I spent the month of September 2011 back on the farm, getting it into shape and making batches of biochar. At the end of the month i took a truckload of the char down to Josiah’s biochar operation in Puna, where it was inoculated and ground up. Back at the farm, the living char was spread all over, especially in the tea field.
We live in a very rural, remote location – which is why it’s so surprising that Google actually got around to driving our neighborhood – but they did. You can even see the bottom part of our tea field clearly from the road, since the camera on the Google van is a bit higher than a person. Try the link: http://goo.gl/maps/khJt
The full name of the document is “Specialty Crops for Pacific Island Agroforestry: Farm and Forestry Production and Marketing Profile for Tea (Camellia sinensis)”. It’s online at agroforestry.net (or directly to the PDF).
I contributed a bit to the document, with some reviewing, an illustration of using ginger as a mulch, and some notes on economics. I’m quite happy with the result, which in 32 pages manages to describe a great deal of what someone needs to know to grow tea in Hawai’i, and process and market it. There’s also some eye-opening statistics about tea in the rest of the world, where the cost of production can be 50x less.
A lot of this information is hard to come by unless you have one of the tea textbooks (the spotty Hajra book from India, or the wildly expensive Willson book from the UK), so it’s great that much of the important knowledge is now online for free.
Meanwhile, our tea continues to grow with astonishingly well. I am baffled by the textbooks which say tea should be “pruned back once every 3–4 years to a height that is comfortable for plucking.” Our tea only takes a few months to go from flat hedges to a wild, tall, profusion of growth. If this keeps up, it will need serious pruning twice a year just to keep it harvestable. Perhaps more frequent and aggressive plucking would help keep it under control, but there there are many other things on the farm (and building the new house) which distract from harvesting. One thing is for sure: the conditions here are very, very good for tea. The soil (just compost, biochar, & mulching) and wet Hamakua weather seem to be perfect.
It’s been a long time since we’ve blogged about tea. The field has been growing exceedingly well, particular in the wet wet weather which stayed wet until mid-April this year. Tea loves rain! Our February 22 harvest, a full-bodied oolong, was announced on facebook and did well. The May 1 harvest experienced difficult conditions, surprisingly hot and dry, which sun-cooked the leaves even before processing. More recently, we did a harvest on May 21 which was made into two kinds of green tea: classic Chinese green, and my attempt at a Japanese green. The Chinese turned out very good. For the Japanese, we don’t have one of those heated tables that traditional rolling is done on, so i improvised. The result is promising – it does taste like sencha – but probably not yet good enough to sell. You can try some if you come by the farm.
Recent intern Alisha, picking leaves for the May 21 harvest made into green tea.
After the major pruning of 5/25, all the older plants are now hedges
Some young tea plants, freshly planted up the hillside. Recent intern Comus helped with much of the planting.
View of the lower field which is nearly all grown in, and now pruned into hedges
Note the pruning makes a lot of stick-ends, each of which should sprout multiple leaves next time, all at the same height for abundant and easy harvesting
Modern Marvels: Tea (hulu video, 44 minutes) is full of fascinating tea information, even if it covers machine process black tea a little too much (Hawaii gets a mention in the first 5 mins)
Tea: We did our third tea harvest on November 30, processed as a green tea. We have actual packaging now with a logo and label. Several people bought it to give as a holiday gift. As our first green, it was delicate and floral and nice, and it sold out quickly.
Biochar: the first solid results are in. Test 1 (green beans) didn’t work well as plants varied widely within each plot. Test 2 (popcorn) showed promise with the char plots growing better, but heavy rains this fall prevented any of the plots from maturing to compare yield. Test 4 (taro) is still in progress as taro grows slowly at our elevation. Test 3 (sweet potatoes) was harvested yesterday:
8 plants, control: 13.8 lbs
8 plants, with char and IMO: 21.2 lbs
That’s around 50% more tuber, and here’s the picture, control on the left:
As those of you following on facebook or twitter may know, we sold out of our second harvest of tea in early November. I can see from the happy growing tea plants that it’s time to harvest again, but the weather has been very rainy for a couple weeks now. The tea loves the rain, but we’re waiting for a sunny day which is important to the harvest process of picking and sun-withering.
Meanwhile, there have been several recent farm tours, including neighbors, a large group of mothers with their toddlers and babies from Waikoloa, and a couple guys with Kanu Hawaii from Oahu:
On October 31, there was the big tour from the Hamakua Sustainable Agriculture Classes, pictures from that event (some by Nicole):
Tuesday evening, Ben & I presented “Hawaii Backyard Poultry Management” as part of “Practical Agriculture for Hamakua 2009″. In case you missed the class, here’s the PDF (2 MB) as maintained on our Ahualoa Chicken Notes. The file covers a source of local stock of baby chicks, feeding organically and challenges of feeding locally. We had a lot of fun talking chicken with 15 chicken enthusiasts. (bok, bok!)
