Our Visit to the Charleston Tea Plantation (Garden) Last Month

On this past October 25th, the morning after driving in to Charleston, South Carolina from Asheville, North Carolina, Melissa and I decided to go west and explore two of the area's features: the Angel Oak Tree on John's Island (click HERE for my article) and the Charleston Tea Plantation, which seems to be in the process of being renamed Charleston Tea Garden most likely because "plantation" carries with it connotations of slavery.  In any event, we managed to get past the morning precipitation by the time we arrived there, beyond the aforementioned Tree and onto sparsely populated Wadmalaw Island.  The first thing you notice driving into the place are the rows upon rows of shortly and very evenly-cropped hedges of tea plants.  This is because the choice leaves are cut from branches grown past a certain height by a custom-designed harvester they call the Green Giant (which is in the above pics)...this machine drastically cuts down on the labor formerly needed to tend and harvest the plants.  We parked and went inside, just in time to go on their trolley tour around the farm, with the driver and a recorded tour guide giving out probably more information about tea farming history and its cultivation than I needed to know.  When we got back to the main gift shop area we sampled some of their teas, browsed around, and then went into the back on a walking tour of the facility's tea processing machines.  I hadn't been aware that different kinds of tea didn't necessarily grow on different types of tea plants, but were rather the products of different stages in processing.   At the end, we naturally bought some of their teas and left with a sense of tranquility from our visit...everyone there was friendly and obviously enjoyed their work.  During the tour it was claimed that this is the only substantial tea farm in the continental U.S. and that the site was selected because of the soil quality here as well as the location in a wet lowland area at this latitude.  Bigelow Tea Company now owns it...I enjoyed the experience but most definitely would have enjoyed it more if it were instead about my preferred drink, coffee...

Just Finished Reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath is one of those books that I should have been assigned during high school English class...how I missed it is beyond me.  In the ninth grade, I did get assigned The Pearl, another novel by John Steinbeck, one I intensely disliked at the time and which kept me from approaching this great author's other works for many, many years.  But a few years ago I read his Of Mice and Men, a brilliant work, and just now finally tackled what is probably his most famous novel, which came out in 1939 and just the following year was made into a classic movie starring Henry Fonda.  Fonda's character, a young man named Tom Joad, has just been released from prison and is returning home to his family of tenant farmers in rural Oklahoma...only to discover upon arriving that they have had "their" farm seized by the bank after Dust Bowl failures in crop yield had placed them behind in payments.  Many of the Joads' neighbors are likewise pulling up stakes and heading to California, where handbills flooding their area are proclaiming jobs abounding in that state's diverse agricultural community.  It is the ordeal of the Joads...with Tom's blunt, common sense take on the proceedings, that defines this story of greedy exploitation by the wealthy, irrational prejudice by those feeling threatened by the incoming "Okies", and the bonds that develop among the poor families desperately searching for work to feed and shelter themselves.  The Grapes of Wrath is an exposé story of this dark period in our country's history...I haven't yet seen the movie but plan to soon: I've read nothing but good things about it, although I suspect that some of the book's rawness may have been smoothed over for the big screen.  But first I recommend you read the book: Steinbeck makes you feel like you're right there with the Joad family, alternately suffering and rejoicing with them along their troubled journey.  As for other John Steinbeck novels, I'm currently reading his more lighthearted Cannery Row and look forward to East of Eden and a hopefully more mature rereading of The Pearl...