2024 May round up

Welcome to the May round-up newsletter. A monthly letter about everything that has happened inside and outside the tea nursery.

Spring harvest, the aftermath

Spring harvest is almost over. Just a few more fields to harvest for tencha, and then the rest is for bancha harvest or trimming in preparation for the summer harvest. So even with the bulk of work and the long hours in the field and factory, we are still quite busy and will be for a bit longer. This is my first spring harvest season, and while we had sort of a good rotation of personnel. The exhaustion was catching up by the end of May. I do not recall ever having worked so hard. Both physically and mentally. The care and attention given in the field is not only for the quality of the tea but also to not harvest more than we need, the safety of the plant and the other farmers and many other subtle differences between fields, cultivars and staff teams.

It was great to process tea and have the opportunity to create the tea from the field to the cup. The most surprising part was being able to taste them so freshly. Almost no one has the opportunity to taste tea processed literally a few hours ago. The most interesting part was the evolution of flavour and aroma during the first weeks.

Recent Activity

As one can imagine, the harvest has taken almost all my available time for anything. By the end of the day, one wants to eat something, drink a warm cup of hojicha and slowly doze off after all the physical effort of the harvest. It requires so much effort to translate the research papers and then find a way to summarise all that information in a non-overwhelming way.

I have been able to try many Saeakari cultivar teas lately, which has made the process much more fun. One of my favourite moments was when I got permission to harvest a Saeakari field myself for the first time ever. The field was planted around 4 years ago, and this year is the first harvest ever in that particular plot. It was interesting to see how different the field is from a more long-term cultivated field. The bushes were more vigorous, and the growth was much more "bushy", in a way. Its branches grow sideways, with lots of space between the main branches. The round shape and density are not as compact as in the other fields we work on.

The morning before I finally sat down to write the newsletter, I went to the Yoshida temple Daichakai, a particular tea festival on the grounds of the Yoshida temple in Kyoto. There, I also found a bunch of other teas made with Saeakari and made good comparison material for the blog on the cultivar. There were multiple farmers from faraway prefectures like Kumamoto and Miyazaki as well. It is always great to see farmers I know and buy their new teas for the year. Also discovered new farmers whose teas really surprised me. A cultivar, in particular, caught my attention on many stalls. I have tried Okuyutaka from several farmers before. This time, many had it available in a variety of processing methods, steamed, pan-fired, sun-dried, black tea, oolong... all of them were delicious and probably, my biggest expense at the festival was gathering so much material of it for a future cultivar post.

What is next

While the Saeakari post is on the way, I have been thinking about the next cultivar post topic. Keep an eye out for the Instagram account later this month. I will post a genealogy tree as I have done with the others. I also want to resumer working on the Aichi Shizuoka trip report. The trip was great, and I would like to share about the projects that we visited on the trip. Other than that, I am taking my time to rest. I am truly exhausted with farming, processing, and all other work needed at the farm. I will be taking it easy for a few weeks. Farming is a demanding job, extremely demanding. While I would like to push on some other ideas or write more for the blog, I also want to have the time to enjoy that process myself.

Books and other fun stuff

This month, I have almost not read anything. The only book I finished is "Ono, Sokyo, and William P. Woodard. Shinto the Kami Way. Tuttle Publishing, 2004.". A book about Shinto, the native belief system in Japan, and an interesting one at that. While not related to tea, it is interesting to understand the several connections with the broader cultural practices in Japan. I found it a light, straightforward read on the topic.

Another book I have been "consulting" rather than reading is a book on rice cultivars. 副島顕子. 酒米ハンドブック. 2017. Around Wazuka, there are a bunch of rice farmers who have been ramping up the work in their paddies lately. Some tea farmers also grow rice on the side, or vice versa, depending on the family. As a tea cultivar enthusiast, you can imagine how fun and intriguing the rice cultivar rabbit hole is to explore the many rice cultivars out there. Shoutout to Tsuyahime and Koshi Ibuki, two great-tasting rice cultivars I have been enjoying lately during lunch breaks and the many curry dishes cooked after a long day in the tea fields.

This rabbit hole encouraged me to create a more personal account to share more "non-tea" related topics I am interested in. Although I am still not sure what will be going on there, I look forward to sharing a bit about other pieces of life in Japan and other interests like rice farming, books, travels, nature and another topic that has been fascinating to me lately, the 72 micro-season division system. A five-day (ish) division of the year describing the ebbs and flows of what is happening in our natural environments.

That is it for this month. As always, you can help the blog by sharing this newsletter or any of the blog posts and sharing it with a friend or family member who could enjoy it.