Where Are My Shoes?: The plants they are a changin'...

December 20^th, 2011

Just when I'm getting ready to leave the farm is starting to look a little more familiar to me. Rather than the exotic ginger, turmeric, rice, peanuts, and sesame, the farm has now been flooded with greens, and peas, and garlic, and carrots, and wheat! And while I knew the majority of my time here would be for the rice harvest, it is unbelievably good to know a little bit about the plants here now. It was definitely fun to learn more about the foods I really do enjoy... seeing how they grow, but I really do want to know more about growing these same plants I can grow at home. Of course, though, things are still done differently here. First, to plant many of the Brassicas (cabbages and cauliflower) the fields are completely flooded, and then the little vegetable starts were placed in the field. The peas plants were scattered randomly over a large field, rather than neat rows and given no trellising. They were then only grown for about three weeks, or enough to get a week's worth of picking from them, before they were tilled into the ground. There are also many many radishes.. in fact, more radishes than I care to look at. And not a wonderful variety of radishes, but all appear to be diakon radishes. I have actually grown a genuine dislike of radishes since being here. I am sick of seeing them at every meal and they give me a stomach ache. Since the rice harvest of 560 varieties has completely finished the farm has now taken on the challenge of growing 139 varieties of wheat. I helped to sow these so I am really excited just to see them coming up. In an effort to not do any type of monoculture the farm workers left a few of the plots empty this time for vegetables. We also sowed a couple of the wheat seeds in rows and others we just randomly tilled in with hand tools. Okay, now my words again in pictures: