feasibility of growing your own tea

ilja

I recently started drinking tea. I used to not like it, i'm unsure if it's just bc my taste changed, or if the tea i previously tried was just that bad. But the point is, i drink it now and i'd like to keep a big stash so I can easily keep drinking it throughout the day.

I also have a garden. I mostly keep it wild. It doesn't seem like the best soil out there, but i have been able to grow things, and i have a manual plow thingy which makes it relatively easy to clear out some square meters to grow stuff.

So now i'm wondering how easy it would be to grow my own tea. Are there people here interested in this, or have experience in it?

I'm obviously wondering about growing it. What kind of things do you plant, and how much maintenance it takes. But also what to do with it afterwards. You have to pick it, dry it, get it in a state that you can put it in your water to actually make tea. Is all of that feasible, or will it be more work than it's really worth.

toast

My understanding is that the biggest challenge is the climate, in that tea tends to prefer hotter, more humid climates.
Kind of like how cofe likes high altitudes and low oxygen.

「 Fristi 」

For reference, there is a company that is growing tea in the Netherlands: https://www.localtea.com/

They even have articles on their website on how to grow your own tea plant and how to make tea from it. That said, for now they only seem to have black and green tea, besides camomile, ginger and lemon tea. Turns out some tea plants can be grown here while others are difficult.

Of course, we don't have to expect rooibos being grown here any day soon. Seems it's really difficult to get a large scale plantation of those going anywhere outside of South-Africa.