My First Rice Farming Experience: The Joys and Challenges of Starting a Small-Scale Rice Farm.

Hello, my friends! It's another time to share my little garden, after I promised to do that in my last post about my garden. So for the sake of today's post, I will be sharing my rice farm plantation, which I just started last week. Actually, I just see farm plantations from afar, and I think it was only once that I had the chance to visit one, and I think that was last year, if I am right. Then, it was like a visitation, and I saw this farm covered with nets. I had to ask the person leading me there, and I was told it was rice.

Land Preparation

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The net I saw that was used to cover it was to chase the birds away from eating up the rice seedlings that come as a reward after planting. So initially, rice was meant to grow in a swampy area, but I never knew how to go about it or the way the rice would be planted for it to grow. So I decided I wanted to try and learn so that I would be able to do my own farming too. But trust me, it wasn't an easy task, especially doing something new I had not tried before.

A few weeks ago, after I have learned about it, I went with my boss to get some rice, which I will plant, and then we created a small nursery which we will plant the rice, and then after planting, we will transplant the rice on the main farm from the nursery. Last week, the rice was 3 weeks of age, and we decided to move it to its rightful place for plantation. But before we moved it to where we were going to transplant, the farm was bushy, and we had to do everything manually without the use of any machines.

Ploughing and getting the farm ready

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We cleared the farm with the cutlass and how and we did manual ploughing, which was a bit hard because we had to make use of the hoe, which I did myself. But before ploughing, some parts of the farm were already flooded, while others were not, but I had to channel some of the water in the over flooded part to some parts of the farm that have a much less saturated water supply so that everything can grow well.

Germinated Rice from the Nursery waiting to be transplanted

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After carrying out all these processes, we went to the nursery to carry the rice we wanted to grow and then I was told how we would plant it so that we could have a very large supply by the time we would harvest it. So I went into the farm, which I had demarcated with the twine for identification and then I started transplanting. Actually, it was a bit of a task to transplant because you had to be careful that the roots of the plants did not fall off at any point.

Transplanted Rice on the main farm

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Because when this happens, then the growth of the plant will retard and might probably lead to death because they will be new to the place you are transplanting them to. On the final notes, the transplanting was done and I did all of this in a space of 3 meters by 3 meters. Now I don't need to come to check for wetting or anything other than to give it a chance to germinate and watch it closely. It feels good to be able to grow a rice plantation after all the stress. What do you think about my farm?