Grow Your Own Tea In A Small Grow Tent
Have you ever wanted to grow your own tea? Well, now you can.
First, let me ask you what you’re picturing when I mentioned growing your own tea. Is it one of those huge plantations you see in photos from China or India? Or are you picturing a smaller version of that in your backyard?
It really doesn’t need to be either of them. In fact, you can grow tea even if you don’t have a backyard. How is that possible? Indoor growing.
That’s right, just like some people grow herbs indoors or their own vegetables, you can also grow tea in a little indoor grow tent. Not many people know this.
And it’s not all that hard to grow, really. You just need to keep the temperature and the humidity fairly consistent, but there isn’t one specific “tea growing environment”.
Famous teas around the world come from all different climates. There are teas from hot and humid low lands in India and China and there also teas that come from the Highlands. They grow in the mountains in China or India or Nepal.
One thing they do have in common is a lot of humidity and a lot of rainfall. So you’d want to keep your grow space humid, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be hot. It can be pretty cool, in fact. You want to make sure that it stays about the same all the time, so you would have to control it somehow.
Apart from that you just need some pots to put the tea plants in and then a nice growing space. An ideal growing space would be isolated from the environment. A greenhouse would work, but even better is a grow tent especially if you’re growing in your home.
For growing the tea in a closet or your basement, you can use a small grow tent to keep your plants protected from the environment. These types of growing tents are often used by marijuana growers, but they work for any plants. For your purposes you really just need a small grow tent. If you need help selecting the best one for your needs, here’s a post that can help you.
Once you’ve got your tent, you’ll need to put some grow lights in it. They don’t need to be especially strong for tea. I would go with some LED grow lights, but you can use fluorescent lights as well. And you need some kind of climate control like an AC unit and some kind of ventilation. You can even grow tea hydroponically, but I would just use soil. It’s easier and that’s the way it grows naturally.
When it comes time to harvest, I’d do it like in the wild. Harvest the first flush, by taking the small leaves from the very tips. These will produce the highest quality teas. You can take them as is for white tea or you can let them ferment slightly to make oolong tea or ferment them for longer periods of time and make black tea. You could even try to make some pu-erh tea, but that’s a bit more difficult. Basically you can make any tea you want from your tea leaves
Probably the biggest decision overall you need to make is which type of tea plant you’ll use. Teas in the wild come from specific types of plants and each of those plants have an ideal growing environment. So you’ll either need to match your growing environment to the plant you’ve chosen, or the plant needs to be selected based on the environment you will create. Either way, you want the right plant for the right environment.
So there you have it. You can grow your own tea now. To recap, you need a grow tent, some ventilation system, some pots, you’ll need nutrients and water and that’s about it. Of course, you’ll also need the plant. Once you’ve got all those things, give it a shot. See if you can grow your own tea. Who knows, if it ends up tasting great, you might even be of the sell it for a lot of money.
You can also find little grow tents here: