News — organics

At Chota Tingrai Tea Estate, we constantly experiment with new methods in cultivating tea. Our latest experiment, taking place in a small portion of MP 9, will utilize Japanese planting and machine plucking. Meet Tani-san, a senior tea agronomist from Japan. He has come to India for the first time to learn how Assam grows tea, and teach us how Japan grows tea. Together, we are trying to adapt the Japanese planting style to Indian tea cultivars. Through this strategy, we hope to increase our per bush yields, and make them appropriate for machine plucking. Tani-san speaks Japanese. Our field...

Last week we shared how we made MP 9 ready for planting tea. Now let’s see how we plant the bushes themselves. We started planting MP 9 on February 10, 2017. We have already planted 57,000 bushes. We still have about 10,000 bushes to finish. Planting a subsection of tea comprises three steps. First, a pair of workers measure out the rows with special chain. The ensure that the rows have the proper space by precisely staking the ends of the planting chain. They then drop a bit of dolomite at the meeting of each chain link to mark the...

On the edge of Chota Tingrai Tea Estate, at the meeting of the river and forest, our workers are busily planting our newest organic tea section, Manohar Pukur 9 (MP-9). Eventually, these 5 hectares will produce tons of our organic Assam black tea annually.  And I say eventually, because founding a new tea section takes many years. It comprises of four main stages- Land Preparation, Planting, Young Tea, and Mature tea. Over the coming months we will check in regularly with MP-9 so you can watch the tea grow with us. On this blog, we want to share with you...

Really, the Mana Difference is all about the smell. The first time I visited the Mana’s organic tea gardens at Chota Tingrai Tea Estate, the smell struck me the most. The scent of the dark earth, mixing with the warm tinge of coming rain and a faint waft of tea from the factory a mile down the road. The scent of living things. A chemically nurtured section does not have a scent, except when it is being sprayed. And that’s a horrible stench. Like bunt tires and dust. Mana’s gardens smell this way because they are more than just a...

Organic management has proven daunting for tea gardens in India. Nutrients in most tea soils have been leached off by years of over cultivation. This has encouraged the over use of chemical fertilizers, predominately urea, to provide the macro nutrients—Nitrogen (N), Phosphorous (P) and Potassium (K)—required by plants to prosper. In many tea gardens, this over use of chemical fertilizers has hardened the soil and formed a salt pan. These factors inhibit the tea bush's nutrient uptake. As a result, many gardens add even more chemical fertilizer to their soil to maintain the tea crop. This application of extra chemical...