Recently, in preparation for a talk about the benefits of tea, I discovered several uses for spent leaves:

Rub a frying pan with damp tea leaves to remove the smell of fish, garlic or onion.

Scatter dried leaves on houseplants and water them with cold tea. Acts as fertilizer.

Burn dried tea leaves to drive off mosquitoes.

In China [...]

It was you who tutored
Me on the art of tea making;
So tender your fingers moved,
Picking the dried curled
Light, dark greenish pieces,
Sprinkling them over
The whizzing little pot,
An elegant Jing De Zhen                                        
That stood with its
Little spout spewing
Vapors that soon invaded
Our nostrils with the
Mind refreshing,
Sweet fragrance of pricey tea.
Your every graceful step
Doing a dance in my mind [...]

I saw an interesting article today called “Don't drink your calories”. Although the article tends to generalize about coffee and tea, they do say that “Green tea has been discovered to have terrific health benefits, less caffeine, and to boost your metabolism, helping you to burn fat. You can even drink it before you go [...]

Any of you who follow the research on tea know that one of the ongoing controversies has been the question of how tea can have such powerful health effects when we know that there are always such low concentrations of polyphenols that show up in the blood stream after consumption. It is a real conundrum [...]

Thus, seven years after Mr. Pepys drank his first cup of tea, Mrs. Pepys enjoyed a similar experience. Quoth his Diary of 1667: “Home and found my wife making of tea; a drink Mr. Pelling, the potticary, tells her is good for her cold and defluxions.” Defluxions notwithstanding, it must be a matter of regret [...]

There’s a lot of confusion about tea. There’s also a lot of confusion about how much tea to buy. Before T Ching, I would typically buy 50 grams of tea at a time when trying out a new tea. Once I knew I loved the tea and always wanted to be sure to have some [...]

The first cup moistens my lips and throat. The second cup breaks my loneliness. The third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration - all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores. At the [...]

The job of a parent isn’t an easy one. We are the teachers of our children. Yes, most of us enroll our children into public education and expect our local school systems to do the job. Many of us also send our children to religious training at neighborhood churches or temples. [...]

Let me start with a brief summary.
Tenbu (Dance in Heaven) and Tenbu Fuka (Dance in Heaven Profound) are unique sencha teas grown in Kagoshima Japan. These are organic, half-shaded teas that are covered a few weeks prior to picking, allowing only 50% of the sun’s rays to reach the plants.
Tenbu Fuka and Tenbu teas [...]

The son of the martyred king had in the meantime been restored to the English throne as Charles II, after having grown up in exile at The Hague. He had brought home with him a taste for tea and soon acquired a Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, who shared it. This explains the earliest Company [...]