Team:HZNFHS Hangzhou/Description
Project Inspiration and Description
Our home city Hangzhou has more than 484 thousands of acres of tea gardens, which yields about 30 thousand tons of tea each year. West Lake Long Jing is the most famous tea of Hangzhou. Jing Shang (Jing Mountain) tea and Qian Dao (Thousand Island) Jade Leaf are also representative teas of Hangzhou. Hangzhou, as an city with long tea history and tea culture, is praised as the “Capital of Tea”. Long Jing, similarly, is praised as the best tea of China and the “Queen of Green Tea”. In the process of a tea plant’s growth, soil is the most important ingredient for good tea, providing water, fertilizer, gas and heat. Most of the supplement and water for a tree plant is extracted from soil, so soil’s humidity, water, and PH all play an important role for tea tree’s growth. Tea plants favor acid conditions. However, soil acidification creates a PH that is so low that it is actually strangling tea plants. In Japan, 50% of tea garden’s soil have PH less than 4.0 and reported rotten roots. Documents show the problem of soil acidification around tea plants has become a potential threats for Sri Lanka and other East Asian Countries. In China 70% of tea gardens have soil of PH under 5.0. The situation is often worse in high yield fields due to the use of fertilizers, which even results under 3.5. However, the improvement of planting methods allows some high-quality tea under even strong acidic conditions and covered the real need for higher PH. Thus, it is essential to reconsider the PH’s impact on tea plant’s absorption of minerals and elements. The problem of PH isn’t a pure chemical one. The PH of soil directly affects the microbes activities, controls the organic and inorganic collide transportation in soil, and the absorption of minerals of tea plants. Some tea garden’s uses lime stone to adjust the soil’s PH。 Thus, if we inject an Nitrogen fixation gene into the bacteria around tea plant, the PH of soil would increase and provide a better environment for the tea plants.
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