Tips on growing tea in Uganda

By Fred Kyambadde

Favorable climate

Tea is a predominantly grown crop in places of high altitude that have a chill climate all year round. This is why farmers like Margaret Kemigisa grow it in Kabarole and others in areas like Bushenyi and Kanungu.

Even areas where it is grown in Mityana and Mukono are hilly. Tea can also be grown in greenhouses provided the soils are a little more acidic.

Cultivation

Three considerations in planning a tea estate are climate, soil acidity, and labor availability.

Suitable climate has a minimum annual rainfall of 45 to 50 inches (1,140 to 1,270 mm), with proper distribution.

If it’s a cool season, with average temperatures 20 °F (11 °C) or below those of the warm season, the growth rate will decrease and a dormant period will follow, even when the cool season is the rainy one.

Tea soils must be acid; tea cannot be grown in alkaline soils.

A desirable pH value is 5.8 to 5.4 or less.

You can find out the pH after doing a soil test from Kawanda or Makerere University, among other places. 

A crop of 1,500 pounds of tea per acre (1,650 kg per hectare) requires 1.5 to 2 workers per acre (3.7 to 4.9 workers per hectare) to pluck the tea shoots and perform other fieldwork.

Mechanical plucking has been tried but, because of its lack of selectivity, cannot replace hand plucking.

Part of the 700 acres of land which has been planted with tea seedlings belonging to Muchiro parish in Kanungu town council

Pruning

Tea pruning is basically done in two main ways which are: pruning of the immature plant or the mature plant.

Pruning is a vital process that halts the vertical growth, enabling the plant to achieve the extended growth horizontally.

This eases the harvesting of tea leaves and allows easier budding.
It also allows branching in a superior pattern which will enable the plant produces more leaves plus buds.

Also pruning helps you remove the unproductive wood from the tea plant.

This entire process requires good quality work to properly shape the plants and effectively stimulate the rightful hormone in charge of vegetative plant growth.

Harvesting

To generate good quality tea, it is advised that you pluck only the second and the third leaves together with their bud.

It is also wise to prune the mature leaves prior to starting with the harvesting.

The above mentioned plucking method is referred to as the fine plucking.

With this technique, chances are high that the produced tea will be of excellent quality.

Plucking of more than two leaves together with the bud is called coarse plucking and the tea quality produced from this technique is very low.

For that reason choose the harvesting technique you want to use basing on the quality and the quantity of tea you want to produce.

Fine plucking technique certainly produces better quality tea, whereas coarse plucking produces more quantities of tea.

The processing method will then determine whether the final product is green tea, black tea.

Tea tree care

For starters, it is often better to acquire plants that have already grown. These can be got from nurseries ran by farmers like Kemigisa.

Market

Annually, Uganda earns about US$90-100 million and the crop is one of the country’s traditional exports.

The industry employs over 62,000 people, supporting more than 500,000 dependants in Uganda.

Small scale farmers sell their tea to processing factories like Mukwano, Igara, Tamteco.

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