Time to grow your own cup of tea for a truly British cuppa!

Michael Wale reaches for his allotment shed kettle and reports on home grown tea

- Michael Wale

We’ve all experienced that dreaded moment when you go to make yourself a cup of tea on your allotment, only to find you have run out of tea. So why not grow your own and never run out in the future?

It will take a lot of care, a few years, and some good luck. However, it wasn’t initially Lucy George’s plan to become a tea grower on the family’s small farm seven miles from Cardiff.  

She went to the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, where she took a course in business studies. It was never her ambition to become a grower, and when she left college she worked in the machinery business.

But then in 2002, her parents said they were going to retire and it was time for her to return home and run the family farm. Mostly, the farm grew soft fruit for pick-your-own and used it to flavour the ice cream production, a business that had been started by her mother in the 1980s.

However, she felt there was a need for diversification and to take a completely different direction that would give her a stability of income. Everything she had been involved with before had seemed to be seasonal.

Randomly, she admits, she came up with the idea of growing tea having researched it on the internet and found it was being grown in Scotland and Cornwall. She explains: “ I got a tea consultant in.  I took the decision to grow from seed, but It is quite an expensive crop to grow. I got the initial seed direct from the former Russian state of Georgia, and also Nepal. Tea seeds aren’t that expensive.  I bought 360 seeds to begin with. After that I was getting 20,000 a year over the next three years”.