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Tea bud and fine plucking
Let’s get back to tea and how it is harvested. When the camellia is fully grown, the youngest leaves are plucked. In this photo you can see what is known as the “fine plucking”: the removal of the bud...
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Tea pluckers harvest tea leaves with bamboo sticks
When you harvest the tea leaves, you must take great care to pick the right parts. Only the tea bud and the two adjacent leaves give you true quality. Sometimes, to prevent the tea pluckers from...
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Tea plucking by men in Nepal
In some regions of the world, tea plucking is only done by women, while men are responsible for other jobs. It’s the case in India and central Sri Lanka, where men employed on the plantations tend the...
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Tea pluckers like wearing a cloth tube around their arm
In different regions of the world, tea pluckers put on a wide cloth tube around their arm to protect their sleeve. A Camellia shrub proves to be quite tough and could easily widen a stitch of a fabric...
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Cheerful plucker looking like a tea missionary
On the Terai plain (area straddling Nepal and India), I’ve seen them use strange crosses to mark the height of tea plants. The cross is stuck into the ground and only the shoots growing above the...
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Tea leaves that are worth a detour
In the south of Sri Lanka, tea is mostly grown by individual farmers who cultivate their own land. They sell the tea leaves just after the harvest, as they don’t have the infrastructure to process...
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Plucking tea with 35°C and 100% humidity
When you know what the climate is like here in Assam, you realise this woman must be brave to work outside. Throughout my stay in the Jorhat region, the temperature varied between 35° and 38°C, while...
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The first harvest of the year is about to start
When I ask planters in Darjeeling when they will begin the first pluckings of the year, they always gives roughly the same reply: around the time of the Holi Festival. Holi takes place in India every...
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The tea harvest in the south of Sri Lanka
Sometimes the people who harvest tea don’t have the necessary equipment to process the leaves. In this case, they sell their crop to another farmer who is able to process it. This is what happens in...
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The first selections of first-flush Darjeelings
As happens every year at the same time, the first samples of first-flush Darjeelings are starting to arrive. There are never many during the first week, then during the peak of the season, around the...
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