Hannah Ellis's Senior Project: Tea Farming!

The final week! I had a great time with my project this week. The beginning of the week consisted odf a lot of weeding and plot clean up in preparation for the tea open house that happened Saturday June 12. On Tuesday, I spent my time clearing tea plant debris from the mother plot. Kacie and Gavin decided to prune the entire top half of the whole tea field on this day so I was in charge of clearing away all of the trimmings from the tops of the plants and making sure they weren't blocking the tea plants from getting sun or anything else important. I also did a little weeding on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Ayla accompanied me to the farm and we spent the whole morning weeding a new plot that is much smaller. The thistles were so so overgrown that there was more weeds than actual tea plants! After weeding all morning and having lunch, we then spent the rest of the afternoon packaging the final product tea for the open house. We weighed the tea and put it into little bags and sealed them. ...

This week, I continued to cut grass and weed for the entirety of my time at the tea farm. It was a little bit challenging because weeding and cutting grass by hand for whole days can get a little repetitive and tiring. Especially this week because it was so hot! I think most of my happy moments this week were at the end of the days when I had finished at the tea farm and was getting in the car to head home. It was super hot so turning on the air conditioner in my car riding home felt very good. Also, it felt good to have put in a hard days work and be able to relax afterwards in the cool car. Challenging moments from the week were cutting grass because my allergies were really not liking that activity. I don't think that I learned a lot of new things this week. I did learn a little more about tea processing and how it can be dried outside rather than inside. I think that my progress since week one is going well! I am really enjoying my time on the farm and next week I will have mor...