T Stands for a Tea Plantation-Part 1

 Hi everyone. I hope everyone has had a great past week. Last week mine was almost too busy: my husband didn't even have to empty the trash by my art table as I never even made it in there even once.  😏 This week I have a few things in the garden I want to finish up. All I have left to do is my actual summer planting- the best part!

Since it's the start of a new week, let me wish you a happy T day. Feel free to join us with your drink related post at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog.

As some of you have read, Mother's Day weekend I went down to visit my friend who lives in North Carolina, and we took a 2 night trip down to Charleston, South Carolina. I decided that Mother's Day weekend would be a good time to go  since  I might as well  actually celebrate the day doing something for myself. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy being home with my family, but my husband had his Mom to visit, and this is my first Mother's Day without my Mom. My daughter was already planning to be  home  this past Friday so I celebrated just a few days later with her. It all worked out great.

Besides visiting a wonderful garden,  another thing my friend and I did while in Charleston was visit the Bigelow Tea Plantation. I thought my photos from that visit would make a great T day post. (Actually 2 posts as I have more to share than 1 normal length post.)

Let me tell you a little about this tea plantation.

The Bigelow Tea Plantation is the only large scale tea plantation in the US. This and the next photo are 2 fields of tea plants (Camellia sinensis). Most of Bigelow's brand of tea comes from other countries, and the only tea that is produced here in the US comes from this farm. You have to buy Charleston Tea Garden teas for tea grown  in the US.

We took the trolley tour of the plantation. And during that tour, I learned a lot about growing tea plants. 

Tea plants are evergreen long living shrubs. They (at least here in the US) have no predators so at the plantation  they don't need to use pesticides, fungicides or other sprays to protect them. They do need a fair amount of water, about an inch a month, and draining soil (they don't like wet feet). They also need a lot of warm sunshine. This area of Charleston is great for that as the soil is sandy and drains; it gets warm and humid, and they get about an inch of rain a month. 

In much of the world tea leaves are plucked by hand, but at this tea plantation they have a machine that cuts off the new growth and keeps the plants at about 4-5 feet tall. Those cut off leaves are the ones that will become tea. They can become any type of tea depending on how they are processed.

I sat on the wrong side of the trolley for the best photo of the machine, but here is that tea tree cutting machine. This is the only tea cutting machine like this in the world.

On our tour we stopped at their greenhouse. Our guide told us that this is the first time since Covid began in 2020 that they are actually growing new tea plants.

You have to grow tea from cuttings, not seeds. Seeds are produced from sexual reproduction in plants, which means that every seed has a variety of genes. One seed would most likely have a different variety of genes from any other seed, which means there would be no consistency in plants that grew from the seeds. (If you planted tea plant seeds, the resulting plants would be similar to how no 2 people, except for identical twins, triplets, etc., are exactly genetically the same.) Cuttings, on the other hand, contain the genes of the original plant. Therefore, they use cuttings to make new plants because that way you can control the resulting plants and get lots of identical tea plants.

These little tea trees won't be ready to plant for another year at least.

And here's another tea field.  These are ready for the first of anywhere from 4-6 cuttings a year.

I didn't take this next photo (I found it online) but here's what the trolley on the tour we took looks like.

I'll share the rest of my tea plantation photos next week for T since this post is getting long, and I still have more photos. Next week I'll share about processing the tea leaves.

And if you wonder if I had any tea from the plantation, they did have iced tea samples. I tried the peach and the unsweetened black tea. I did buy a few packages of loose tea too. I still need to try the mint tea, but the American Classic and peachy tea are really smooth. I'm guessing that's because it hasn't been sitting in the bag quite as long as tea produced in other countries where the tea  has to be shipped to and then  distributed within  the US.

This is my ticket to  this week's  T day post. 

And speaking of flavored tea, because the leaves are so dry, we learned it was easy to add flavorings to it. The leaves absorbed it easily and quickly. 

Thanks for visiting, and I hope you have not only a great T day, but the rest of this week also.