"Why does your tea cost so much?"

What a cup costs

Are there cheaper teas? Yes. Always.

You can buy tea for a few dollars a box. We're not pretending otherwise. We won't talk you out of it.

This one is grown in living soil by two people who show up every day — for the land, the plants, and the people it's meant to reach. Here's what's inside the price.

Every plant is grown out by our hands. Some we start from seed. Some come as cuttings or starts from other farmers we trust — that's its own kind of relationship, plants passed grower to grower. However it arrives, we tend it from there: transplanted, watched, moved, carried through whatever the season does. Rain, wind, the dry stretch, the bugs. We weed around it, water it, wait. Some plants take a year before they give anything back.

We harvest by hand. Leaf by leaf, in the cool of the morning, only what's ready. We leave the rest to keep growing. Then it dries slow and low — days, not minutes. Rush the dry and you lose the thing you grew it for. We blend small, by feel, tasting as we go. No two batches match. That's what hand-made is.

Then everything around the tea. Every label hand-drawn or made by us — inked, scanned, fussed over. Every package chosen down to what's inside the bag. None of it is the cheapest option. The cheapest option usually means someone, or something, else paid the difference. The grower underpaid. The soil mined. The plastic that never breaks down. We'd rather carry that cost than pass it along.

Small farm, two people, real relationships with every plant. We harvest when the plants say ready. We dry slow. We pack carefully and with intention — because how we show up and work with the plants connects to them. Cheaper exists. It just moves faster and asks less. We chose different. Not because it's easier — because the medicine carries what's present when it's made. The love in it is real. So is the price.

We think the most important ingredient is relationship, and this is where the heart blooms. We are collaborators, asked to listen and move with intention — learning to take our movement in mind, body, and spirit and direct it, because where we are coming from is where we are going. Knowing what we are rooted in, what we come from, and where our edges are is medicine for how we show up to the web of creation.

We make sure humans aren't at the center. But in learning what it is to be human, we support the authentic recognition of each life — each being playing a crucial and beneficial role. We already have everything we need, right inside us.

And here's the other half, because it's just as true: we know life is expensive, and every dollar is a decision. We think about that often — at our own kitchen table too. This community is the whole reason we do this, and we want the medicine to find the people who need it, the ones drawn to it. Price should not be the wall between a person and a plant that might help them.

So if cost is a real barrier, reach out. No explanation needed. We'll work with you. That offer is not a footnote — it's part of how we want this whole thing to work. A farm that only feeds people who can pay full price isn't the farm we're trying to build.

Grown out by hand, dried slow, blended small — by two people, on one half-acre on the north shore of Kauaʻi.

That's what you're holding.

— Aubree & Jen