The work that is involved on an estate to ensure that healthy leaves continue to flourish and are skilfully prepared for your comforting cuppa!
The Bush
In its normal state of growth tea can grow into a tree of some 35 feet in height. For easy control and constant harvesting, planters have developed a pruning and plucking system which controls the bush at about two and a half feet in height, encouraging it to spread and fill across to the surrounding bushes. We call it the ‘plucking table’. Below are listed some of the main works to invigorate and nurture this amazing plant:
The picture below is of a bush that has just been pruned and is beginning to recover with new shoots and in about 90 days the bush will be able to be plucked in as a new field with the skilled new field pluckers.

Pruning
Each field is maintained on a cycle dependent on elevation.
Low elevation – pruned every 2.5 to 3 years.
Mid elevation 3 – 4 years.
High elevation 4 -5 years.
An estate will usually range from 1 – 6 Divisions and range from 50 (20.23 hect) to 4,000 (1,618.76 hect) acres in extent. The larger estates & groups are often made up of several original proprietary coffee estates. Thus 6 divisions may well be 6 old estates from the 1800’s.
Each year about 2 fields in each division will need pruning and brought back bursting with energy, to go back into plucking. A division is usually an area of some 200 to 300 acres. The area is divided up into fields, often with no obvious boundary. These fields vary between 20 to 50 acres each and about 7 -10 fields per division. When the first tracts of land were purchased from the crown for clearing, purchases were often in multiples of 50 or 100 acres. Pruning these days is fairly light in the main, it is largely a slash pruning, years ago we would have religiously cut out all dead wood back to live wood and shortened all new shoots to 4 inches. Recovery of the shoots back to tipping is about 90 to 105 days for new shoots to reach the level of the plucking table. Once the long green shoots are up tipping takes place. This is the first plucking in a new field from pruning and it breaks the shoot back to where the plucking level is required and this will be the plucking table until the bush is pruned again. The broken and plucked shoots are thrown on the ground as they are useless for quality tea. From then on the plucking cycle begins again every 7 days.
Each division has a band of trained skilled pruners and trains up two or three new pruners each year. Each pruner is given a set number of bushes 140 – 150 for a days work.
2. Drains
The picture below illustrates that estates create their own service roads and bridges to enable the estate vehicles to access the tea fields where the plucked leaf is ready to be taken with speed back to the factory to avoid deterioration and oxidising before rolling. New access roads had to be cut and rocks blasted with blasting powder or sticks of dynamite.

When Pruning of a tea field takes place, the opportunity is taken to spring clean the field. In order to control soil erosion from heavy rains before the tea field is planted out with vegetative propagated tea clones (VP) the field which is steeply sloping has 2 foot deep box drains cut across the hillside to the contour line. At the end of each box drain the wall leading to the next box has the top cut down so as to allow the dammed water in the box to overflow into the next box. This slows the flow of water and allows any soil to settle in the box. At this time the box drains are re-cut to their original depth and the soil carried into the tea rows above for spreading. Often these days a row of a local grass like Mana grass is planted along the top edge of the drains to again hold back soil.
3. Weeding
This is a monthly exercise which is carried out fairly gently without scraping the soil to any extent. Grasses and certain binding weeds are encouraged to combat soil erosion these days whereas in earlier years weeds were eliminated.
Traditionally every family received an area to work in their spare time for increased income. Usually the family would then leave grandmothers and grandfathers to do this, together with younger children who enjoy being in the fields. Any members of families who may have some genetic or physical problem that does not allow them to work in the normal sense could also be given weeding work which is light and provided an income to the family unit.
4. Manuring
In my grandfather’s days he often used horse and cattle manure, with compost and Poonac (the by products from the coconut mills) for manuring. Later the Colombo Commercial Co and Baurs introduced the modern scientifically formulated artificial manures and a formula was born for calculating the requirements of the bush. This is based on the application of 10 lbs (4.54 kilos) of Nitrogen for every 100 lbs (45.36 kilos) of made tea yielded. This and increasing areas of the new high yielding Vegetative Propagated (VP) bushes, resulted in rising yields and capacity problems in withering, which led to the trough withering system. Certain problems have arisen. For instance the 2025 clone combined with heavy manuring produces a very fleshy, watery leaf and this has created some problems when trying to maximize quality. The trough withering system is now the standard system and is one of the few new mechanical advances that have truly been as good as or bettered the old system.
5. Disease
In the 1960’s spraying of chemicals was the standard response to disease. D.D. for root disease fumigation and Dieldrin for shot-hole borer beetle, copper spraying for Blister Blight fungal spore attack on the leaf. It was realized that Dieldrin created as many problems as it solved, by killing the Braconid Wasp (Macocentrus hormonae) which parasitized the Tortrix moth and then led to Tortrix attack. The TRI concentrated on biological control, encouraging the right species of insect for nature to do the controlling. This has been a huge success story in the island and the International ISO organization recently congratulated the industry on its performance and the production of the cleanest teas in the world. Spraying residue levels were not recordable.
6. Nurseries
These are vital to sustain large supplies of stock for speedy planting in the short planting season, as the monsoons break.
Tea Nursery

