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

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

by Christine Parks

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.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

5 of 5 stars

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Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Grow Your Own Tea is a comprehensive guide to growing, harvesting, and processing tea from the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. Due out 1st Sept from Workman Publishing on their Timber Press imprint, it's 208 pages (print version) and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

This is as advertised, an encyclopedic guide to cultivating, harvesting, and preparing tea. It's laid out logically, and the language is accessible, the instructions achievable (given some determination and favorable climate considerations). The authors are experienced tea farmers and have provided a good groundwork for the curious home gardener to succeed with tea growing.

The introductory chapters cover the history of tea, contemporary tea culture in the USA, and the agriculturally relevant info on the tea plant. Worth noting, this book is concerned with the culture and processing of Camellia sinensis, and not the other plants we often use for infusing drinks and tisanes such as mint, chamomile, nettle, lavender, lemon verbena, etc.

The bulk of the content is devoted to a detailed tutorial for choosing, siting, sourcing, planting, and caring for tea plants. The troubleshooting and diagnostic guides in these chapters are very well done and worthwhile for related plants in the Camellia genus as well. The pictures are very clear and useful. Whilst the bulk of the book seems aimed to a somewhat larger scale gardener blessed with good climate, soil, and other favorable conditions, the authors do include a very interesting subchapter on container growing. I'm definitely going to get a couple of plants and try cool greenhouse cultivation. If I managed to grow peaches and nectarines in Norway, I am hopeful for a positive outcome for tea also.

This is an interesting and comprehensive well written guide to growing and processing tea. This would be a nice selection for tea lovers, serious gardeners, or those who like a horticultural challenge. There aren't many layman-accessible specific guides for cultivating and processing tea (the vast majority are focused on herbal teas or foraged plants), so this is a standout selection in a very small pool of choices. Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 4 August, 2020: Finished reading
  • 4 August, 2020: Reviewed