Spring green tea or Winter green tea?

Most tea drinkers blindly think spring tea is better than other harvest, but I have found out that there are different qualities in each harvest and different processing styles that bring out the best of each harvest.

Spring tea and seasons.
Sencha is a specific style of processing. Typically steamed at the initial processing stage and slowly rolled into dry leaf. This style processing benefit from young tender leaves and high level of amino acids because of brewing practices that follow the processing. It allows the leaf to bring out concentrated tea liquor and full range of flavor. Sweetness, astringency and bitterness in balance. Similarly each processing style is developed to express the best of desired tea type and their particular harvest.

If Winter harvest was used for sencha processing, undesired quality in sencha is quite obvious due to nature of sencha processing that expresses dynamic range of flavors and aroma.

Winter tea has its own unique quality and cannot be processed in the same way for the best winter harvest quality.

..., but why do they process it in the same way? No wonder winter tea in Japan received bad reputation about their quality because they use the same sencha processing style.

The most important part is its economy of tea processing. Since fall and winter tea generate little profit and a lot of people rather not harvest winter tea at all, but there are nearly extinct regional processing styles also unfortunately called bancha.

I looked at various other types of winter harvest that adapted completely different processing styles. In rural regions of Japan where winter tea was quite common until recently, there are handful of devoted grandpa and grandma still doing the traditional regional processing.

Winter Tea
I started experimenting with winter harvest a few years ago. There are a lot of regional recipes using fall and winter teas. They can be very wide range from green tea to black tea to post fermented tea. Even within green teas there are so much variations in how they processed. Mostly what was available to process tea at each household was the limiting factor. Iron wok, steamer, drying room, etc

Looking at regional green teas, I found that there are simple sun dried green tea tea, labor intensive pan-fired tea, half-finished tea and lots more. Perhaps I will talk about individual style in the future.

Green Pepper Rot Test

I had a really good year with green peppers this year. I like slight bitterness of Hawaiian thin wall green peppers. Just as I like bitter melon too.

Anyway, so I did a rot test.

I found that as most green peppers left on the plants turn red and fall on the ground, harvested peppers did the same. They slowly dry and turn red. There are few that melt into slime.

The garden space that I grew the peppers were of course used no-fertilizers. No chemical fertilizers, no organic fertilizers, no chicken manures, no animal manures. Only thing used was ground where leaf litter naturally decomposed on the ground so much like planting in a natural forest environment.

Some people just don't get it. Understandable, I was like that too. Too much confidence in their organic fertilizers and natural things are all good. Once I said "using no-fertilizers even organic fertilizers" and a lady told me "oh, so it's the same. I only use chicken manure."
Chicken manure is an organic fertilizer. It's just not commercial organic fertilizer if you get it from your chickens.

Anyway, I need a comparison study to be able to really see the difference. I only know what no-fertilizer vegetables do, but typical organic vegetables with proper nutrients and minerals may not be as bad although I hesitate to contaminate good soil with organic fertilizers.

Vegetables that melt into slime

I was reminded by one of farm helpers we have that some vegetables that are stored at room temperature are not safe because of salmonella and other potential food poisoning.

According to his findings, vegetables start to deteriorate after harvest and increase the population of potentially health hazard organisms.

I agree with certain aspects. If chicken manure or other animal manure are applied, there is always potential contamination. This is one reason natural farming insists on using no animal manure sources.

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So here is my testing method.

Store vegetables at room temperature or in a refrigerator and see how long it takes for the vegetables to turn into slime.

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I found that many vegetables I got from farmers market or stores melt into slime in matter of less than a week.

Have you had any experiences looking through vegetables in a refrigerator and wondering why the vegetables go bad so quickly? Natural farming slime experiment showed that there are too much free nitrate absorbed by plants. Generally nitrate comes from application of fertilizers both organic and conventional. Generally organic fertilizers tend to be worse because organic growers tend to overdo with organic fertilizers because they don't burn the plants as much as chemical fertilizers. so the result is not as clear when growing, but consumers are the ones that really see what's wrong.

Read next story of my Green Pepper storage test.