Hello Hive

It's the weekend again, and time to engage in the more rigorous farm work. All we have continually done this week is to seek out more rice seedlings from our neighbors who have finished transplanting their own fields. Rather than leave the rice grains in the nursery to perish, they can be useful to other farmers; hence, they sell their unused rice seedlings to us.

With that, we have been able to cover more and more portions of our farm even though we still have some more space left. Hopefully we can get more seedlings to cover the whole farm. The seedling challenge we have faced this year is a lesson for another year. We must be ready to nurse as many seedlings as possible and do that near a river or water source so that whenever there is a drought incident we can keep the seedlings until the return of the rain.

Even though we have nursed some good quantity of rice seedlings this year, having to transplant over and over again wasted a good portion of our seedlings. And my constant fear now is not being able to cover our entire field this year, as this will reduce our yield. We have often set a target or wish to increase our yield.

We can grow and harvest up to 10X (90 kg) worth of rice grains if the whole field is covered and all conditions, such as weather and others, are friendly, but for now we have barely covered half of our rice field and are still in search of more seedlings.

We were lucky to have rainfalls two times in a row, last week and then yesterday. With that, our field is well watered now, and you can see that some of the water is beginning to stay in the field.
I hope that it continues this way throughout the remaining farming season for our remaining crops to do well.

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On another note, it has been exactly 6 days since I planted my onions, and till now there is no evidence of any of them germinating. Not knowing the time frame onions use to germinate, I have been patient with this.
My other veggies take about 6 days or less to germinate, and I thought that the onions would do likewise.

I had to reach out to my brother, who had germinated some onions earlier, but himself. I was told not to worry that onions take longer than that and that some take up to 10 days to germinate. There is a whole lot to learn while planting various species of crops and veggies, and sometimes years of experience is better than book knowledge.

I was also taught that I was meant to give it some viability treatment by removing the husk completely; this enables the onions to be able to germinate faster.

Today is yet another day and we are all headed out to farm already. Let's see what our hands will find to do. Remember that there is always work to be done in the farm when farming season begins until harvest and storage is completed.