The Dream of a Tea Garden, Stage 1
I apologize to all of you who have been waiting in vain to receive a newsletter in April and May! I have used the Corona crisis to start a long-awaited project that I have dreamed of for years, namely the establishment of a tea garden and a tea retreat in Denmark. Everything suddenly fell into place in March when we sold our house in Hjortshøj in just two days, and then the dream became a reality. On June 1, we moved to Mols Bjerge near Ebeltoft. A huge house and 5 acres of land will now form the framework for our tea garden and tea retreat. This is the beginning of a new adventure.
Molbo Tea Garden
It shall be called Molbo Tea Gardens & Tea Retreat! I have just moved to Mols, so technically I am a Molbo. Several people have expressed that this is not something you can call a tea garden. The Molbo people are seen as foolish jokers who cannot be taken seriously, and everything they do goes wrong. Well, that is precisely why it should be called “Molbo” – growing tea in Mols must be a Molbo story. It is up to us to turn a seemingly silly idea into a success!
Chinese Guests
A year ago, we had a lovely young Chinese couple staying with us – Hui and Yahong. They were looking for a new place to live, so my husband drove them around from one property to another to find their dream home. They spotted a huge house in Mols with a lot of land. It was far too big for them, but my husband thought I should take a closer look at it, and during 2019, ideas began to bubble up. I couldn’t help but sense a great potential for a tea garden with an accompanying tea retreat – imagine being able to grow and produce tea in Denmark!
Danish Tea Gardens
I know that Jais Westh Lauritsen, founder of Chaplon, tried it in Roskilde without success, but since then I have met several tea farmers from many countries who produce some of the finest tea in the world. I have friends and contacts who grow tea in Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, and Italy, not to mention those in the USA. I have met producers from Berlin, the Netherlands, France, and Portugal, so why not Denmark? I began to explore the possibilities. Perhaps the time was right now?
Tea Masters Cup
Everything started to take shape when we held the Tea Masters Cup in Copenhagen in September 2019. One of the participants was the Chinese Dr. Fan Deng, who co-owns tea gardens in Duyun with her husband. She had spent some time in Denmark while pursuing her Ph.D. at AU in Faulum near Viborg and was to spend a few months in Denmark in 2020. Fan has studied under Mogens Greve, who is the country’s leading expert on soil conditions in Denmark. We arranged a meeting, and in December we took soil samples from several areas, both in Hjortshøj and in Mols. It turned out that the soil in Mols was best suited for growing tea. The soil here was porous, had no clay, and the pH value was perfect. I remember from my stay in India that what is crucial for a tea plant is that water drains away quickly, as the bushes cannot tolerate wet roots.
The Beginning of 2020
At the beginning of 2020, I was busy traveling around Europe to develop the curriculum for an international tea education for the European Tea Society, which has now changed its name to the European Specialty Tea Association. I also managed to arrange the first Tea Masters Cup in Ireland, and just before I was to finalize the description in England, all the chaos with Covid-19 hit. Suddenly, there was room to revisit the idea of a tea garden, and the house along with the land was still for sale.
Lockdown
Just before the lockdown, we invited three real estate agents to assess our house. One of them wanted to bring a client by that Monday, so we got busy painting, sanding, and polishing. The house was sold on the spot, and we had to move by June 1. Therefore, we immediately had to purchase the property in Mols plus additional land.
All the furniture was stacked in two twenty-foot containers and placed outside in the yard. Now we have craftsmen painting, repairing, and building. If you want to know how everything progresses, you will have to follow along in the next installment about Molbo Tea Garden and Tea Retreat.