How Tea is Grown and Harvested

All types of tea come from the same shrub, Camellia sinensis. It is grown for the hot or cold beverage made from its leaves. Legend has it tea was discovered by a Chinese emperor when tea leaves blew into a pot of boiling water nearly 5000 years ago. Today, most commercial tea is produced in Asia, Australia, and Africa.

Camellia sinensis is a perennial evergreen native to Asia. The tea shrub is a rounded plant featuring glossy green leaves, yellow flowers and brownish-green fruits. In the wild the shrub can reach 60 feet tall but is pruned back to about three feet when cultivated. There are two varieties of the tea shrub. The hardier sinensis variety is commonly grown in China and used to make Chinese or green teas while the assamica variety is grown in India for black tea.

The earliest records of cultivation of the tea shrub date back to 4^th century China when it was grown for medicinal purposes. Modern tea drinking dates back 700 years. Currently, 80 -90% of commercial tea is grown in Asia. India leads as the highest producing country.

Tea shrubs require an acid soil, warm climate and adequate rainfall of forty-five to fifty inches annually. If temperatures dip twenty degrees Fahrenheit below the warm season temperatures, the plants will go through a dormant period, stalling production. The perennial shrubs are grown on plantations and can produce for up to fifty years. Tea shrubs are very expensive to replace and new plants can take up to five years to produce. Seventy to one hundred year old tea fields are not uncommon.

1500 pounds of tea leaves can be harvested from a single acre. It takes one to two field hands per acre to harvest the leaves and perform the fieldwork. Tea is grown on hillsides and severely pinched back to encourage new leaf shoots to form. Tea is harvested by plucking after every flush, the formation of the top two leaves and a bud. The new shoots are plucked every seven to twenty-one days by a worker with a basket on his back. Mechanical methods of picking have been tried but do not work very well because they are not selective. Growing tea is hard labor and most workers are very poorly paid.

How tea is grown affects the flavor. Farming methods, plant variety, soil type, climate, harvesting and processing methods all affect the flavor of the tea leaves. Processing methods of withering, oxidation and drying account for the biggest differences in the four different types of tea: Green, Black, Oolong, and White.

The tea considered to be the best is loose leaf. Loose leaf is from a single plantation and not blended with other leaves. Most popular brands of tea use a blend of up to twenty plants to make loose tea or tea bags. Expert blenders mix, taste, and rate the tea leaves for consistency, flavor, and appearance. A fine tea features a clear and bright appearance while a poor variety can be muddy.

Works cited

http://www.plantcultures.org/plants/tea_plant_profile.html

http://www.stashtea.com/

http://www.teamuseum.org/index.htm