Rice Survivor (Wet Season edition): Patience is a virtue

-
I'm participating in this wet season's "Rice Survivor" activity. The question that worries me the most is: will the plants I tend this season survive? :) It's going to be a challenging time, this wet season...

---

June 6, 2013

It was time, at last, to sow the seeds we got from other people. Team Tagumpay must have been the slowest of the planters because it took us two hours to finish sowing seeds. But to be fair, it was the first time for some of us to even be in a nursery. Even though it was quite hot when the team worked, it was all fun... at the beginning. As the first hour passed, planting rice started getting monotonous. Patience was starting to thin.

I wondered how people working in the field handled the slower pace in life.

But of course! There's music! One of the bird ladies (women who stayed in the fields to shoo away the birds) started walking about with her portable radio blaring. Just following the woman's lead, I started playing music from my iPad. Maroon 5 was on top of my Dropbox starred music list so I played the band's songs. If wifi signals could reach the nursery, I would have played the classical music podcast; but there was no wifi in the field.

June 7, 2013
One of my group mates, RK, told the rest of the group, that we'd start seeing something the following week. Me being me, I just had to drop by to visit the nursery to see if anything's happening yet. Since it's been only a day after sowing, nothing's popping out of the ground yet. I felt like Sam Gamgee going around the Shire checking the plants he had sprinkled with Galadriel's gift.

June 11, 2013

So, I visited the field again, with Jen and Maya. Five days into planting and green things started emerging from the ground! I had a sigh of relief because we know we'll have something to transplant after 16 more days.

Just to make sure that the plants we were going to plant were strong enough to withstand the stress of pulling and transferring to a different field, we gave the plants an initial helping of fertilizer. With the rains just around the corner, these plants will have a lot of challenges ahead of them; so it wouldn't hurt to give them a head start. In seven days, Team Tagumpay will be back in the nursery to give these seedlings another boost of fertilizer. 

As we countdown to transplanting day, I can just say that the Rice Survivor Wet Season challenge teaches one important lesson that farmers all know:

Patience is a virtue.


Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for dropping by!

Before moving on, please share your thoughts or comments about the post. :)

Thanks again!

Popular posts from this blog

Skyflakes

-
One of the more famous Philippine exports is Skyflakes , a wheat-based, salty cracker. It is one of my emergency food items: I typically have some stocked at home and in my handbag in case I become hungry (like in traffic jams). When there's no electricity and it's impractical to cook rice (because the leftover would spoil), I'd open a pack of Skyflakes and generously coat each cracker with Cheez Whiz... if I had a bottle of it within reach. Anyway, each time I spent more than two weeks outside the Philippines, I'd be elated to see boxes of Skyflakes inside Asian stores (particularly when in I was Australia and in the USA). Back then, I took it as a sign of homesickness. When I moved to California, I didn't miss Skyflakes because Mommy made sure that there's a steady supply in the house. Skyflakes is embedded in Filipino gastronomy as a snack, a panawid-gutom , that anyone who reacts positively upon seeing Skyflakes outside the Philippines must have spe...
Read more

10 things I learned while driving on Marcos Highway to Baguio City

-
I went on a day trip to the City of Pines, which was around a 700-km drive from my house. I drove  going up there and then from the city to Victoria, Tarlac. After that, my dad took over the driving duties. It was day trip with Tita Ising and Tito Sibing with us. Anyway, this trip was my first time to go to Baguio City with me behind the wheel. As everyone who drives up knows, there are three main routes to Baguio from the lowlands: Kennon Road, which ascends from Rosario, La Union. It was out of my options because it's too dangerous to use that road in the rainy season. The second route is via Naguilian Road, which makes my trip a lot longer because the beginning of the ascent is in Bauang, La Union (further north). The last route, and the one I took, was the Marcos Highway, now known as the Aspiras-Palispis Highway. This 47-km road starts from Agoo, La Union and is touted as the safest route among the three.  As I drove up and then down (on the same day; we were in...
Read more

Surat Mangyan

-
Image
In high school, part of the Filipino curriculum was learning about one of the country's ancient native scripts called Baybayin . I learned back then that this script was eventually abandoned because the Spanish, and eventually the Americans, encouraged the use of the Latin script for written communications. But that's in the lowlands; the rules were different up in the mountains. In the lush mountains of Mindoro, groups of indigenous people called Mangyans  live largely in isolation away from the Christianised Filipinos. This isolation has led to the continuous development of the Mangyans' old script, Surat Mangyan . As I walked inside the Ayala Museum , I saw this bamboo tube (I'm not sure if it's an instrument) with Mangyan script written all over it. I suppose that this was equivalent to a book or a song. But I haven't figured out what's written yet, despite the translation guide provided. What I can do, however, is write my name in Ma...
Read more