#1 Upon this handful of soil
Glen Caladh Farm - Tea Diaries
Upon this handful of soil, humanity depends, husband it and it will give you food, fuel and shelter and surround you with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse, taking humanity with it.
Sanskrit Veda 200BC
It’s 10:30pm on a June evening 2020, Loch Ruel wears the pattern of the hills like silk. We are planting tea seedlings, each one so carefully that breathing becomes conscious, coaxing out the long fragile tap roots from the soil. After 6 years searching for our place in nature and by the sea, looking out onto the water from the doors of the polytunnel is a tonic for the spirit and a dream come true.
We came to Glen Caladh Farm from Edinburgh in 2017 with the aim to grow a tea plantation, to have land that we could farm, enjoy and sustain. The plan is to have a mutually beneficial arrangement with the land we take from as we think humanity would do better if this relationship were higher on the human agenda.
We have our first 2 acres of tea plantation and we are bringing on the next generation of tea in our polytunnel. We mow the pasture and try to promote wildflower meadows, over absent in the UK. We are experimenting with growing various plants that are happy with acid soil and abundant rainfall.
The forest management plan seems quite simple if we had the cash to implement it, as we could return it to Caledonian forest and let it look after itself. Our small vintage motor collection seems to grow with Duncan’s enthusiasm! A love of machines meets a love of plants… an incongruous mix. Duncan is as happy as can be and the machines seem indispensable at the moment for many tasks on a tea plantation.
On moving here we installed a micro hydro pipeline and the farm now chugs along, powered by the ever running river at the North boundary. We work building and growing and trying to start up a business to sustain it all.
I am starting this blog to talk about tea and nature, and to tell our tiny story of a Scottish grown single estate tea, its journey from field to cup and some other things along the way.