Manual picking: including direct hand picking, sickle/small scissors picking and big scissors harvesting. Picking directly by hand is labor-intensive and inefficient, and the fingers of tea pickers are very vulnerable to injury. Used before the' 90s. "Scissors harvesting" became popular after the 1990s, which is characterized by several times higher efficiency. However, the harvested tea leaves are uneven in length, with broken leaves and low quality. Most of them are used in a large number of colors, even for Tieguanyin. At the end of 1990s, the sickle/small scissors harvesting method was popular in Tieguanyin, which was characterized by keeping one bud for Shuang Ye harvesting, and the efficiency was slightly higher than that of the traditional direct manual harvesting method, and the fingers of tea pickers were not easily injured.
Machine picking: the advantage of automatic mechanical tea picking is the highest efficiency, and the disadvantage is similar to scissors picking. Under actual conditions, the choice of picking methods is not immutable. Tieguanyin, for example, does not always adopt the ideal way of "reaping with sickle/small scissors" into "one bud Shuang Ye", because Tieguanyin needs sunny days to make, but the sunny days in a tea season are often very limited. At this time, the problem of tea picking efficiency is highlighted. In order to catch up with the weather, it is often required to harvest all Guanyin tea in just a few days. At this time, it is necessary to harvest with scissors or machines.