Its been quite a month, the rains have been incessant, sometimes one wakes up in the morning & wonder, oops is this going to be another day where no work is possible & still worse to have to sit around & do nothing. It’s a recipe which quickly makes me into an unstable mad person. Luckily sometimes the clouds just clear for about a while, then in a flash i would be grabbing my raincoat, umbrella & the sickle & feeling happy to be putting in some work.

Most of the work this month has been in collecting a nature’s bounty which comes to us in aplenty in the form of green leaves. Just select a spot on the land where one can prune down the leaves without much ado, preferably a mixture of different genres, also a combination of mature green leaves, tender leaves & tender stems for the lignoprotien, select which plots has to be mulched & just go ahead with a liberal dose of mulch, also once out, then its better to be out till  the rains become unbearable. In summer where 10 -12 hrs of work was possible, now during the rains one is able to work only for 4 hrs. For “workaholics” like me it can be an unbearable situation to be in, but managed to cope somehow.

It has also been a month of serious uncertainties, especially vis-a-vis Rice & Haldi. Both seems to be doing ok as of now, but one doesn’t know. One eagerly looks into each newly emerging leaf & see if the leaf size is bigger than the previous leaf, both in length & in width, what is the height of these plants going to be. With rice one eagerly sits around in the edges of the field & sees if tillers are appearing. Also with the continuous rains & the absence of sunlight the growth has been slow. But from now on the rain tends to reduce a bit, hopefully there will a few days where the sun can peep out a bit, some active photosynthesis can take place, so on & so forth….

Part of the rice transplantation involved a small experiment with planting only one sapling & we tried to keep it equidistant with a rope etc. It did take a long time & finding help was difficult, then we had to revert back to the normal style of planting

Just sitting by the rice fields & observing the saplings lots of ideas gets thrown up in my mind about how to do the rice planting next year, i am more & more mentally shifting towards direct sowing, but given the heavy rains, one will have to create raised beds, so i am crazily making my plans & drawings for next year & making notes. But as of now, on the practical level it will be better to be exercise my mind over how i will be using the moisture on the soil after the rice crop. Now whatever i’ve done with the rice is over & done with, basically now leave it to nature, probably on a sunny day, might interfere a bit & indulge in some foliage spray. What crops to take after rice ? Udid, Channa, Wheat ? And how to take it in a cost effective manner & without much disturbance to the top soil ?

A certain Mr & Ms Minivet has been doing a lot of hide & seek with me & one day i just could not resist the temptation to take out my camera & click !

With rains also comes lots of illnesses, every house in the village seems to have someone down with fever, its been tough on all animals also, after Shankarya left us, now we ‘ve lost both Rani & Janu to various illnesses

So as of now, just want to get through with this period of uncertainty !