{"id":26,"date":"2006-11-18T22:43:04","date_gmt":"2006-11-19T08:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/?p=26"},"modified":"2010-10-25T20:02:11","modified_gmt":"2010-10-26T06:02:11","slug":"first-tea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/2006\/11\/first-tea\/","title":{"rendered":"First tea plants in the ground!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday was my 36th birthday.  Friday, we invited over friends and neighbors for a celebratory tea planting, putting 8 <em>Bohea<\/em> in the ground on the driveway terrace.  I made a big batch of lemon-lime tea from our citrus trees.<\/p>\n<p>It was fun!  We dug holes in the clay soil, added fine black cinder for drainage, 6-6-6 organic fertilizer, a little aged chicken manure, some slow-release trace minerals, and lots of my home-made compost.  By blending in the original clay (which is fairly acidic, but poor in nutrients) i&#8217;m hoping the resulting mix is acidic enough for the tea plants, which actually like their pH as low as 4.5.  We learned a whole lot about our soils in our farm class &#8211; we have highly weathered volcanic allophane soil with tremendous surface area, high CEC, low in many leachable minerals such as calcium, capable of absorbing and holding a great deal of good stuff.  And we&#8217;ve got the Indian textbook by Ghosh on how tea is grown in several subtropical parts of the world, and advice from CTAHR.  But it remains a guess what tea will need to thrive and produce high quality in Hawaiian soils, because nobody has done it yet!  To make it even more complex, we&#8217;re sticking to certifiable organic methods, unlike the State Ag researchers who are getting fast growth by pumping the fields with high levels of chemically-produced nitrogen.<\/p>\n<p>Pictures L to R: Deb and me measuring out 2&#8242; spacing, our neighbor&#8217;s daughter K\u00f4lea sprinkling &#8216;blessed&#8217; water on the baby plants,  Deb and me posing with tea, and a group picture around the completed planting.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/washedashore.com\/blog\/06-2\/DSC00479-2.jpg\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/washedashore.com\/blog\/06-2\/DSC00479-2_small.jpg\" border=\"2\" alt=\"\" width=\"132\" height=\"120\" \/><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/washedashore.com\/blog\/06-2\/DSC00483-2.jpg\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/washedashore.com\/blog\/06-2\/DSC00483-2_small.jpg\" border=\"2\" alt=\"\" width=\"134\" height=\"120\" \/><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/washedashore.com\/blog\/06-2\/DSC00489-2.jpg\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/washedashore.com\/blog\/06-2\/DSC00489-2_small.jpg\" border=\"2\" alt=\"\" width=\"102\" height=\"120\" \/><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/washedashore.com\/blog\/06-2\/DSC00501-2.jpg\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/washedashore.com\/blog\/06-2\/DSC00501-2_small.jpg\" border=\"2\" alt=\"\" width=\"153\" height=\"120\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday was my 36th birthday. Friday, we invited over friends and neighbors for a celebratory tea planting, putting 8 Bohea in the ground on the driveway terrace. I made a big batch of lemon-lime tea from our citrus trees. It &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/2006\/11\/first-tea\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":450,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions\/450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}