NOTES FROM A RICE PADDY

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The airplane method of seeding is very fast, of course, but probably not adapted to the use of tender sprouted seed. In most commercial practice, the rapid natural ascendancy of sprouted or transplanted rice over weeds, coupled with some manual labor for residual weed control, is traded for weed control by chemical methods. The planting of germinated seed is probably a good method for small-scale farming in the United States ... since in most of the country the warm season is not long enough for two rice crops, and weeds can be particularly troublesome when the germination of unsprouted rice seed is delayed by cool weather.

Rice is a beautiful plant and grows rapidly during Oklahoma's typically hot July and August. In 1977, my paddy required only one major weeding, which I did in about two hours with feet kept bare so the rice plants could be felt and not trampled. A major weed is barnyard grass, which resembles rice until the seed stalks appear, but which is a slightly darker green, has a diminutive or absent ligule-instead of the conspicuous pubescent ligule of rice—and Hems that are reddish at the base, while those of rice are nearly white. A broad-leaved aquatic weed with shallow roots is also common in my paddy, but it is easily pulled up and eaten by our ducks. During midsummer, the water surface shows tints of blue, indicative of nitrogenfixing, bluegreen algae. The paddy is not a significance cant source of mosquitoes, which are apparently controlled by the numerous frogs attracted during the summer growing season.

I harvest the rice when the kernels show the first signs of falling from their panicles, about September 20 in Oklahoma. My harvest date has been insensitive to the planting date., de pending instead on the variety of rice used. Birds are not a serious pest unless the rice stalks are blown down, or lodged, by a severe storm ... the stalk is not stiff enough to give even small birds a good perch.

I harvest the rice by hand in about an hour by successively gathering together all the stalks I can embrace and cutting them off with a knife. After the harvested stalks have dried for a few weeks in a large wooden tray in the barn, I remove more than 95 percent of the grain in about 15 minutes. This is done by striking the mass of stalks with the flat of an ordinary pitchfork. The grain falls to the bottom of the tray, and the stalks with unthreshed grain are worked over by eager chickens.

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