Tea plucking is the process of picking mature tea leaves for tea and tea-based products. It can be done manually or with machinery, depending on the type of plant and growing conditions. Manual plucking allows for visual evaluation of each leaf, while machinery is faster but risks harvesting immature leaves. Advances in technology have improved the accuracy of machinery, reducing the need for separating harvested leaves from other plant substances.
“Tea plucking” is a term that is used to describe the activity of picking tea leaves deemed ready for the preparation of tea and tea-based products. Tea leaf harvesting is a process that can be done manually or handled using machinery that helps speed up the harvest of the crop. Effective tea harvesting involves the ability to identify when the leaves of a particular tea plant have reached the desired level of maturity and making the effort to extract only those leaves, allowing the remaining leaves to remain on the plant and continue in the ripening process .
The exact procedure used in tea plucking will vary. Attention is paid to both the type of plant involved and the conditions in which the plants are grown. Typically, harvesting will involve determining which leaves are ready for harvesting and then engaging in that activity at certain times of the year when the plants are considered to be at their best. Determining when to harvest often depends on prevailing weather conditions and the impact harvesting will have on the remaining leaves that will be harvested later.
Traditionally, tea plucking has been done manually. Using this process has some advantages, as it allows the trained individual managing the collection to visually evaluate each tea leaf before it is plucked. The actual plucking can be done with specially designed shears, or by gently grasping the stem of the leaf, squeezing the stem between the nails of the two fingers involved, and delicately tearing the leaf from the plant.
Larger operations sometimes use machinery to aid in the tea harvest. While it is faster and very useful in harvesting large quantities of tea leaves for mass production of tea products, there is an increased risk of harvesting immature leaves and even parts of the plant as well. It is not unusual for additional machinery with winnowing capabilities to be used as a means of separating the leaves from any other plant waste unsuitable for the production of dried teas and other tea products. The decision to use tea harvesting machinery is increasingly common, especially when plants are grown as a primary crop. Thanks to advances in design and technology, the equipment used in tea picking today is able to conduct the picking with greater accuracy, which in turn helps reduce the amount of time and resources spent separating harvested leaves from other plant substances.
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