LED Grow Lights Can Grow Tea Indoors:

Make your own matcha green tea at the Twelfth annual Greater Danbury Irish Festival.

Ives concert Park, Danbury CT

Our festival runs September 5th, 6th & 7th 2008

Mark your calendar! Learn all about the KIND LED K5 series of grow lights and their effect on tea plants

Three day pass only 20.00

Contact Chairman of the Festival Publicity Committee

Admission Prices

Adults $10.00/day
Children under 12 FREE w/adult
3 Day Advance Sale Pass $20.00
   

Our tickets are as always available at the gate but this year they are also available by visiting the box office on the Westside campus of WCSU or IVESCONCERTPARK.COM or calling 203-837-8499

This page is quite old and out of date. These days, the Danbury Hibernians are totally into matcha powder from Kyoto, and, more recently, in grwoing their own tencha in their indoor gardens using LED grow lights. To get up do date info, head to the new green tea Hibernians main page. But first, read on: we've provided some interesting reading material to make this page less boring and outdated.

It’s no secret that the Danbury Hibernians have, in the past two years, become obsessed with the Japanese green tea powder called matcha. We’ve scoured the web for as many sources of this stuff as we could find and we’ve ordered from them all. We’ve narrowed it down to our absolute favorites and we make sure we always have a full stock of it at any of our Hibernians meetings. No one will leave thirsty; everyone will get a taste of that thick, delicious cup of usucha tea. But recently we’ve gotten a lot of questions from our readers about the source of our tea. Many are concerned about radiation in tea leaves from Japan. We’ve discussed before how this is not really an issue. To make it short, basically the tea leaves used to make matcha come from Western Japan, for the most part.

These areas are far away from Fukushima where the meltdown happened. There is no radiation in these leaves. But some people will be concerned, so we try to offer alternatives. Of course, there is China, but if you’re concerned about pollution in your tea, this is not the way to go. In China it’s almost 100% certain that there will be something in your tea that you do not want there. Stay away from Chinese tea.

What we have begun doing recently, and what you might want to do, too, if you’re one of our more organic gardening loving readers, is to just grow your own tea at home. It’s much easier than it sounds.

The impetus came from an article we read. It talks about a farmer in Japan growing his tea indoors. He uses similar principles to hydroponic farmers. If you have the space, the main expense will probably be the lighting.

You could go with florescent grow lights, as they are the cheapest, but their output is not really strong enough to feed a large indoor garden.

An HID system (High Intensity Discharge) is much better suited. You would want to go with two bulbs: HPS bulbs, which stands for high-pressure sodium, take over during the flowering stage of plant growth. During this stage your flowers need light that is heavy in the red spectrum and HPS bulbs are just that.

Prior to the flowering stage comes the vegging stage. For that, you would want to use MH bulbs. MH stands for metal halide. These bulbs have a lot of blue spectrum light, which mimics natural sunlight and is what your plants need to grow quickly and strongly.

The combination of these two bulbs will grow some great tea plants, but there is a drawback. They consume a lot of electricity and produce a lot of heat, so you will have to spend money and more electricity costs on cooling your indoor grow room.

To avoid this, we suggest going with an LED fixture. Check out this site for a great selection of LED grow lights, including the extremely popular kind LED K5 XL 1000. You see they are much more expensive than HID systems, but that is only the initial cost.

After two or three years, you will make all of your money back in energy savings and also in what you save by not having to constantly replace the bulbs. Furthermore, you do not have to spend money on expensive cooling system. LED grow lights run cool and will not overheat your grow room.

The KIND K5 XL1000 LED grow light we mentioned above is a best seller for a reason. It contains 12 bands of light, giving you the full-spectrum that any plant needs to grow. It has preprogrammed modes that will take your plant from the first stage of growth, the cloning stage all the way to harvest. You not have to do any guessing as to which spectrum is best for which stage or how long your lights need to be on during the day. The preprogrammed modes will take care of all of that for you.

Kind K5 XL1000 LED grow light

In addition, this light is very easy to install. Simply hang it above your plants, plug it in, and select the mode on the remote. That’s it, your tea plants are feasting on the kind LED’s high PAR output and will actually grow better than they would’ve outdoors.

Your first grow with an LED light will probably yield less of a harvest then you might hope for, but that is to be expected. There is a bit of a learning curve and by the second or third or fourth grow, your little indoor tea garden will have an output that rivals any plantation in the world’s top tea growing areas. Of course, you still have to adjust the nutrients in the soil and all the other things, but if you do this right, you can grow yourself some wonderful tea leaves.

So what you think? Do you want to give it a shot? Get yourself some tea plants, get a couple of planters and fill them with soil, get a KIND XL1000 LED grow light and start growing. A few months from now when you harvest your beautiful tea leaves, leaves that you know exactly where they came from and you know there is no pollution stuck to them, you will be glad you read this article and took action. Drink up!