Gadenin日本語Get the appThree years, and why they are not wasted
Nearly everyone who plants a tea bush wants to pick it in the first summer, and nearly everyone who does regrets it. A young tea plant has a small root system and a single stem, and every shoot you take off it is growth it needed for building structure. Plants picked early stay small, stay leggy and take longer to reach a useful size than plants left alone.
The realistic timeline is three years from a young plant to a first proper picking, and four or five from seed. In that time you are doing three things: getting the roots established, cutting the plant hard to force it to branch low, and keeping it out of trouble over its first winters. The picking table you eventually pick from is built in these years and cannot be built later without starting over.
Judge progress by the stem and the branching rather than by height. A three year old plant that is knee high with a dozen branches coming off a short thick base is exactly right. A three year old plant that is chest high with one main stem and a few side shoots has grown more but is much further from being pickable, and will need cutting down to about six inches (15 cm) to fix it.
Seed grown plants vary. Tea does not come true from seed, so a batch of seedlings will differ from each other in vigor, leaf size and how early they flush. This is not a problem, and it is one of the pleasures of growing several: after three or four years it becomes obvious which of your plants is the good one, and that is the one to take cuttings from.
| Age | What the plant should look like | Your job that year |
|---|---|---|
| Seed or cutting | Single soft shoot, few roots | Keep humid, shaded and never dry |
| Year one in the ground | One stem, growing away strongly | Water, mulch, remove flower buds, do not pick |
| Year two | Cut low, three to six shoots from the base | First framing cut, feed, do not pick |
| Year three | Twelve or more branches, knee to hip high | Second framing cut, take a token first pick |
| Year four | Dense bush at waist height | Level the table, pick every flush |
Starting from seed and from cuttings
Tea seed is short lived and loses viability fast, so it must be sown fresh. Soak the seeds in water for a day and discard any that float, then sow them individually about an inch (2.5 cm) deep in an acid, free draining mix, keep them at around 70F (21C) and keep them damp. Germination is slow and uneven, commonly six to twelve weeks and sometimes longer, and a seed tray that looks dead after two months is often not.
Cuttings are the way to reproduce a plant you already like, and they are taken from semi ripe wood in late summer, when the current season's shoots have firmed but are not yet fully woody. Take a short cutting with one leaf and a bud, cut cleanly just below the node, and set it in a gritty acid mix under cover with high humidity and bottom heat. Rooting takes several months, and the young plants stay under protection through their first winter.
Either way, the seedling stage is the most fragile the plant will ever be. Young tea has almost no tolerance for drying out and none at all for direct hot sun, and the two commonest losses are a tray that dried out for one afternoon and a pot moved into full sun too early.
Pot up as roots fill each container rather than starting a small plant in a large pot, where the excess mix stays wet and the roots rot. Move up one size at a time, always into an acid mix, and keep the young plant in shade or dappled light for its first two seasons.
- Use an acid mix from the start Sow and pot into a mix formulated for acid loving plants. A seedling started in ordinary compost yellows within weeks and rarely recovers its vigor even after it is moved.
- Keep humidity high, light indirect Cover trays or use a propagator, and keep the young plants in bright shade. Direct sun on an unrooted cutting or a new seedling kills it within a day.
- Harden off slowly Move a young plant to its outdoor position over two or three weeks, increasing exposure gradually. Tea sunburns badly if it goes from shade to full sun in one step.
- Plant out in spring Plant into the ground or a final container in spring, once the risk of hard frost has passed, so the plant has a full season to root before its first winter.
- Protect the first two winters Give young plants a windbreak, an unheated cold frame or a sheltered wall for their first two winters. Established bushes are far tougher than the plants that have not yet made a woody base.
The first framing cut is the whole game
In year two, once the plant is clearly established and growing strongly, cut it down to six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm). This is the decision that separates a bush that will be pickable for decades from a leggy shrub that never quite works, and it is the one almost nobody wants to make on a plant they have nursed for two years.
The plant responds by breaking three to six shoots from the remaining stem within a couple of months. Those shoots are the permanent frame. A year later, cut them all back to about twelve to sixteen inches (30 to 40 cm), and the frame doubles again. This is how a single stemmed tree becomes a dense low bush with a level top.
Make each cut in late winter, before the buds swell, cutting cleanly above an outward facing bud. Feed and water well afterwards, because the plant is rebuilding its canopy from stored reserves, and expect it to look shocking for about six weeks before it breaks.
Take no more than a token pick in year three, a handful of shoots at most, so you can taste what your bush gives and learn how the leaf behaves. Real picking starts in year four, and by then the frame is set and the plant will carry it for a very long time.
Rub off every flower bud that forms on a plant in its first three years. Autumn flowers and the seed that follows draw on exactly the reserves you want going into branch structure, and on a young plant that trade is a bad one.
Keeping a record while nothing much happens
These early years are the ones where a record matters most, because so little changes visibly from month to month that memory becomes unreliable. Write down the date the plant went in the ground, its height and the number of stems at that point, and where in the garden each plant sits if you have more than one.
Then note each framing cut: the date, the height you cut to, how many shoots broke and how long they took to appear. That short list is what tells you whether your climate needs the cuts further apart or whether the plant can take the next one a season early.
Record the first winter damage too. Note which plants browned at the leaf margins and where they stand relative to the prevailing wind, because that is the evidence that will tell you where a windbreak needs to go, and it is far more useful than a general worry about hardiness.
Finally, note the date of the token first pick and what the leaf was like. From that point on the record turns into a picking log, and the years of framing notes underneath it explain why one plant crops earlier and better than its neighbor.