The picture below is of the beds of VP clonal nodal cuttings with 1,000 cuttings to each bed. The plants will be planted out in the field after one year. The plants will be plucked at about 2 years.
a) A tea nursery, consists of a plot of mother bushes, of the clones that the estate has selected for their purposes. These mother bushes are allowed to grow their new shoots naturally until they reach about 18 inches in height when they are carefully cut with a very sharp knife by the nurseryman and he then proceeds to cut above each leaf node to provide a leaf with a short stalk beneath. These nodal cuttings are carefully retained in a bowl of water and then planted into ready made large beds of 1,000 poythene tubes filled with a prepared soil mixture. Originally the beds were stocked with bamboo baskets but to-day polythene tube is cut for the plant bags. The beds are shaded from the sun, watered and fed regularly by the nursery staff. Planted out at a year old and then cut across twice a year for a year to 18 months to encourage width before being brought into yield at 2 to 2.5 years of age.
Each mother bush can supply some 1,000 cuttings per year and are pruned at 15 to 18 months to encourage further supplies.
The original areas planted mainly in seed, are now 125- 130 years old and still in production but failing. This has meant a large replanting programme from the 1950’s accelerating in the 1960’s and still underway. The costs of this are very large indeed and a huge drain on estate finances, even with government subsidies. The basic premise is every estate should re-plant 2 % per annum of the total estate acerage in order to keep to an on going cycle of renewal that will maintain the ideal yield and therefore keep overhead costs down to a sensible level. As soon as yield falls, the cost of production of 1 kilo of tea rises.
Present day thoughts on the life of the bush have been revised in line with the greater yields and stress on bushes compared to the 1900’s:
Seed sown tea = 75 – 80 years life
V.P. planted tea = Ideally Low country 35 years. High grown 50 – 60 years.
When new planting is undertaken. the whole area is cleared and winched out. The soil is then deep forked down to 18” by hand, removing all roots, levelling, terracing and planting in Guatemala grass to renovate and improve the soil. This grass is lopped twice a year and laid on the soil to mulch for a period of two years.
The area is then holed and planted with the one year old plants at a rate of 13,500 per hectare. Planting distances have varied over the years with 4 feet x 4 feet, 4 x 3 feet and then 4 x 2 feet.
Shade Tree and Firewood Nursery
b) This is a separate nursery maintained to bring on species of trees for planting within the tea as shade trees (Albizzia, Grevillia etc), for wind belts (Acacia) and firewood plantations (gum). Some estates also plant up copses of pine and jungle trees for timber production. You will see that we use an estate tree (sustainable under this programme), for our wooden chestlets or boxes. At Le Vallon there was a green manure nursery in Colgrain division above Colgrain bungalow and I then opened a specialist gum nursery in No.2 field alongside and above the main cart road. At that time there was a large expanse of patna grassland above the main Government road at the end of Colgrain division which had once been a coffee estate with a tumbled down stone bungalow covered in bushes and small trees. The area was well over 100 acres in extent and a huge flow of blue gum plants were required to plant this up with fire belts cut across the hillside. This was to become a valuable source of renewable firewood for the two tea factories on Le Vallon as blue gum once felled will re-generate itself like coppicing. Thus the estates in those days were always thinking of ways that would allow the estate to be as self sufficient as possible, cutting down on expensive imports of oil to fire the furnaces.
Many factories were designed to take alternative fuels. Le Vallon factory was able to take firewood for its burners to fire the leaf, plus fuel oil and pelton power (water power) for driving the belts to drive machines and produce our own electricity. Today large internationally financed hydro schemes are in place. In the 1940’s our own family estate was totally dependent for electricity produced on the estate. This meant the charging of large banks of batteries in the bungalow during the day, ready for use at night. Each night the factory requested permission to stop the machines and the bungalow batteries took over. If the bungalow was hosting a party then the factory would be requested to keep the engines running and the night watchman would receive a telephone call from the bungalow when the engines could stop.
7. Replanting
Replanting Costs
At the present wages, replanting costs have gone above Rs 2.5 mn. Some companies who had Tea and Rubber did replanting whilst rubber prices were at an all time high about five years ago, but with the rubber prices recently collapsing, they too find it difficult to carry on.
Summary | Total cost per Ha Rs / Ha | |
Uprooting Year | 925,044 | |
Rehabilitation | 79,730 | |
Planting Year | 1,171,542 | |
1st Year upkeep | 257,625 | |
2nd Year upkeep | 321,289 | |
Total | 2,755,230 | |
Labour Cost | @ | 687.00 |
At this present time in 2016 there are approximately Rs.186 to the £1 sterling and this equates to an approximate replanting cost of £14,813 per hectare. Without replanting on a regular basis yields fall and overheads rise which equals bankruptcy.
8. Plucking

