Rice Survivor (Wet Season edition): And now we wait...

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Once the seedlings were on the ground, all we had to do was wait. Well, not exactly. We also needed to monitor the water in the field so that if there's too little water, we irrigated; if there's too much, we drained the water. Plus, we kept an eye out for weeds, snails, and rats. And then there was the fertilizer to be added at certain periods of the plants' development stage... we didn't add the fertilizer ourselves; someone from the farm did this for us.

Being the novice farmers that we were (except for RK), Neale, Jen, and I worried about discolorations in the leaves because these surely were signs of diseases. But Adam, an expert in plant diseases, told us to do nothing. So we did.

It's fascinating to watch the plants grow from tiny seedlings to mature plants. I dropped by the field every afternoon early in the season because it wasn't raining yet. But when the heavy downpours came, I visited only in afternoons when it wasn't raining.

When the leaves started to turn pale and the panicles became heavy with grain, we knew: the season was about to end.





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