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Zhornyna Experimental Tea Farm is not the most northern tea garden. Planters in Germany, Scotland, Northern China, and Canada claim that distinction but the rootstock that has evolved over seven decades of Transcarpathian winters may be a commercial success if it is both frost-resistant and good tasting. Photo courtesy of Maksym Malygin.
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Maksym Malygin at his desk and nursery in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photo courtesy Maksym Malygin.
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Zhornyna oolong draws praise. Photos by Damian Malygin.
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Photo courtesy Maksym Malygin.
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Photo courtesy Maksym Malygin.
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Control plants outside shelters are as hearty as those within. Photo courtesy Maksym Malygin.
Ukraine’s frost-tolerant tea cultivars, survivors of 70 years of prolonged winters with heavy snow and temperatures down to 26 below zero Celsius, hold the promise of expanding tea lands in northern climes.
Virtually all the world’s tea thrives in a narrow band between the equator’s latitudes of 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south. Rising temperatures within this band threaten to diminish the quality and reduce yields by 25% in key producing regions by 2050. Land suitable for growing tea will decline from 40% to 55%, and since demand is unrelenting, shortfalls are inevitable unless the tea lands are expanded. Researchers have identified hotspots in Kenya, India, and China, that will force growers to plant “upslope” at higher elevations where cooler temperatures prevail. Unfortunately, subtropical tea cultivars that make the best-tasting tea perish in a hard frost, expected above 7,500 feet.
Except in Ukraine.
In 1932, the Soviet Union decided tea collectives would meet to “…full satisfaction the Soviet people’s needs for domestic tea.” Nineteen state-owned tea plantations and nine factories were established on the Black Sea in Georgia. By the 1940s, Georgia’s 25,500 hectares were producing 30% of the tea consumed in the USSR. Researchers identified several cultivars capable of surviving heavy snowfall, but few of these cultivars made great tea.
In 1949 tea researchers at the Soviet Union’s research Institute of Tea and Subtropical Agriculture in Georgia, after surveying much of Transcarpathia south of Kyiv, decided that conditions in western Ukraine on Chervona (Red) Hora Mount near the town of Mukachevo were ideal for planting cold-resistant tea. Experimental gardens were planted in Crimea, Primorsky Krai (the Maritimes), and in the far western islands of South Sakhalin and Kunashir.
In Ukraine, they planted 50 acres from seed Georgian No. 2, Kangra, and a Japanese-Indian hybrid. Tea was grown on the plantation for three years, reaching a peak of 1.5 million kilos before the project was halted in 1953. Georgia continued to expand to 56,000 hectares in 1993, producing 75 million kilos of tea processed at 70 state-run factories.
Maksym Malygin, a process management specialist, living in Kyiv, revived the abandoned tea plantation in 2013. “After canceling financial support for research, the plantation was abandoned. Lots of tea bushes were dug and cut out, and only their roots remained. Thanks to the efforts of plantation workers, tea bushes still grow, but there is insufficient capacity to develop the plantation, Malygin explains.
His first concern was not finding a resilient cultivar. The 300 tea plants he pruned and protected survived winter temperatures of 26 below zero Celsius. His more significant concern is whether the large leaf plants would make great tea. After nurturing the grove and pruning, he waited four years to see if the leaves would make good tea.
He chose to make oolong, and in 2017 after a series of tastings by friends and tea professionals; he was ready to celebrate.
He has concentrated on propagating the subcultivar in the past few years. “The surviving tea plants are in five places. Each has different morphological features. Unfortunately, we still have not been able to find specialists in the post-Soviet years who could establish a tea variety according to the morphological characteristics of plants,” he said.
“In this case, we need to use DNA analysis, but we need to have data from old Soviet cultivars for comparison. My personal opinion is that the 300 bushes in the restored area descend from the Georgian No. 2 variety.
“The seeds from the surviving plantation trees have not matured for a long time, they are very few, and they are not complete. There are no seeds in the reconstructed experimental plot, but this is due to the forming pruning to restore full-fledged adult plants,” says Malygin. “It is because of this situation that we have launched cuttings rooting projects,” he said.
Malygin, who lives south of Kyiv, postponed his first recorded conversation due to air raid sirens. He and his family remain safe, but Russia’s invasion means “we will lose at least one year. Also, we will not be able to organize the collection of leaves to produce more tea.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-changes-the-future-for-tea-leaves/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-kenya-tea-idUSKBN2CR1Q6