The harvests will begin soon in Darjeeling. Happily, the tea is still picked by hand. The low-altitude plots are harvested first, for a simple reason: the tea plants have benefited from higher temperatures, meaning the terminal bud has grown faster. We can see that this photo was taken at the bottom of the valley, due to the gentleness of the slope and the density of the covering that protects the bushes from excess sunlight.
9 March 2010
Let’s get back to tea and how it is harvested. When the camellia is fully grown, the youngest leaves are plucked. In this photo you can see what is known…
4 September 2012
In southern China, on the slopes of Phoenix Mountain, tea bushes are planted on terraces due to the steep gradients. This way of organising tea bushes is quite a rare…
19 January 2018
Farming methods change over time. Tea bushes sometimes used to be planted following the slope of the ground, resulting in vertical lines like those visible on the left of this…
12 July 2011
Every time I go to China, I wonder what else will have changed in the cities and countryside that I know. The rapidity of change in the country takes your…
