Shiding Bitter Tea Garden Hosts Spring Farm Day Event
The weather was mild, and just a few days after "Grain Rain" in April, the long-awaited Tea Seed Hall spring farm day kicked off. Early in the morning, the agricultural planning team arrived at the home of Brother Ye at the Shiding contract-farming farm to check on the transport cart. The cart was much smaller than expected; we had been a little worried at first, but watching the person in charge use an electric saw to shorten the branches and then skillfully load and tie them onto the cart, although the going was slower and the transport took longer, we still relaxed and accepted the situation. Sometimes things just work out in the end.
While we were confirming the transport cart, Brother Ye and Grandma Ye from the neighboring tea garden had already been busy since early morning, picking tea leaves in preparation for making this year's spring tea. Although Grandma Ye is advanced in years, she is still full of energy, picking tea leaves while asking about how we were doing and showing concern about the branch-moving situation that day. Tea picking is time-consuming and labor-intensive work; picking the tender leaves from the tea bushes starts at 4 or 5 in the morning, yet after each person's daily harvest is made into tea, the amount is only a tiny bit. As a result, there are fewer and fewer tea-picking workers today, or the traditional tea-picking girls we used to see. When we taste delicious Taiwan tea, we truly must be grateful for the hard work of these farmers behind it.
After the Tea Seed Hall team arrived, we began dividing the work of clearing the garden and moving branches. Everyone wore gloves and moved among the bitter tea trees on the hillside, forming a transport line, and soon the branches were slowly moved from up the mountain down to the flat ground below. But we also quickly began panting heavily, since after all the branches Old Lin cut down all had a certain length and weight, and in the process we still had to dodge the surrounding tea trees and bitter tea trees, winding along the mountain paths. The work continued until the lunch break, when everyone sat on picnic mats to rest, and then took part in plant arrangement, picking nearby plants and placing them into Tea Seed Hall bottles, arranging them as each person pictured in their mind, which also let everyone catch their breath.
"Grain Rain" is the last solar term of spring. Traditionally, whenever this season comes, rainfall is very abundant throughout the Yellow River basin of the mainland as well as the Taiwan region. The origin of Grain Rain is that farmers have just finished spring plowing around this time, and the rice seedlings in the paddies also need abundant rain to nourish them, so this season was named "Grain Rain." During the midday rest, sure enough, the mountain weather changed faces just like that; clouds and rain quickly gathered, and a heavy thunderstorm began to fall, forcing us to quickly evacuate the farm and go to Brother Ye's house to take shelter from the rain. When it eased a little, we went to Qingshui Temple to eat a local meat dumpling, paired with traditionally brewed sour plum juice, as lunch. The sudden heavy rain disrupted the existing schedule. Even though we were soaked through by the rain and our whole bodies ached from moving branches, we still enjoyed ourselves, playing around in the mountains, and felt even closer to the Shiding bitter tea garden.
