Yiwu Outdoors

Before I bought my humble garden cottage,  I lived in an industrial loft space to give my husband more studio space.  I would take my tea on the cement rooftop garden with a few scraggly potted plants-  I vowed I would find a cosy home surrounded by leafy trees.  

When you drink a lot of ho-hum teas, natural surroundings are one of the ready ways to enhance your tea session.  The fact the tea happens to be kind of uneventful doesn't bother too much when one enjoys birdsong, greenery and dappled sunlight.  As most of us work indoors most of the day growing pale and sickly,  any time spent under an open sky is precious.

The tea in the first photo is 2011 EoT GFZ sent to me by Israel- a pretty fine Yiwu to be taken indoors or out.  But it's apparently still not magical enough for me to gushingly spout a full exclusive post.  This is unfair to this tea as I haven't felt motivated to dissect a tea for a proper review in quite a while.  This tea has one of the unique effects that I can taste the sweetness somehow in my teeth. It's hard to explain but more likely it coats my outer teeth with a sweetness.  I've noted better Yiwus stimulate various tastebuds on the roof of my mouth or under my tongue that I didn't know existed.   I alternate between wanting to hoard such Yiwus and accepting Yiwus don't natively match my preferences. Triggering hidden taste receptors alone does not always make for a compelling tea for me- a tea has to engage the mind.  My scattered brain stubbornly refuses to gather focus.

When I finally found a shoebox of a home on a tiny plot of land, I naively thought such a teensy patch of earth was one of the things in my life I could easily control.   Even a tiny garden can possess a mighty will of it's own and grow out of control within a single season. The house eater rose- the innocently pink bloomed Cecile Brunner spans fifty feet across encroaching half my backyard. While I give it weekly haircuts with pruning shears so no one's eye gets poked out, my husband battled it a few years ago  hacking away two truckloads of thorny canes before giving up.