The picture above is of the ideal part of the new flush for top quality tea but these days hard to achieve in the interests of modern labour relations.
One of the most important operations to the tea-maker. I have discussed pruning as the starting point and the fact that from pruning the bush takes about 100 days to recover growth to the plucking table.
Each division has a new field plucking force, of usually 60 highly skilled pluckers (mainly women). They move in on the designated day with long level sticks and break back the new flush to the level, following every change in the contour of the ground, this gives an amazing smooth rolling carpet effect across every hillside and the new field will be a light fresh green colour. This first break is thrown to the floor in quality production and then the field comes into the divisional plucking cycle with every bush being plucked every 7 – 10 days depending on the weather. 7 days in wet weather, 10 days in arid dry periods, every day of the year. The pluckers fingers flick across the bush selecting the fresh new shoots with a bud and two leaves, some estates will take four leaves. Traditional rolled leaf requires greater disciplined plucking. CTC can deal with much coarser leaf. The pluckers also break back any coarse leaf or dormant shoots and throw them down on the ground, moving to the next bush and so on. Today it appears that the plucking round is set in stone at 7 days in rain or drought. The tight round apparently increases yield even if there is less leaf to take.

The picture above shows Robert Wilson observing new field pluckers using their sticks to maintain the ‘Mattam’ (Tamil for contour plucking).
A new field is designated as new for up to 2 years and then handed over to the old field pluckers who are not as skilled. The new field pluckers are numbered 1 – 60 and allocated rows throughout every field and they know those rows belong to them. This is used in determining and supervising responsibility for poor plucking. Once a field becomes an old field on its way to the next pruning, it produces a more mature leaf and the tea-maker will be aware of which fields are coming in each day. Their age and aspect on the estate and he will respond in manufacture accordingly.
The picture below shows the new ‘flush’ appearing above the darker mature leaves and broken stems where the plucker broke back to in maintaining the contour level.

