Baozhong instead of bunny in the Easter week

I returned to San Hsia for the first Baozhong of spring 2023. Despite finding a fresh bunny hole dug in the tea plantation, I didn't encounter any bunny even though it was the Easter week! What I did find was a new batch of Qin Yu Baozhong made from the new cultivar #22. It's quite interesting to see this new plantation grow. Here you can see it 2 years ago. You can notice how the soil had to be protected from rain and erosion.

This is what the Qin Yu plantation looked on March 14, 2023:

And this is what it looked like on April 7th, 2023, after three weeks with plenty of rain in northern Taiwan (and higher temperatures than in winter). And this is taken 2 days AFTER the harvest!

If you go back to March 14th, you'll notice that on the right hand corner in the foreground, a few tea trees were replanted, because some trees didn't survive the early years of this new plantation.

The farmer has set up this little nursery in order to grow new tea trees. He grows them by planting branches of tea trees! 

In tea harvesting, producing and brewing, timing is everything! The window of when the leaves grow and mature just enough to remain fresh is narrow. It all happens within a few weeks, as we can see from these pictures.

Below are the 2023 (left) and 2021 (right) versions of this Qin Yu Baozhong. While both have these incredible floral fragrances that are characteristic for this cultivar, the 2023 Qin Yu Baozhong is more about freshness, while the 2021 is sweeter and calmer.