Gardening Tips

There is a reason organic products have become so popular. With all the stories of toxins and other contaminants in our food supply, it makes sense that people want to know that their food is clean. Growing your own is really the only surefire way to ensure this, but for most of us that is not really possible, so we rely on organic products. This is what we call the organic products lifestyle.

All that said, growing your own food isn’t really all that difficult. You just need to get some indoor grow lights and you can start your own vegetable garden in your basement. And it’s not just veggies. You can grow just about anything. We’ve had articles on this site about growing tea on your own indoors or growing other fruits and vegetables. You can grow them inside grow tents or you can just have a basement room.

Naturally, you can also grow outdoors, but that limits what you can grow and when you can grow it. For that reason we generally recommend growing indoors using LED grow lights or something similar. It just works a lot better.

If you can’t, though, then you have to rely on organic products. You have to rely on other people growing those organic products and then labeling them correctly. That is a problem.

There been so many stories of incorrectly labeled products, especially ones coming from countries like China and India. The sad truth is, you can’t trust anything that is labeled as organic if it comes from one of those countries. Growers there have no scruples about labeling something as an organic product when it isn’t one it all.

But how about in the West? If you’re living in Europe or the United States or Canada or any other country in the West, can you trust these labels? I would say not really. In Europe perhaps you can trust it, but in the United States I definitely would not. The people in charge of the food supply in the US are incredibly corrupt. The government is controlled by money and the companies that benefit from putting toxins in our food supply have tons of money and control the government. For that reason I don’t think you can trust anything labeled as organic in the United States.

If you want to take part in the organic products lifestyle, your best bet is to grow your own food. That takes time and costs a bit of money, but it is not impossible. It is totally worth doing, in my opinion. But, I know most people can’t do it. I myself don’t really have enough time to grow all of my food organically. In fact, making sure everything you consume is organic is virtually impossible.

But you can grow far more than you think yourself. I started growing my own tea. Then, when I got an expensive coffee machine, I also started growing my own coffee indoors under grow lights.

For that reason you do have to trust other people at some point. You can buy locally, but how can you be sure you can trust that? The truth is you can’t. But you have to. For me, I know that I’m consuming some things that aren’t that great for me and that’s just the way it is. There’s nothing I can do about it.

What you drink is a major component of most modern diets. Almost all diets can agree that sodas are no good and most say the same about alcohol. Some to tell you that alcohol is fine in moderation, and even beneficial, but they all tell you not to drink too much. The same goes for coffee. Most diets say coffee is okay, as long as you don’t overdo it. But the one drink no one ever says not to overdo is tea.

With our focus on an organic lifestyle, it should be obvious that we recommend organic tea above all else. The difference is basically the same as for other plants. Organic tea growers do not use pesticides or other chemicals to grow their tea. They grow using ancient methods so that the leaves you get are pure and free of any harmful substances.

Is Organic Tea Actually Organic

The problem is that, apart from Japan, most teas that we consume come from either China, India or Kenya. All three of those countries have a long tradition of lying about something like the organic nature of their products. They might have organic stamps, but you certainly cannot trust them. Even though the government in some of these countries, especially China, claims they’re doing their best to regulate the organic industry and ensure that anything labeled as organic actually is organic, there’s just so much corruption within the government organizations in all three of these countries, that you can’t be sure you’re actually getting organic tea.

So what can you do?

As with so many other foods, the best solution is to grow your own. Yes, it is very possible to grow your own tea. Tea likes to have a relatively warm climate, but it likes the high altitude where it is a bit cooler. So basically, a subtropical high-altitude climate. Tea plants also need a lot of water. All the tea growing regions in the world are very humid and they get a lot of rain. If you live in an area where you do not have this type of climate, you might be thinking “too bad.” “I guess I can’t grow tea.” That is not true.

Grow Your Own Tea

You can actually grow tea indoors. Just like marijuana or any organic flowers or vegetables or herbs or fruits, you can also grow tea inside. Obviously, you need to provide the water and the light in these cases. You’ll need to provide a lot of water and you want to keep the grow area quite humid. For this reason it is a good idea to have an enclosed grow space, like maybe a greenhouse or just a simple grow tent.

Good Grow Lights For Tea

For light, tea actually uses less light than many plants. It doesn’t flower, so you really just need good vegging lights. LED grow lights are good for this or florescent lights or you could use metal halide lights, although I would only recommend that for a larger garden. Personally, I would get one good LED fixture that has a lot of blue spectrum light, since you don’t need as much red spectrum light for plants that don’t flower. Apart from that I might get a fluorescent fixture or an LED fixture like the NextLight Veg 8, which basically mimics a fluorescent fixture but is better in every way.

Processing And Oxidizing The Tea

Tea is not all that hard to grow. The hardest thing will be harvesting at the right time and then processing the freshly picked leaves the correct way. As soon as you pick the leaves, they start to oxidize. If you want white tea you don’t let them oxidize very long at all and you generally use very young shoots. This means you would harvest very early.

For green tea you let them oxidize a bit but only it a little bit. Then you need to stop the oxidation process by using heat. You either roast the tea, as is common in China, or you steam the tea, as is more common in Japan. Either way you heat it to stop the oxidation process. If you let it oxidize completely, you get black tea.

For oolong tea you would stop somewhere in between green tea and black tea. There is actually a large variety of oolong teas. Some are just slightly oxidized and are almost green teas and others are much more oxidized. Darjeeling tea is a good example of the latter. Most people consider it a black tea, but it is actually an oolong tea.

Finally, there are also yellow tea and pu-erh tea, but I wouldn’t worry about those two. They are much more rare and much more complicated and if you are a first-time grower, you’re probably just going to make green tea or black tea or maybe oolong tea. In fact you will probably end up with oolong tea by accident.

Either way, your new organic tea will taste great and you’ll hopefully have studied up on the best way to brew and drink your variety. A safe bet for almost all types of tea is a nice see-through teapot with a strainer so you can watch the tea leaves unfurl. The infuser is not necessary, but it makes it much simpler to keep the tea leaves out of your cup. Many places in China just brew tea in a glass, so it is certainly possible to make good tea without an infuser. However you choose to drink it, I hope you enjoy your first batch and I know that your second will be much better than the first and your third better than that. Happy growing!