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I got to visit a tea farm here in Portugal last month, it's located close to Porto, they are aiming to make Japanese style tea.

Part of the plantation is in rows like this using the field that used to be a vineyard with fruit trees on each side (mostly apples and pears), you can see the difference between the plants propagated by seed and stake, stake plants are clones so they are all the same height and have the same leaf size leading to a neat looking hedge like you see in bigger plantations.

Propagated from seed:
Propagated by stakes:
The plantation aside from the ex-vineyard rows are in an open field:

The trees are still very young, the older ones were about 4 years old so they are just starting.
They are fully organic, for pest control the bushes are sprayed with a herbal mix (mostly chamomile) from time to time but what makes the difference according to them is the biodiversity, the different kinds of trees and bugs around mitigate pests and diseases associated with intensive single crop farming.

Sadly didn't take a lot more pictures because of my crappy phone, oh well, hopefully I'll visit again

Here's the project's web page https://chacamelia.com/en/project/about-us/

Wow, very interesting what this couple are doing, out on a limb sort of. The tea plants propagated from seed look super healthy, and smart idea to consult with the Morimotos. So do you think they plan to steam their leaves as in Japanese sencha? Enjoyed the video as well, Portuguese from Portugal is so smooth

Victoria wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 10, 2017 3:36 pm

Wow, very interesting what this couple are doing, out on a limb sort of. The tea plants propagated from seed look super healthy, and smart idea to consult with the Morimotos. So do you think they plan to steam their leaves as in Japanese sencha?

I tasted a bit of green tea they made and it was steamed like sencha but whole leaf, it produced a very smooth tea with no bitterness at all even brewed at ~90ºC but still retaining a sencha flavour profile, it was a bit weak though, maybe using gong fu parameters would liven it up or maybe it was a result of sencha processing without cutting the leaf, I don't know a lot about Japanese teas so I don't know how common that is.
I'm sure it will improve as they are able to produce more of it.

Victoria wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 10, 2017 3:36 pm

Enjoyed the video as well, Portuguese from Portugal is so smooth

She has quite a bit of german accent so it might not be the best case to compare Portuguese and Brazilian accents

Found another pic, of a tea flower: