many of the tea growers on the island, i’ve attempting to start my own tea from cuttings, with not much luck. So far i’ve tried 13 batches of cuttings, from 10 different sources. So far, only one batch (from Eliah’s plants) had a decent success rate. All of them from random (non-cultivar) sources have done very poorly. I keep a spreadsheet and do an inventory each month.  Out of around 1000 cuttings, i have had to cull around 600 so far. This is a lot of work.

I’ve noticed one thing, though, about the cuttings that don’t make it. Some die quickly, others die slowly, and some take a very long time, holding onto their green leaves for weeks or months until finally giving up. When i pull these out of their pots, many of them have what appear to be “root balls” on them. Some pictures to illustrate:

It looks like these branches really tried to make roots, but each time it just made a short root and stopped, resulting in these “balls”. What could cause such a thing – plant disease? lack of nutrients? nematodes? too much or not enough water? It doesn’t seem to be systemic – some plants, right next to a failure, with the same potting mix, did great with lots of healthy roots, so it’s probably not the soil composition.

Anyone have any idea? Email me.

It’s a little hard to see in this picture, with the macnut husks and the dappled light, but i recently mulched all the tea plants in the ground with a ring of goat manure (at a distance of a few inches from the plants, to avoid ‘burning’ them).  The manure mixed with straw is a gift from the very nice people at the Ahualoa Goat Farm.
The tea is growing so slowly, it’s kinda frustrating.  I can only hope that it is taking its time to build nice roots, and will pick up speed as we head into summer.

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.

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:

I took some pictures today and wrote descriptions of what’s been afflicting many of our young tea plants in the greenhouse. Taking macro shots with a 7 Mpixel camera gave big, scary looking images of something horrible attacking my plants. The pictures are now in the tea notes (scroll to bottom of page) and here are two of them: