Divisi
How to grow Tea
Camellia sinensis · Theaceae
Photo: SeanTwice · CC0
Tea (Camellia sinensis) is an evergreen highland bush you grow not for one harvest but as a living plucking table — a flat-topped hedge, kept pruned to about waist height, that pushes out soft new shoots again and again for a whole generation. What you pick is the tender tip: a bud with the two young leaves just below it ('two-leaves-and-a-bud'). New fields come from cuttings of chosen mother bushes, never from seed, so every bush is a known type. Above everything else, tea lives on sour (acid) soil — about pH 4.5–5.5 — and must never be limed. Keep it moist, keep it mulched, feed it steady nitrogen, and pluck it light and often, and one bush earns for you year after year.
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0 
Rogerirakoze · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Row spacing
- 120 cm
- Plant spacing in the row
- 60 cm
These are general figures for the crop, compiled from published agronomic references including FAO and CABI. The right choice for your field depends on your soil, rainfall and the yield you are aiming for.
Will tea actually do well on your land? Check your field against every crop in the catalogue — free, no signup. Run the free crop check →
Other names for Tea
tee · tea · thé · itiye · tiyi · chá · icyayi · chai
Working in buckets, bags or paces? The farming glossary turns the measures growers actually use into kilograms and hectares — what a 20 litre bucket of each crop really weighs, and how to size a field by walking it — alongside the Shona, Swahili, Ndebele and Yoruba words used in the field. Open the glossary →
Growing tea, stage by stage
Your tea year on an established bush: keep the soil sour and mulched, pluck the soft two-leaves-and-a-bud every 1–2 weeks, feed nitrogen back after the rounds, prune every 3–4 years to reset the table, and rush every pluck to the factory fresh the same day.
- Season start — clean, mulch and feed the table
- Pluck and feed, round after round
- Prune to rejuvenate the bush
- Get the green leaf to the factory fresh
6 step-by-step tasks in the app
Every task for tea — what to do, when to do it and why it matters — with the amounts worked out for your own field, reminders as each one falls due, and warnings before extreme weather.
Pests and diseases that attack tea
1 more threat tracked in the app
Divisi tells you which of these is a risk on your tea right now, when to walk the field looking for it, and what to do the moment you find it.
Frequently asked questions
What spacing should I use for tea?
Space tea rows about 120 cm apart, with roughly 60 cm between plants within the row.
What pests and diseases attack tea?
The ones covered in this guide are Algal leaf spot, Armillaria root rot, Bagworms. Each has its own page explaining how to identify, scout for and control it.
Grow tea with a plan, not a guess
Divisi turns this guide into a dated plan for your own field — what to do each week, reminders as tasks fall due, and warnings before extreme weather. Free for farmers, works offline.
Or check your field first