How the tea field would change in autumn?

Dear our valued customers,

We hope you are doing well. In October, here in Kagoshima, Cosmos is in full blooming and the first new rice of the year have been harvested.
When it comes to October, there is the Halloween. The origin of Halloween for the ancient Celts, it was an event to celebrate the autumn harvest and drive out evil spirits. Now in Japan, it is more like a festival for enjoying “Trick or Treat”, sweets, Halloween decorations and a costume party.

How the tea field would change in this season? From now on, when the Akibancha, autumn harvest is over, the tea plantation will enter the fallow period. For preparing the following year’s new harvest, tea leaves are cut, and if it is deep cut, we could see the brown branches parts. Unlike the vivid fresh green color’s tea fields, the brown branches field can be seen, there might be felt little bit unique than the usual.

＼Why is it cut so much?? ／

There are two types of cutting, Trimming and Pruning.
Trimming is usually carried in autumn season, (or spring, it depends on the regions) by doing that, the next shoots grow all at once, so that the old leaves and stems are not cut together when their harvest.
Pruning is to cut the brunches short, therefore, the amounts of new shoots will be decreased, but on the other hand, a new buds tend to be big and its quality recovered and better. It is usually done after first flush and second flush. Moreover, by managing the tea field’s height, it gets easy to do harvesting work. There are some types of cutting depths, so the artisan farmers adjust it with the condition of tea fields considering the period of duration to restore and growth of the tea.

Yellow color of new harvest tea fields, dark green fields, black or silver fields with the covering the cloths before its harvest, and brownish fields that have been cut between harvests… Tea fields can be seen a lot of varieties of changes throughout the year. In this newsletter, we introduced about the cutting of tea field. As opposed to the tea fields that going to have a fallow period, we will be busy to have a gift season from now. We hope Kagoshima’s tea will be chosen one of these! Thank you for reading. Trick or Treat! Happy Halloween!

References： Nihoncha Instructors Association (edit), Nihoncha Certification Committee (supervised), Nihoncha-no Subetega Wakaru Hon
The book the tells you everything about Japanese tea. Official text book of Tea Certification. (Nihoncha Instructors Association, 2008)　(from p 86 )