Ben and I got started into farming by the first class of its kind in 2006. Back then, Jim Cain was the program manager. Now, Donna Mitts is the lead organizer. Take a look at the classes offered http://www.hamakuadev.org/ many which are geared towards specifically farming in Hawaii.
There’s plenty of venues to talk chicken story with us:
Tuesday, October 27 from 6pm, Vicky Dunaway will discuss “A Pastured Poultry Model That Works” for about 20 mins. Her talk is followed by a public screening of “Mad City Chickens,” a feature length documentary about the return of urban backyard chickens. We hope you’ll join us for the 1 hr 18 minute movie.
Halloween, Saturday, October 31, join the Practical Ag class for a farm tour on our homestead, “Ahualoa Egg & Tea Farm” from 9 am to 11 am. I hope to introduce you to Ophelia, my favorite Barred Rock hen and Lil’ Buff, my favorite Buff Orpington. Register with Donna Mitts (call 936-2117 or email ohanadonna@yahoo.com).
In this short video Susan Orlean introduces Tookey, a Gingernut Ranger, one of her original hen who is currently at the top of the pecking order. (In our flock of ten remaining hens, I picked out the top hen: it’s Alpha-hen, an Australian Orpington, commonly shortened to Australorp.) Watching chickens, online or in real life, makes me happy. It’s nice to know the chickens are making a comeback in backyard all across America.
Now that we finally have some processed tea to share, it was time to make a site for the tea side of our farm. It’s still very simple, just a beginning, but here it is: Ahualoa Tea Farm
Our second harvest, as an orthodox black tea, turned out great. Slightly sweet, no harsh tannins, and keeps giving flavor over 4-5 steepings. Experienced tea tasters tell me that it’s unique, somewhat like other Hawaiian black tea but unlike tea from anywhere else in the world.
We brewed it a couple different ways, and just for fun, did a side-by-side comparison with a “normal” commodity black tea in a bag:
There’s no comparison – they are completely different things. I almost hesitate to call what we’ve made “black tea”, as it brings up entirely different associations for most people.
I visited San Francisco a week ago, and visited the nice people at Samovar Tea Lounge. They have a little Hawaiian tea to sell (not ours, yet) and really nice ambiance and food to complement it. I met the owners and we brewed up 10g of our tea for them and their staff to try.
From their positive reaction, it seems likely that connoisseurs of hand-processed teas will ‘get’ our tea right away.
The tea has been growing powerfully this wet summer, since the last pruning on July 5. The field was covered with fresh harvestable tips in an astonishing 1 month after the last harvest, but at this stage, we’re still building up the fullness of the hedges, which means letting the branches grow and fill in. So, i waited 2.5 months from last pruning. In retrospect, 2 months would have been just fine.
The pictures tell part of the story, which starts at the 13th picture in the 2009 tea album, read the captions and click forward:
Day 1: at 7:30am, finally a sunny day, down to the field to harvest. Surprisingly thick wet dew on the plants. Over 3 hours to harvest all the tips. Thankfully the sun stays out, so it gets a chance to wither all day. Brought it in and weighed it, just under a kilo at 958g. That’s around twice as much at our first harvest!
Day 2: The goal is a black tea. No heating this time! I heated a little on our first harvest, aiming for an oolong, but ended up making it a green tea. The heat changes the enzymes which darken the leaves, so this time no heating until the very end. It took all day, three periods of rolling then resting. Here’s a video of the rolling process:
As an experiment, i pan-toasted half the resulting tea in the wok, on low heat for 10 minutes, tossing it by hand. Drying was in the dehydrator that we usually use for drying fruit, around 2 hours at 130F. Result: a total 305g of finished tea, very black in appearance, around 32% of the weight of the wilted primary leaf.
Processing tea is not easy to learn about! There is no information online, almost no books, on actual tea production. You could learn first-hand from visiting tea farms, but those parts of the world are very far way. There are a bewildering variety of ways to process tea, with many steps that take a lot of practice to do well.
The only known book in the English language that actual details production is Tea: Cultivation to Consumption (see tea media notes). Unfortunately it’s rare and expensive. Today Deb pointed me to the popular affordable The Story of Tea which also has a chapter on making tea. I’ve been putting that together with everything we’ve learned from other Hawaii growers, and a few HTS events and visiting experts.
We’ll find out tomorrow how it turned out – the moment of tasting!
