Distinguished Oolong Tea Leaves

I mentioned previously that I had started my own indoor tea garden. I thought it was time for an update. It has been going so well, that I’ve decided I want to expand. I now want to grow tea outdoors as well, so that I can increase production by a large magnitude.

Of course this presents a number of problems. One is the climate. Outdoors I can’t control it, while indoors I have full control over it. The other is security. Anyone can come in and just steal my tea plants. I’m going to need a full security system.

However, the land on which I want to grow my tea is in the middle of nowhere. There is no Wi-Fi there, so I need a security system that works without Internet. I wasn’t sure if that was even possible, but it turns out it is. I just have to sacrifice a few things. Security systems that run without Wi-Fi record to a hard drive locally, but you cannot look at the feed from a remote location.

What this means is that I can’t simply view the cameras on my phone or computer at home, whenever one of my motion sensors goes off. I have to trust that my fake security cameras and my floodlights will scare the intruders away. Or I have to call the cops to go investigate. Because there is no Wi-Fi, I can’t view it in real-time myself. I would have to wait until I can get on site and review the recordings.

There is a way around this and that is to wire the system into cable or to use cell phone signals. There is no cell reception out there, however, so that won’t work either. It’s a bit of a conundrum, so I will definitely have to think about the security situation.

Other problems are just the difference between growing indoors and outdoors. Indoors I was growing using LED grow lights and I had full control over everything. This ensured that I got great results every time. Outdoors, the weather will have a huge effect on my results. There will also be many days when the plants don’t get enough light. I can’t use grow lights outdoors, after all.

From these reasons, I’m afraid that my tea will not turn out that great when I grow it outdoors. The other reason, of course, is it the climate in my area is not as conducive to growing tea as it is in locations where it is grown currently, like China or Japan or Taiwan or India or Kenya.

These countries have high humidity and many of the locations where the tea is grown also get a lot of cloud cover. These conditions are important for the tea. It also needs a decent amount of sunlight too, though this is not quite as important. The main thing you need is the humidity. And it’s just not that humid where I live.

Nevertheless, I think I’m going to move forward. This means that I’m currently researching security systems. I found a number of companies that offer do-it-yourself systems, like Lorex, and I think that’s actually who I will go with. They are a bit more expensive, but they seem to be high-quality and the cameras work with or without Wi-Fi.

I will have to get power out there to keep the security cameras and the hard drives running, but I need to get power out there anyways for a lot of the equipment I need for the tea.

In order to get good distinguished leaves, I’m going to need to process it on site and that will definitely require some power. I don’t want to use the old-school processing techniques, at least not the completely old-school ones. The processing I will do will be based on old-school methods, but it will involve some technology to speed the process up. The result will hopefully be some wonderful distinguished tea leaves.