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On Your Farm: Welsh tea farm

Welsh tea farm

Welsh tea

BBC Radio 4 - On Your Farm, Welsh tea

Mariclare Carey-Jones is at a former fruit farm in South Wales, which now grows tea.

Mariclare Carey-Jones meets farmer Lucy George, who converted her family fruit farm in South Wales into a tea farm. How does the wet Welsh weather affect her crops?

After Lucy George took over the family fruit farm in the Vale of Glamorgan, she realised the business wasn’t really her ‘cup of tea’, so she decided to go into tea production instead.  Asked where the idea came from, Lucy says “I’m think I’m still trying to figure that out!" She adds: “One thing that really drove me was trying to find a product we could actually sell year round to have some more stability to the farm income.” Now, ten years on, she has a thriving business.

In this programme, Mariclare Carey-Jones visits Lucy’s farm to find out what it takes to grow tea in the Welsh countryside and what impact the Welsh weather has on the crop. “Some plants will tolerate the conditions, some will struggle, so it's really a numbers game of planting more and more tea plants and eventually ending up with plants that are actually enjoying the conditions here in Wales” Lucy tells Mariclare. 

Mariclare also joins Lucy in the on-site tea factory where the leaves are processed into a variety of teas. How do artisan producers like Lucy compete with the big tea companies? Leaves that don’t make the grade to sell as tea are used to make another range of drinks instead.

Produced and presented by Mariclare Carey-Jones

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