After a week of cat and mouse run with the rain, we finally decided to carry on the sowing the paddy seeds. With the onset of monsoon, the entire villagers starts the paddy farming. All of them can been seen either on the fields or busy in market to get the best variety of paddy seeds. Our farming is completelly depends on rain. And rightly so #metoo get on the fields to get the sowing.
Sowing paddy seeds is entirely a manual process. I have already shared before about our ancestoral piece of land in middle of the jungle. I began our farming with the same fields. Last year, there was no farming due to rainfall deficit. It turned out to be green fields after a year time.
Sowing process is not an easy activity. Before we put the seeds on to the soil, firstly we need to plough the soil in a limited space. We do not need to plough the entire fields. We ploughed up the land at a specified place. It took the animals to complete 17 rounds to plugging up the field.
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Once the ploughing is done, still we need to wait to sow the seeds. Before sowing, we need to have the levelling the soil. And also to extract all the unwanted grasses, that comes out due to plugging the fields.
While the men were at work, doing all the field work, I went to the market to get the seeds. I brought it eaelier to save time. It is 25kg packets and yield a good production. The packets were emptied in a separate pot. This helps in putting the seeds easily.
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The sowing the seeds is again a manual process. I thought it is direct placing each of them into the soil, but the sowing requires spreading out the seeds in a specific way. It ensures that seeds were spread in each part of the ploughed soil.
Soon the fields were covered with seeds all over the place. The barren soil were covered with minute seeds particle. However there is still a risk of being consumed by birds. Means we can't let the seeds to be exposed to birds and other animal.
So to hide them, and protect the sowing, we need to cover them with the soil itself. It is again a manual process, where we put the loosened soil and moved with hands to cover or the seeds with the soil.
It is a tough job as, it required good amount of effort to cover the entire sowing areas, also the person remain in bend position. But somehow it was quickly managed in my case. I was also involved a bot in getting the seeds covered.
The spreading of soil allows the seeds to remain within the soil. Now we let them to grow for another 15 days. Till the time we must depend of rain for adequate watering of the seeds. A little heavy rain may wash away the entire efforts. Finally the fields will look like this.
This year we are expecting a good harvest, with good rainfall.in sight and not like last year where we were in loss due to drought. Also this is my sole experince in farming. I have another fields where I will be going to do all the activity.
Keep waiting for some soil fun while farming in coming days.