Summer isn’t peak harvest season for high mountain tea, but that doesn’t mean tea farmers are just idling at home with the AC on. Besides daily weeding and pest control, they have to time the pruning of the tea trees just right and step up fertilization. *In the photo below, the fertilizer in the middle of the tea plantation is soybean fertilizer.
Over the past couple of days, the store manager headed out to the Lishan and ShanLinXi tea regions. Tea farmers getting ready for the autumn harvest are busy applying supplementary fertilizer, and piles of soybean meal (commonly known as bean cake) fertilizer sit by the fields like small mountains. Word has it that an average-sized tea factory needs one to two hundred bags at a time, all of which have to be hauled manually. Since high mountain tea plantations are mostly steep slopes, you can only imagine how much physical effort it takes.
Tea plantations preparing directly for the winter harvest are starting to prune their tea bushes. By trimming the bushes to be neat and lower, the winter tea will grow better and nutrients can be delivered smoothly to the leaves. The store manager loves finding tea plantations pruned this neatly; yields might drop slightly the next season, but quality gets a massive boost.
With the tea farmers working this hard, the store manager has to keep pace, too. In the past few days, I’ve already locked in a few exceptionally well-managed tea plantations as our targets for the winter harvest. A tea merchant’s job is all about putting in the legwork—walking more and seeing more is the only way to get a head start on securing great tea!
