2024 June round up

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

Summer harvest, heat, rain, and black tea

At the farm, just when we finished the spring harvest, we had a bit of a downtime while preparing for the summer harvest. Lots of trimming, deep cutting some fields and ramping up some improvements in the factory. This month the heat has been rising, and it is considerably hot and humid. Specially if we had the long days of rain that the Tsuyu, the rainy season, has brought to us lately.

This month I will learn a lot about black tea processing as we will produce some at the farm. It will be interesting to explore the process. I drink quite a lot of Japanese black tea, I find it an appealing tea, and plenty of farmers are exploring many ways to product with the tools available to them. Or sometimes, simply, what they would like to find in a cup of tea.

Recent Activity

The Saeakari cultivar is finally published, spring is physically and mentally intense, so I have been taking as much rest as I could and that prevented me from writing as much as in other times of the year. It was a good time invested in recovering from long days at the farm, adjusting to the new house and neighbourhood. It also gave space to think about this kind of articles altogether. Translating cultivar research and making it more accessible is one of the main points. But as I research and gather more and more information about them, I realised how many technical details come up, intended to guide the farmer's hands when cultivating them.

I still don't know if these articles should take a pivot to make this material more approachable by people that are eager to learn about Japanese tea but not necessarily go down the deep rabbit hole of cultivar development. On the other hand, it could also steer into going even further down that path and focus on research that you could not find anywhere else, unless you can read Japanese and know where to ask those kinds of questions. Nonetheless, one of the reasons I write these articles is for my pleasure, I love the researching and gathering information part of an article. Publishing it's a way to share with others can benefit from it, and we can have a conversation about them. Which is also one of the reasons I started this blog, to talk to other tea enthusiasts about the things we are interested in.

What is next

In a few days, summer harvest will begin for us in Wazuka, I have already seen some farmers carrying around shades, and even harvested tea around. During that time, I will be focused on the farming and resting in the downtime. This time, though, the harvest should be a bit shorter as the weather is extremely hot and humid. Furthermore, the quality of the tea is different, and we deeply cut a few fields that will take a break until next spring.

During my downtime I have started to gather candidates for the next cultivar post, some possible ones are Okuyutaka. A cultivar I am enjoying a lot lately, and I am pleased to see that many farmers are using it out there. Another option would be to explore a few of the less known cultivars. Usually, those are more difficult to research as they are not well distributed, but it also makes the articles more short and perhaps do a quick round talking about 1-2 of those. There is also the possibility to just write about something else, like recovering the kind of abandoned tea types series. We will see…

I will also be preparing some new resources and doing some more preparation for an upcoming project for the blog, More on that next month if I am able to put the time into it.

Books and other fun stuff

This month I have not read anything book related, but rather reconsulting some previously mentioned books about tea cultivars and the one about pests, as those are showing a lot at this time of the year. I will leave a mention to them below in case you missed them from other newsletters.

The tea pests and diseases book. "Akihito Ozawa, Yasushi Sato. 目で見る茶の病害虫. Published by the Shizuoka Tea Board".

Tea cultivar book. “静岡県茶業会議所. 茶の品種. 2003. 2nd ed., 静岡県茶業会議所, 2019, https://shizuoka-cha.com/index.php/books.”

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.