Early Book Review: Grow Your Own Tea: The Complete Guide to Cultivating, Harvesting, and Preparing by Christine Parks; Susan M. Walcott

Grow Your Own Tea: The Complete Guide to Cultivating, Harvesting, and Preparing by Christine Parks; Susan M. Walcott is currently scheduled for release on September 1 2020. Consumer interest in tea has grown rapidly in recent years and continues to climb. Worldwide there are 25,000 cups of tea consumed every second—more than billion cups per day. For tea drinkers interested in the freshest flavor, growing the leaves at home is the ideal solution. Lucky for them, tea is not an exotic, hard-to-grow crop—it can be successfully grown anywhere that camellias can be grown. In Grow Your Own Tea, readers will learn how to cultivate, harvest, and process this venerable crop. Parks and Wolcott share details on how to get started; describe cultivation, long-term maintenance, and harvesting; show how to grow tea plants in containers; and describe how to process and store harvested tea leaves. This book includes information on how to produce white, green, oolong, and black teas.

Grow Your Own Tea caught my eye as soon as I saw it on Netgalley. I am an avid tea drinker and an avid gardener, so this book was right up my alley. I already grow many of my own herbs and have used my own mints and other herbs to flavor loose tea, but was interested to learn more about the cultivation and drying process. I had read about the different types of tea before, but I leaned even more about the history and diversity of tea in this book. I thought I was too far north to grow tea, but was thrilled to discover that there is a variety of tea I just might be able to cultivate and use. I found the information to be very well organized, accessible, and interesting. Everything a tea grower might need is covered, from how to plant, to how to harvest and make use of the results, and everything in between. I cannot wait to put my newfound knowledge into action, and to share the results with the other tea drinkers in my life. The resources and information at the end of the book was helpful as well.

Grow Your Own Tea is an informative and valuable resource for tea lovers. I am planning on buying a physical copy of this book for my own reference library.