I've got a good url on the botany of the tea plant somewhere.
Apparently I should find it again. Everyone once in awhile I'm allowed
to walk the plank backwards till I fall in. Don't make me rise up from
Davy Jones' Locker if I ever discover that the tea bush is allowed to
flower in Japan for whatever reason. Interesting your comment about
the Xiao (mini) tuochas. I mention recently buying some in Chinatown
and not caring for the taste compared to other cheap green puerh. I
just looked again and the only English is Green Tea and I can't find
any characters for Sheng or Puerh. The leaf you can peel with hand. I
think it is an ordinary green tea in tuocha form without much taste.
Can you describe the surface of the wulong and TGY tuocha and how hard
it is. If it looks like the ones we've seen then problem solved. It
is compressed for whatever reason. It could very well be that the one
tea I described as a seed is really a seed. The larger pod and nugget
is definitely rolled leaf and hard beyond belief with a completely
smooth sealed like surface. The ginseng would have to be acting as a
hard glaze hiding the irregular surface of the rolled leaf and
preventing it from coming apart after several infusions. I mentioned
before the TenRen King tea with American Ginseng you find behind herbal
counters. It is so expensive I've never cared to buy some to even
discover if the grade is similar to what I'm talking about. Someone in
Fujian is producing at least 3 different non flavored commercial
oolongs with a grade of tea I haven't seen before. Five if you count
the obvious RenShen already mentioned from China and Taiwan. Sometimes
I think my posts give people a bad hair day.

Jim

kuri wrote:
> "Space Cowboy" > wrote in message
>
> > I thought the tea plant would go to seed if left on it's own.
>
> Tea seeds in Uji have 1 cm of diameter, and they appear when the leaves are
> old and thick at the end of Summer.
> It's much bigger than your pods. I don't know for other sorts of tea bush,
> but that seems unlikely.
> They may have used the young tips not fully developped.
>
> >The TKY is not flavored with anything because I drink the
> > Orthodox versions enough.
>
> Tea flavored tea ? They coat it with the powder of the same tea ? I don't
> know what that would bring exactly, but my supermarket now sells wulong and
> TGY in shape of mini tuo-chas, because it looks cool and it's convenient (
> dosed for one standard pot, easy to carry). Maybe the coating protects the
> leave from staling.
>
> Kuri