The life of tea plants from seedling growth to senescence and death can be divided into four stages: seedling stage, juvenile stage, adult stage and senescence stage.

Seedling stage is the beginning of tea life. It takes about 8-9 months from the maturity, sowing and germination of seeds to the first stop of growth of aboveground plants.

The young age is about 4-5 years, which is an important period for cultivating tea trees and crowns. In the last 1-2 years of these four or five years, that is, in the later period of adolescence, you can generally take the way of topping and picking tea leaves to get income. Adult period is a period of vigorous vegetative growth and reproductive growth of tea trees. In the case of good nutritional status, it generally lasts for about 20 years, which is the period when tea trees exert the greatest economic benefits. After repeated picking, the senescent tea tree forms a "chicken claw branch" with fine branches at the top, the germination ability is weakened, the bud leaves are thin, and the yield is obviously reduced.

Therefore, it usually takes 3-4 years for cultivated tea trees to be officially picked. Picking tea is an economic benefit for tea growers, but it is a stimulus and harm to tea trees. Therefore, for tea trees in the picking period, it is necessary to strengthen fertilizer management, supplement nutrition in large quantities, and maintain sustained high yield and high quality.

Tea picking is to pick the leaves of new buds on tea trees, which are composed of buds and leaves. Picking one bud and one leaf is called "one bud and one leaf", picking two leaves is called "one bud and two leaves", and so on, including one bud and three leaves and one bud and four leaves. When the bud leaves gradually mature, there are only short buds at the top (called resident buds) and the leaves are below. A bud leaf with a permanent bud sandwiched between two leaves is called a "sandwich leaf". Sometimes a leaf is accidentally picked, which is called a single leaf.

The size and tenderness of picking bud leaves are determined according to the different requirements of different teas, that is, different teas have different picking standards.

High-grade famous teas, such as Longjing tea and Biluochun, all need to pick tender buds and leaves as raw materials. Super-grade and first-grade Longjing tea is generally collected from one bud and one leaf to one bud and two leaves. You can pick a bud and two or three leaves as raw materials in the second and third grades. Some famous teas require picking a single bud or a bud and a leaf as raw materials, such as Baihao Yinzhen, Xueshuiyunlv and so on. Therefore, to make a kilogram of high-grade famous tea, you need to pick 60,000 to 80,000 bud leaves and 6,543,800+bud leaves, which shows the difficulty of tea picking.

A large number of black tea and green tea are produced in different grades. First-and second-grade teas generally require one bud, two leaves or three leaves, third-and fourth-grade teas require one bud, three leaves or four leaves, two leaves or three leaves in pairs as raw materials, and fifth-and sixth-grade teas generally require two leaves or three leaves in pairs, and the leaves are relatively thick and old.

The picking standard of oolong tea is different from that of ordinary red green tea. It's not as tender as possible. Too tender raw materials can't produce the fragrance of oolong tea, and of course, too old raw materials are not ideal. Oolong tea generally requires "open harvesting", that is, when the new shoots grow to 3-5 leaves, the terminal buds stop growing, and when the terminal leaves open to 60-70%, 2-4 leaf buds are harvested as raw materials.

The raw materials of edge-pin pressed tea are mostly coarse, old, sun-dried and roasted, so the picking standard is generally coarse and old. Pick four or five leaves from one bud or clip three or four leaves in pairs, or even cut the raw materials with a knife.

Tea picking in most tea gardens in China is still mainly by hand. In the tea-picking season, tea-picking girls wear tea baskets all over the tea garden, and sometimes they sing folk songs, which is really a landscape in the tea area. In some large tea farms, the varieties of tea trees are consistent, the germination is neat, and they are also picked by machines. Machine tea picking has high efficiency, but poor selectivity, and there are often some simple leaves and old leaves.