Hello Hive

Our groundnut farm is doing very well so far and is even at the seed production stage now. You may even wonder how we often manage to do all of the farm work moving from one farm to the other. But this is how we do it every year: plant a little of every one of the essential crops that we need.

We use groundnut to make a special kind of drink, for soup, and for many other purposes. I can hardly find an individual who would say that he doesn't like peanuts.

Daddy had earlier divided the groundnuts along with some corn in one portion of the farm, as we often practice a mixed cultivation here to maximize any of the available land spaces we have. (Farmable land is getting scarred by the day as population is increasing and a lot of people have bought our farmlands and turned them into estates.) The corn was badly affected by the rains and had stunted growth with nothing to be harvested here.

I can say that our corn bambaranut and rice are the two crops that were mostly affected by the rains this year. Even though the groundnuts were planted during a drought period, a very negligible portion of the groundnuts dried off. As of today, we have the second flowering stage, which is often an indication of seed production.

Harvest won't be far away anymore. Most likely, by mid-October, we should be ready to harvest these.

We managed to complete the weeding of the farm. Giving the groundnut more space to grow well further.

I have suggested to dad earlier that we should pull off the corns and plant new ones since it is the time for planting second session corn; hopefully that will produce well since the rains are a bit better now.

I actually wish that we could grow more corn on our family farm since we eat a lot of corn meals, but dad doesn't want to take the chances and stress to plant more crops on a very thin line of hopes for the rain. Like I said before, the crops on our family farm are for personal consumption, while the commercial farms are an adventure. I just tried out this year to see if I can go into farming and growing crops as my own agribusiness.

For my own part, I was lucky to have had a bountiful harvest of corn earlier, and I have replanted the farm for a late-session corn again.

Harvesting of groundnut is usually a time-consuming task, unlike corn. This has been the reason I chose to plant soy beans instead. I'm not sure I can endure the stress for the groundnut harvest.

So I still have the handful of soy beans waiting to be harvested and the new corn that is just germinating.