May 16, 2012


(Concept Tea (10) is here.)

















William said...

Thanks for those interesting insights about Tie Guan Yin.

Do you really need an important intake of nutrients for tea farming? The biomass taken out of the field is actually quite small compared to other crops.

It's surprising that young bushes give a better tea than old trees. Maybe the fragrance is better but how about the mouth feeling?

Gingko said...

Hi William, the older ones of Tie Guan Yin are bushes, not trees. They don't have the root system like Yunnan arbor tea trees to get nutrients from deep layer of the soil. So organic fertilization is the key. Nutrient factor is also why arbor tree puerh is better than plantation puerh :-)

GN? said...

I fertilize my orchids with the waste from my tropical fish tank as well .

Alex Zorach said...

Hmm...any crop eventually requires some fertilization if you are removing any biomass at all. Also, evergreen plants like the tea plant tend to invest more in each leaf than deciduous crops, because the plants are not used to losing many leaves in their natural environment.

From what I've read of fertilization in the tea industry though, the nutrient requirements are relatively low, and the spray-application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that is the norm in many types of modern agriculture, is complete overkill, leading to lots of nutrient pollution in runoff.

But I'm not an expert in this area.

I find Gingko's comments about the pursuit of "new bush" oolong not creating the best long-term results interesting. I like the idea of permaculture in general. It's totally unrelated to Tie Guan Yin production, but Makaibari estate in Darjeeling really pioneered permaculture practices, in a region and during a time period in which conventional monoculture was the norm.

I hope that agriculture across the board can move more over to this sort of system...the ecological benefits are compelling, and I suspect that Gingko may be right here that it can also be economically sustainable in the long-term, even if the up-front costs are substantially higher.

Gingko said...

Very interesting discussion! About fertilizer, to put it short, I think tea trees can survive with little nutrients, but it takes ample and particular nutrients for the tea leaves to be tasty. It's true for a lot of other trees. Nowadays, many fruits are rather "tasteless", because they don't get enough effective fertilization. Although they receive a lot of synthetic fertilizer, most of the fertilizer spray ends up in the river poisoning the water system, while the crops are in malnutrition.

In traditional agriculture, for a lot of plants, the most important fertilizer is given in winter in solid form (like the sheep droppings mentioned here). So the fertilizer has the winter and spring time to decompose in the soil and is taken up by plants slowly. Synthesized fertilizer is given in a soluble form, and during the growth season, when there is usually much rain water to wash away the fertilizer. Even when most synthesized fertilizer is taken up by plants, the synthesized fertilizer is usually rich of nitrogen and phosphorus, but short of carbon nutrients which are usually responsible for good tastes of leaves or fruits.

It's just recently I've realized that people should really talk more about fertilizers (and poops!), not just about tea but about many other crops. I was quite shocked to meet some young farmers who has no knowledge of organic fertilizer, and all their fertilization knowledge is from sales representatives from fertilizer companies! In the old days, even city dwellers would know a lot about plant growth through their gardening experience. Nowadays it's rather sad that some professional farmers don't know the full cycle of plant nutrients.