Hello Hive
Happy new morning to us. I hope that we all woke up hale and hearty and enthusiastic about the day's work.
As usual, most of my mornings start with feeding our birds at dawn before heading to the farm. Since the farming seasons began, my schedules were readjusted to meet with the different tasks at hand. My sewing projects are done in the evening and mostly accomplished at night since that is the time we often have a power supply, and then my morning will be about our poultry and other farm work.
Before the week runs out, we will most likely be done with the weeding of this rice farm that has been planted much earlier than the others, which we are about to plant.
The next task right after this manual weeding is already staring at us in the eyes.
Can you see the number of rice seedlings that germinated per stand? It's more than what can grow together per time
Whenever we are planting rice, it is most times very difficult to control the number of grains that get deposited into the ground at the same time. An attempt at this by counting the grains we plant is often boring and a waste of time; hence, we take a finger tip of the smallest amount we can imagine, and plant. At germination time you can have as many as 10-15 or even more seedlings growing together.
Some other times we deliberately plant as many grains in the soil as possible when it is such periods that birds often disturb planted grains. This way we could have some grains germinate even when birds attack and pick up some
But in the instance where excessive grains germinate like this, it is yet very much necessary and advisable to reduce the quantity per hole so that the grains can grow properly.
Having too many grains per hole creates this overcrowding among crops, which eventually leads to poor yield. We are working on applying herbicides to where the excessive removed will be transplanted to. We can choose to transplant the excesses to a different location for them to grow, but before then the land has to be prepared, cleared of weeds, and well watered so that transplanted seedlings can survive.
Every transplanting of rice must be done in well-watered soil, as seedlings die off easily in dry ground, contrary to when they are planted. Planted rice grains survive better on dry ground than the transplanted ones.
Some herbicides have been applied to portions of another farm where these excess seedlings will be transferred to. If this is not done, growth of the crop will be slow, and overcrowding greatly reduces the quantity and quality of grains to be produced.