Last week, the spring rains arrived, bringing a significant amount of rainfall to the major high mountain tea regions in Nantou and Taichung. Over the past few days, Qingxin Oolong—the primary tea variety for high mountain teas—has started to sprout. However, we’re facing quite a tricky situation: many of the tea plants are budding all at once, raising concerns that the harvest period will be too condensed and we won’t be able to pick everything in time.
Staggering harvest periods is a key challenge for tea farmers. In typical, favorable years, pruning and increased watering can be used to prompt the tea bushes to sprout in batches. This way, once Tea Garden A is harvested, they can seamlessly move on to Tea Garden B—not only making the harvest efficient but also maximizing tea quality. However, with the drought this year, many tea gardens haven’t been able to rely on extra watering. When the spring rains arrived last week, it was as if a switch had been flipped: the tea bushes all began sprouting at once, and their growth rate is rapid.
When tea bushes sprout all at the same time, it means the harvest window will be compressed into just a few days, leading to a fierce scramble for tea pickers. In the worst-case scenario, some of the tea won’t even be picked in time. We’ve run into this situation a few times in the past; unable to recruit enough tea pickers, we ultimately had to resort to machine harvesting. Using machines to harvest high-altitude spring tea is certainly a rare sight. On top of that, some tea gardens delayed their harvest by over ten days, and that batch of tea ended up tasting so bland it was barely better than plain water.
Over the past two years, the pandemic has caused a persistent shortage of tea-picking labor, which has tea farmers feeling a bit anxious about such a concentrated harvest period. Ten days ago, we were worried the drought would keep the tea bushes from growing shoots; now, we’re worried the sprouting period is too concentrated and the tea is growing too fast. It just goes to show that farming—living at the mercy of the weather—is a job that never runs out of things to worry about.