When 2018 rang in for Hortfire LLC, there was some optimistic thoughts that this coming year, things were going to be different and that changes were on the horizon.  Well, some of that optimistic thoughts vanished very quickly with the Polar Vortex event of 2018.  There was a record setting of duration of time below…

In continuing with a Darjeeling tea theme of blog postings, we were fortunate enough to receive four samples of First Flush tea from Darjeeling from Lochan Tea Limited.  We are extremely thankful for these samples.  We were very curious what 2018 and the First Flush would bring given the labor strike and unrest of 2017…

(Author’s Note, this article was originally written in the late Summer of 2017 for Italian Tea Magazine Fogli De Tea by Stefano Aliquo,  this is the English version with full photos. Again, I want to gracious thank Rajiv Lochan and Shiva Saria, once again for their expertise and knowledge.) There has been an emergence on…

I have been asked way too many times in the last few years, more like judged, about what Hortfire LLC is and where it is going. Hortfire LLC will always exist, it will never go away, no matter what. When the original project started in college, it initially was a project, yet when I noticed…

While I have been thinking about writing the next blog post (for quite sometime), I couldn’t decide on exactly what to write.  Then a package came in the mail, and after opening the package, I realized what the next post was going to be about. Little did I know, that what was in that package,…

WARNING: This blog post can be seen as political in nature due to the subject matter it is addressing. It is not my intent to pick a side and demonize one and herald the other, as I am of the full belief that there is an excellent opportunity for the Northeastern India tea region to…

This week we want to touch on a subject that is a small part of our business, plant breeding and branding. This past Spring we stumbled across a native American holly that had some interesting features to it compared to other cultivars of it. We tried to propagate it, got it to root but shortly…

Hey everyone, since we broke away from the regularly schedule format in our last post, we figure it was time to give an update on a previous post. Last December, we talked about how to do camellia cuttings in the winter. Some time has past since then and to keep things growing and moving in…

(Writer’s Note: We wanted to do something a little different for once. We wanted to open up and acknowledge and give credit to something that inspired us from an unlikely place as a child. We are using some humor in this blog, we are going outside of the box on this one, but we are…

We want to wish everyone a belated Happy Summer Solstice. As we begin to march into the summer months, we have becoming across a common theme when we have been talking to people about plants and historical landscapes this year. The “preservation” theme. The preservation movement can be traced back to certain points of history…

A few weeks ago, the news came out that researchers at the University Kunming, Yunnan, China had unlocked the tea genome. This has drawn praise and also fear at the same time. The fear is in the thought of “transgenic” tea or as I know it as GE (Genetically Enhanced) tea. It did not take…

We hope everyone has had a great start to the new year. Today we are going to go over some winter maintenance of one of the most beloved plants, hybrid tea roses. Most people don’t know that the rose is actually the national flower of the United States. Patience and discipline will always pay off…