The old joke about Yorkshire Tea is that it’s grown on Ilkley Moor.

Ho ho.

It’s not of course. Yorkshire, much as we love it, doesn’t really offer the best conditions for growing tea. Not like the lowlands of Assam or the highlands of East Africa and Sri Lanka.

But just because it’s a daft idea to grow tea in Yorkshire doesn’t mean it’s not worth having a go. What we lack in sub-tropical temperatures we’ll make up for with good old Yorkshire gumption, we thought.

So we planted one hundred little tea bushes in the courtyard garden beside our factory. They’ll never produce quite enough tea to make us self-sufficient, but it made us happy. And sometimes that’s more important.

One of our tea bushes - the not so hardy camelia sinensis

Fingers crossed then. We’ll keep you posted on how they do.