Rice Paddy - Third Time's a Charm • 田んぼを三回目できました！！！

That little plot of mud in the background is our humble rice paddy. In my hand is a half dozen or so rice sprouts destined for said plot of mud...

The forecast was for rain today, and so I thought it would be my only free time away from ABE and Ajishima Kingdom field work (I still have three huge fields to till and beds to build ahead of our sweet potato planting, but cannot do so in the rain. The rice paddy is basically like my hobby and is officially and distinctly unrelated to our other farming endeavors). So I asked Mr. K if he would be willing to work in the rain to get our rice paddy planted, and he agreed. Fortunately, nary a drop did fall while we labored away!

Mr. K had pulled the weeds from the field a few weeks ago, but they had returned with a vengeance! The first thing we did was remove as many as we could while turning a blind eye to the others we couldn't be bothered to pull. We then noticed that one side was higher than the other, so we proceeded to move several tons of mud and clay slurry to the lower end. After a couple hours of tossing mud pies hither and tither we achieved a relatively level surface in which to plug our little bundles of rice sprouts.

This is a laughably small paddy compared to the ones the professional farmers tend on the mainland. But we are proud to say that in the four years since we started reclaiming this paddy from the wild (it took all winter to prepare for our first spring planting three years ago), we have done all of the work by hand. We used weed whackers and chainsaws to clear the brush and trees around the paddy, but in the paddy itself we have pulled thousands of weeds by hand and occasionally implemented hand tools only to abandon them for our own handy digits.

I went au naturel this year for the first time, with bare feet, and I even shed my gloves before planting. The mud was refreshingly cool and soothing in places and suspiciously warm in others! I have a few scrapes on my feet, but I am no worse for wear. However, I was surely feasted upon by no less than a hundred unseen mud-dwelling beasties with an obscene toe-biting fetish!

I did not have nearly as much free time this year to devote to the paddy preparation as in years past. I am very grateful to Mr. K for all of his efforts to get the paddy and surrounding area ready for me to jump in the mud, plug some sprouts and try my (dirty) hand at taking some selfies. To the uninitiated like me, that was more challenging than actually planting the rice. I won't even show you the many pictures of my hands and elbows obscuring the image of Mr. K bending over for the camera...