Planting rice -the early stages.

I have now seen a significant fraction of rice’s life cycle.  Well, I’ve seen rice in fields, and been involved in the second planting and the final harvest.  Today, and last Sunday, I helped out a little with the first planting.

My brother-in-law is posing for the camera and my father-in-law is in the paddy.  In the fore-ground are many shallow trays.  Each tray gets a fine pad of what looks like chip-board then goes into the water.
Then we spread seed over the chipboard.  The seed has to be spread very thickly but shouldn’t be piled.  I am not very good at it but I figure I helped a little.

My footprint.

My monster-sized feet (size 12 or 300mm) are beyond what any Korean rubber boot can contain so I end up going barefoot.  This is fine, mostly, except for…

Leeches and other critters.  I’ve had to remove leeches from my own legs, and from other’s legs in Canada and in Nepal, but I don’t like it.  There were a lot of snails around, too.  Now, snails may seem innocuous, but only to those who haven’t studied parasite biology.

Anyway, going forward in time, we see the rice after one week.  Okay, this is what I helped with last week. This rice looks a little sickly but will look much better in a few more weeks after we add soil; which is carefully shaken onto the trays.  I think the cover keeps other stuff from growing amongst the rice and wicks up water from the surrounding area.

We are about ready to return to the house on the kyeong-oong-ki.

My mother-in-law and I don’t always see eye-to-eye, but that is on trivial, cultural things.  She does her best to take care of me.  No one in the family drinks much, almost none of that is beer.  Still, she tries to offer me a beer when I visit, even though she doesn’t know what to look for or how long beer keeps.  We can see this beer passed the best-before date more than a year ago and has some awful stuff floating in it.  It was a kind offer, but I drove home soon after returning to the farmhouse, so I shouldn’t have drank it anyway.

In a month, we’ll take the trays out and remove the rice -which looks a lot like sod for a yard – and load up a planting tractor, which will do most of the work in the second planting.

Tags: farming