Tea Picking Times and Tea Leaf Requirements: Morning and Afternoon Are Best, Plus an Introduction to Sanwu Tea

The best time to pick tea is from dawn until before the sun rises; when picking tea, take care not to crush the tea buds with your fingers, but rather pinch them off with your fingertips, so as to keep the tea leaves clean.

The methods for plucking buds and leaves from the new shoots of the tea plant include hand picking and machine picking, among others.

1. Hand picking: (1) Pinch picking: also called snap picking; this technique should be used for all fine, tender standard plucks, including the top bud and the tipped leaves.

(2) Lift picking: this is the technique for medium-standard plucking, and is used in most black and green tea regions.

(3) Two-handed picking: this is an advanced hand-picking method for raising picking efficiency; it is 50-100% more efficient than one-handed picking, with a person generally picking 20-25kg at the low end per day and up to 35-40kg at the high end, but the tea plant must have an ideal canopy, a flat picking surface, and uniform sprouting.

2. Cutting harvest for edge tea: because the raw material is coarse and large, tools are mostly used for cutting and harvesting; the tools used in various places include small crescent-shaped iron scrapers, sickles, or tea-picking shears, among others. The tools must have sharp blades, and cutting must be quick, to avoid splitting the branches and affecting the sprouting of the next round of new shoots.

 Machine picking: a few days before machine picking, hand pick a batch of fresh leaves that meet the standard, so that the quality of the machine-picked fresh leaves can basically meet the requirements for processing middle- and low-grade strip tea, and the efficiency is more than 10 times higher than hand picking. After a tea garden is machine-picked continuously for three or four years, the buds and leaves gradually become smaller, the density increases, and the leaves become thinner.

3. Machine picking is mainly done with a reciprocating-cutting tea picker. It is driven by a small 0.6-14 watt gasoline engine or a micro motor of about 40 watts; the power is transmitted through a flexible shaft to the hand-carried picking device, driving the cutter and the leaf-collecting device in reciprocating motion.

The picked tea leaves are sent into the leaf-collecting bag by the action of a fan or sweep wheel. The picking quality is good, with a bud-and-leaf integrity rate of about 80%, and it is the main type in the development of non-selective tea pickers. The tea picker produced by Tong'an Technology [1] has good durability and can be used for professional commercial tea picking. Compared with ordinary tea pickers, it starts very easily, is very simple and convenient to operate, and has a wide range of applications; it can be fitted with various cutters. The tea picker is a good helper for cement garden maintenance; it is small in size, light in weight, and powerful, and is the number one designated brand among professional users! Advantages of tea-picking shears: 1. Relatively high efficiency.

Some practices in Taiwan, China, however, favor picking afternoon tea; they believe that tea at this time of day has no water on it, keeping the tea leaves crisp and refreshing, which is more conducive to making good tea.

Tea picking requirements:

 1. If the tea plant has been pruned, tea leaves below the picking surface should not be picked, so that the side branches become dense and the tree form is neat and vigorous.
2. Picking should proceed row by row and plant by plant, checking each clearly; do not pick only the plants with many buds and leaves while leaving those with few unpicked, so as to avoid reducing yield.
3. During picking, the picking standard should be strictly defined and strictly implemented, so that quality is uniform.
4. Attention must be paid to leaving reserves; fish leaves and old leaves must not be picked.
5. Do not pick when there is dew or after rain, to avoid the tea taste being astringent and thin, the liquor color turbid, and easy scorching during fixation.
6. Before picking, the tea plant should be shaken to remove dew, rainwater, dust, spider webs, and other unclean matter.
7. Never pick roughly; tea leaves that have been bent down should be restored.
8. For each clump, all buds and leaves that meet the standard must be picked clean in one pass, to avoid the trouble of going over the clump again (when picking, work from bottom to top, and from the edge to the center).
9. Old and tender leaves should be picked separately, to avoid affecting quality and causing trouble in processing.
10. When picking, do not break the tea leaves with your fingernails, to avoid tea juice flowing out and causing chemical changes that turn into black spots.
11. Develop the habit of early picking and tender picking, and pick early year after year.
12. It is advisable not to pick winter tea, so as to maintain the vigor of the plant.