Deb came across a very cool, short New York Times article: ‘From a Long Tradition, Small Sips Quickly Brewed.‘. Unfortunately, it’s not fully online unless you’re NYT subscriber, so i dug around to find another blogger who quoted the full article. The author Harris Salat has an entry on his blog “He ate well” with the pictures.
It would be great to produce some tea someday that deserves such a passionate brewing.
Recently i mowed the lawn and gathered the cut grass. Cut grass is useful, both as bedding that makes the chicken coop smell nice, and as a green matter input to the compost pipeline. This makes for happy chickens and nice organic compost for our eventual tea plantation:
Now, there are many people that say a lawn is a terrible thing, and they’re mostly right. A quick web search turns up “green lawns have to be maintained through use of chemicals that can pollute the groundwater and kill beneficial plants and insects; Americans spent $17.4 billion a year on their lawns; it the largest irrigated crop in the United States, consuming 50-70 percent of U.S. residential water…” You get the idea.
Well, those folks aren’t talking about the Wet Side of the Island of Hawaii! Here, lawn is not a foolish waste of environmental resources. It is a defense tactic against the ever-incroaching wall of Kikuyu grass (brought to Hawaii from Africa by cattle ranchers), which rapidly grows to several feet high, making land impassible and unusable. A lawn here consumes no chemicals and no water. However, mowing it provides a very large quantity of useful cut grass.
Last night a got a call from Takahiro saying he had a few tea cuttings for me, from his own plants! This is really wonderful and unexpected. I quickly dashed over to pick them up, and he told me a little about the cultivar, Benikaori.
I had tried looking for any information about it online, but found none. The USDA Tea pamphlet says only “in Japan [..] used for black tea production”. That’s mysterious, as Japan does not drink black tea – why would they grow it? Takahiro explained that after WWII, when Japan was economically devastated and looking for things they could export, ‘Benikaori’ was developed as a cultivar that could be grown in Japan and made into good black tea for export. It’s still pretty mysterious how it ended up being grown in Hawai’i 
(which has a really different climate).
In any case, Takahiro gave me a bucket:
I managed to get 86 cuttings from that little bucket! He said that even cuttings from the totally green tips of the plant can sometimes root, so i extracted every bit of material i possibly could.
Here’s a snapshot of all our little plants. The ones on the table are rooted, and the cuttings that haven’t rooted yet are under the table where it’s nice and shady:
And a closeup showing how the CSOs (in the back) aren’t doing as well as the other, younger plants:
Today was another good day of potting. Jim went to Hilo and picked up 200 more little pots for me ($.20 each at Garden Exchange, they fit 5×5 to a tray). I made 36 more cuttings from Eliah’s plants. All my cuttings are still a long way from rooting, though.
I did a count. Here is how many little plants of each tea cultivar that we’ve got actually growing:
Benikaori 15, Bohea 39, CSO 16, Yabukita 29, Yutaka Midori 13, Assam 1
That’s 113 plants, although many of them probably won’t make it. The CSO in particular are just clinging to life even though it’s been 8 months since they rooted.