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

"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. It will delight even the armchair gardener and casual tea lover." —James Norwood Pratt, author of James Norwood Pratt’s Tea Dictionary
 
Tea lovers, make a fresh pot, sit down with this delightful guide, and discover the joys of growing and processing your own tea at home. Tea farmer Christine Parks and enthusiast Susan Walcott cover it all from growing tea plants and harvesting leaves, to the distinct processes that create each tea’s signature flavors.
 
In this comprehensive handbook, you’ll discover tea’s ancient origins, learn about the single plant that produces white, green, oolong, and black teas, and discover step-by-step instructions for plucking, withering, and rolling. Simple recipes that highlight the flavor of tea and creative uses for around the home round out this must-read for tea fans.

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.