About the blog

 Hi,

   My name is Swamy Karnam and I am a part time farmer hoping to be a full time farmer.  This blog is about my journey learning about farming, fermenting, brewing as I go from a part time novice farmer to hopefully one day be a real farmer.

I started farming crops that could be used in brewed products.  The main crop is tea and secondary crops are rice and lavender.  The intent was to brew the tea into ready to drink (RTD) tea and Kombucha, while the rice was to be used to brew beer and wine (mainly Sake).  The lavender was grown to blend into the tea and beer.  Since then I am also growing tertiary crops, mainly some herbs that can be used in the brewed products, namely Tulsi (holy Basil or Indian Basil),  Mint, Spearmint, Ginger, etc.  Also I have started to lay the foundation to make Kimchi, pickles and other products.  This blog is about my experiments and recipes.

This blog was started on April 1st 2024 but the farm itself was incorporated on June 24th, 2022 as Junga Chai, LLC.  The property for the farm was actually bought on March 31st 2021 but the idea for a tea and rice farm was conceived many years ago, the exact date is not certain.  In November of 1982 I went on a vacation to Darjeeling and visited some tea farms and fell in love with the town. In the summer of 2008 I went to Nepal and did a trek around Mt. Annapurna and saw many rice fields terraced into slopes of the mountains.  A few years later I visited Peru and did the Inca trek and fell in love with the terracing there.  Sometime around there I was able to visit the Charleston Tea Plantation in South Carolina which rekindled my love of the tea plant.

In 2021 I found a side of a hill for sale for very cheap. It was about 140 acres and ranged from 1200 ft to 2000 ft in elevation near Lexington, VA in Rockbridge County which also has a horse center.  I wanted to recreate the terraced farms of Nepal and Peru as well as the contoured tea farms of India on this hill.  Rockbridge County seemed idea because of the hills which seemed liked the hills around Darjeeling and the weather has some overlap.  Darjeeling is very close to Nepal.  There is a 8000 meter mountain nearby called Kanchenjunga.  It is on the border of India and Nepal. It is the only 8000 meter mountain (out of 14) that is partially in India. Kanchenjunga is a Tibetan word that supposedly means 5 great snow mountain treasures as this mountain has 5 peaks. I was looking for a name for my farm that was short and I could get a domain name. So I chose the last 5 letters - Junga and combined with Chai which is the North Indian name for Tea. It is from the Chinese root word Cha.  Junga thus probably means 5 treasures in Tibetan I believe but I chose it as a unique name. But if I had to choose 5 brewing treasures they would be - Tea, Fermented Tea (Kombucha), Fermented Rice beer, Fermented Rice wine, Fermented and pickled edibles. 

The logo and graphic image of the farm has rice terraced fields in gold, contoured tea farm in green and Lavender in purple.  There is an image of a horse to depict the artist's interpretation of the farm on Hogback and Big Butte mountains as viewed from the Lexington Horse center.  The graphic also contains a rice farmer with a straw hat to emphasize the thousands of years of rice and tea cultivation and processing knowledge in China.  Lavender is something I also ended up encountering on my various travels.  One Lavender farm was on a mountain in Hawaii and fortunately I did find 2 farms very close - one and the same county and my farm is visible from this Lavender farm. 

So in theory at least Lavender, Tea and Rice should thrive in Rockbridge County.  Lavender because it is already established here, Tea because weather is somewhat similar to Darjeeling and the slopes on my property are like the slopes of Darjeeling and Nepal and Peru.  Rice is a controversial one because of water availability but in my research I found that the rice grown for beer and Sake did not need as much water as the ones for general food.

So the terraces are for rice fields because they can hold water if they need to.  Contour farming is growing crops on hillsides without terracing.  This works great for Tea and Lavender as they don't like water and slopes have a way of moving water away from the roots.  I also learned that rice does not need to be flooded but rice roots don't get root rot and like the water but the water kills most weeds if they are flooded. 

In general I like mountains and think that contours and terraces are pretty.  Tea plants are Camillias and surprising long lived like Olive trees.  Apparently there are some tea trees in China that are over 3000 years old.  Lavender are moderately long lived and they actually thrive on poor soil and very little water.  I like plants that are hardy and don't need a lot a care because I want to use my time with brewing and terraforming the hills.  Rice needs more energy as it has to be planted yearly and needs more water than the two.

So the name Junga Chai for my farm somewhat starts to make sense but I wanted to keep sort of a diary of my experiments in a blog format and wanted the blog to have it's own name  and wanted to name it after one such experiment.  In one of my early experiments I mixed some tea with some sake and liked it thus the Sake Tea name.  Sake is rice wine and Tea is of course the second most consumed beverage in the world after water.  I thought it would have been beer but I was mistaken. 

That's pretty much all about the origin of this blog and the farm.