Tea Harvesting and Growing

Tea harvesting is a laborious task that requires some training in order to yield the best results. When plucking the leaves for a high quality tea, they pluck the bud and the second and third leaves only. This is called fine plucking.

If more leaves are taken with the bud it is said to be a coarse plucking and produces a lower quality tea. Sometimes mature leaves are discarded giving each bush a pruning which enables nutrients to go into new growth.

The best climate conditions are usually those that are higher in altitude and get plenty of rainfall. It also seems preferable to have cooler weather and misty mornings to shield the sun which causes the bush to mature more slowly.

A typical tea bush will generally produce about three thousand tea leaves a year. Now before you get any ideas of buying a tea bush and making a fortune, you might want to know that these three thousand leaves only make up only about one pound of fully processed tea.

Once the tea leaves are collected in baskets they are taken to the factory to be processed. The processing steps taken will depend on the type of tea desired.

The types of tea that differing procedures create are white, green, oolong, and black. I explain the procedure for each type on their respective pages.