one friend, who has a number of plants (25+) regularly has good crops of seed from his plants, and I managed to swipe a few good handfuls of them at an event this spring (with permission!). I've had bad luck trying to grow tea from seed in the past - all sent-away-for dry seed. this is fresh seed, so many of the problems of coming from dry are gone. the instructions were: plant them, don't let them dry out too much or freeze.
these are some of the seedlings (I think the total count is at 20 now). I'll try to find relatively safe places to plant them too, once they get big enough, but it'll be nice to have enough plants where losing one won't be the end of that experiment.
been playing around with processing tea for drinking the last few years, and it will be really nice to have more leaves/tips to play with as everything gets bigger. there are a few smaller 'plantations' (like my friend's) in the area. there are also couple of fancy tea-houses in our very local-centric town that have already made clear that if we ever produce enough (and get our processes down), they will be happy to pay top dollar for local mountain-grown tea! (whether I'll ever have enough plants to make such an idea profitable, rather than just 'cool', remains to be seen...)
anyway, that's where this story's at for now. this program has been brought to you by applestar's request and my bit of extra time this morning.
