Grow Your Own Tea: The Complete Guide to Cultivating, Harvesting and Preparing

(Paperback)

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This comprehensive guide details how to grow and process real tea (including white, green, oolong and black). Consumer interest in tea has grown rapidly in recent years and continues to climb. Worldwide there are 25,000 cups of tea consumed every second - more than billion cups per day! For tea drinkers interested in the freshest flavour, growing the leaves at home is the ideal solution. Lucky for them, tea is not an exotic, hard-to-grow crop - it can be successfully grown anywhere that camellias can be grown. In Grow Your Own Tea, readers will learn how to cultivate, harvest, and process this venerable crop. Parks and Wolcott share details on how to get started; describe cultivation, long-term maintenance, and harvesting; show how to grow tea plants in containers; and describe how to process and store harvested tea leaves. Grow Your Own Tea includes information on how to produce white, green, oolong and black teas. AUTHORS: Christine Parks, Ph.D., developed Camellia Forest Tea Gardens in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to grow and make tea and provide an educational setting for visitors. Parks is also a partner in Tea Flower Research, collecting, propagating, and testing cultivars for hardiness in the NC Piedmont region. Susan Walcott, Ph.D., is a Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her publications include several articles on American grown tea. She has written three Additional experience with publishing includes three books, as well as numerous book chapters and academic articles. SELLING POINTS: . Consumer interest in tea has grown rapidly in recent years and continues to climb. Worldwide there are 25,000 cups of tea consumed every second - about 2.16 billion cups per day. Recent studies showing the toxicity of commercially produced teas are leading more people to grow their own tea. This book is for this lay audience. . Readers will find information on planning and planting a tea garden; care and maintenance; growing in containers; and detailed instructions on harvesting and making tea. . Parks and Walcott are experts in the small-scale production of tea. Their expertise combined with clear, step-by-step photography make this a must-read for tea fans. 150 colour photographs, 5 illustrations

Reviews

"Plant a tea plant and watch it grow! Grow Your Own Tea is truly a masterpiece how-to guide to cultivating and enjoying the sacred leaf. Christine and Susan have planted a landmark in our horticultural history and a milestone on America's path to becoming a tea-consuming society. It will delight even the armchair gardener and casual tea lover." --James Norwood Pratt, author of James Norwood Pratt's Tea Dictionary

"The guide of guides to the cultivation of tea." --Booklist

"A comprehensive guide for anyone wanting to learn about growing and gardening with Camellia Sinensis." --The US League of Tea Growers

"From seed to sip, this is a perfect book for tea lovers and gardeners." --Triangle Gardener

"In this helpful new title, you can learn how to grow, cultivate and harvest white, green, oolong, and (the nation's favourite) black tea in your own garden." --Gardens Illustrated

"If you're thinking of growing tea at home, this guide is a great resource." --Tea Happiness

Author Bio

Christine Parks, together with her husband, David, developed Camellia Forest Tea Gardens in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Parks family has worked for decades collecting, propagating, and testing camellia cultivars for hardiness--today Christine and David are partners in Tea Flower Research, which has formalized the family's work. She was chair of the Tea Committee of the American Camellia Society, and a founding member of the US League of Tea Growers and representative for southeastern growers.

Susan Morrison Walcott is an emerita professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has sipped soup-like buttery tea in Tibet and visited Hangzhou's tea gardens and tea museum during a research trip to China's high technology parks--a geographers' curiosity leads down more roads than cat has lives. She is a founding member of the US League of Tea Growers and has published several articles on tea grown in the United States in academic journals.