The Lion's Rear

I have two Tea plants, Julie and Saint Frank. Julie is a Juliette cultivar plant from Camellia Shop, and Saint Frank is a San Francisco cultivar from the same shop, purchased at the same time in 2019. Making enough tea to brew 1-1 with people and gift to friends is a Hypergoal .

• soil pH of 5.5-6.0

• They like to be moist, never dry and they will not tolerate wet feet.

We suggest planting on a slightly raised planting to help with drainage. Provide a 2-3” mulch with leaves, straw or bark - never rocks or rubber mulch.

• Use soil destined for azaleas or other camellias

• Fertilize with Hollytone four times a year

• Get an organic oil soap to control aphids and mites

• Don't use a time-release or granular fertilizer because that can cause burning

• You must feed regularly, once every 7-14 days during growing season.

When planting in containers:

• Keep roots close to the top of the container

• make sure there are drain holes

• fill the very bottom with pebbles so that the drain holes don't clog

Did a pretty heavy prune and propagation on [2024-02-11 Sun].

So one of my tea plants, Saint Frank has slowly gone dormant or died since I moved from Seattle to Eugene, OR . It was the more dominant plant when I lived in Seattle. But Julie, the other has gone crazy since we moved down here, but the plant has grown at an angle toward the sun and very planar, not really a bushy, three dimensional plant.

To start I took all the "soft" wood off of the healthy adolescent plant and picked twelve to put in to rooting hormone and potting soil in reusable cube trays.

I'm not sure most of these will survive long enough to be put in the ground but they're on my balcony for now. I'm excited to think about putting at least 14 mature plants in to the ground in like 5 years from now. It's the first "real" step toward this hypergoal of Growing and Processing Tea I've made in a while.

I thought about taking some leaving some fresh tips to ensure that i have some tea to fry in the spring or summer, but you'll notice the mature leaves on Julie aren't super healthy. I need to "debug" this, I think they were just getting too much water, or the soil did not drain enough. Would love some feedback.

So i just took all the soft wood for propagation, basically cut back to the closest node, and i took out some cross-branches and generally tried to shape the plant to encourage bushing by removing woodier bits. A bit of Bonsai .

Frank is so sad. I feel bad. It did not fare well with the more fair weather. At the end of fall it only had a single green tip, on this one low branch. Every other tip was gray and dead. so I chopped all that off. I hope that little bud wakes up in the sun without all that dead weight. Fingers crossed.