There are many disciplines to be followed in plucking for the best production. It is vital to ensure that the leaf is weighed often enough, especially in heavy flushing periods after rain when yield increases, to ensure that the leaf is not crushed into the baskets or waiting around on the roadside for long periods. As soon as the leaf is plucked, withering starts and fermentation of any crushed leaf also starts. It is vital that estates invest in open weave baskets allowing air movement and bamboo supports to allow baskets to be stacked without crushing. At weighing it is important that leaf is not left lying on the floor and walked on but cleared constantly. With many estates having large areas of re-planted tea in the new clones the bushes have filled out to join each other and walking between the rows is harder, this has brought in plucking into sacks and then the leaf from the sack is transferred to the cane baskets at the field edge. I understand the idea but I am not convinced that this is best for the leaf as crushing from extra handling and shaking must take place. I also see too many instances of plucking that is too hard and includes leaf that is not ideal for rolling. I understand that these days the pluckers will down tools if they are disciplined too much because they lose weight and bonuses but tighter control would lead to better quality leaf. Green tea estates also practise this and perhaps they can get away with it where steaming is used. Certainly the modern C.T.C. system of ‘Cut, Tear & Cut’ machines will make a product from anything if quality is not a requirement.
9. Classification of teas by Seasonality
The map below explains the direction and influence of cool wind on the Tea districts on the Western flank of the central hills and lowland area in February/March, The Western Quality season.
A major concern here in the has to be the level of knowledge that consumers or indeed the general trade has about tea and how it gets to them. Once upon a time tea was part of what people learnt at school in Geography along with coffee and other products that the U.K. had been involved in during the Colonial era.
One of the basic facts that gets lost in marketing spiel by large companies is the classification of a tea by when it was produced during the year. Commercial companies convey as little as possible about their teas when they market them. It is as if they wish to divorce the production process from the marketing process.
The very finest teas will be produced at a very specific window of weather such as the Western quality teas in February to the end of March and within that window will be an even smaller window of about one to two weeks when the season is declared a season and the flavours are really concentrating within the leaves.
You can have SINGLE ESTATE teas – They have to come from a single estate but when???
A SINGLE estate can be from that core S/W or Uva season period – or just in the window either side which would be the next quality down as long as there is little rain on the estate.
A SINGLE estate STANDARD – These are still single estate but they are teas produced from the daily programme come rain or sunshine, blended up to a tea board standard laid down for each district or alternatively to a client requested standard. To bring such teas up to these marketable standards will require 8 % to perhaps 20 % of the classic seasonal quality leaf to be added to teas plucked in the monsoonal wet seasons.
Beware of seeing packets marketed with an estate name without a reference to it being of seasonal quality production or authenticated by the area tea board. If you are on a website, they may borrow ideas from other areas such as tea board sites or industry information sites and suggest that their teas are of the highest quality but unless you can detect quality you will be unable to classify the tea. ObviouslyPRICE will in the first instance generally define a standard from a seasonal tea. We buy our teas direct, we pack and ship those products direct to the U.K. & our foreign clients so even though their prices may seem reasonably high they are as low as we can possibly market them for that quality.

10.Yields
Early estates including our own in the 1900’s were yielding 400 lbs of made tea per acre (0.404686 of a Hectare).
(Remember from 100 lbs of green leaf in the field, we get approximately 20 to 22 lbs of made tea).
By 1953 our estate was yielding 915 lbs per acre. By 1962 it reached 939 lbs per acre. We sold the estate in 1954 to the Thondaman family ( started the first major union -CWC). The national average yield in 2005 was 1,500 lbs per acre (1,500 Kg / hect) as a result of much renewal of the tea stock with the replanting of tea fields with the new TRI VP clonal stock. Technically it is possible with the new clonal material for a period in small well managed areas to reach 4,000 Lbs per acre or kilos per hectare. However as stated elsewhere the estates have been inundated with several negotiations with the unions that resulted in excessive high wage awards with the results that funds for the required 2 % of an estate to be replanted annually could not be provided and now unfortunately yields are beginning to drop and at this very moment in October 2016 the estates have experienced an unusually long drought further lowering yields but producing teas of good quality receiving higher prices than at this time usually but not high enough to offset the lack of yield.
The above information was compiled by Robert Wilson, of Robert Wilson’s ‘Ceylon’ Tea U.K. and may not be used or copied without his permission and reference to source. 1998 – 2016.