Hello Hive

It is time to rise and shine and I am dropping my blog a little earlier today because by 7am we are expected to already be in the farm. There is a lot of rice harvesting to be done and the earlier we go the better for us. Most of the times the sun is usually very hot and not comfortable to work in hence we go to farm at dawn and do most of the work so that by midday we would not be left with much to do other than cleaning and packaging of grains.

I believe that there is no one in this community who is not familiar with potatoes. In as much as I would have appreciated it if we can grow potatoes all year round, it is impossible to do any farming activities during the dry seasons here. There are no provision for water reserved for anyone to engage in irrigation farming and the only things grown during the dry season is gardening and vegetables growing.

The river banks often get occupied during the dry season as everyone tried to secure a place close to the river to grow some vegetables.

Preserving potatoes leaves for next planting season is an important activities that is meant to be done.

Planting potatoes here is done via the stem cutting system. Sometimes it is difficult to grow some potato from the tiny tubers all over again for a new farming season, hence we prefer to keep and nuture some of the vegetative parts for any planting session.

Rather than trying to germinate the vegetative parts from the tuber all over again, taking care of this vegetative parts till a new farming season begins is highly profitable.

All we need do is to harvest some of the vegetatative part, keep them in a cool place around the house , keeping their roots in the soil, then we occasionally wet them to keep them alive

In places where our house locations can get really dried, you can take some of the vegetative parts to the river bank, dump as much of the vegetative parts and continually wet them with the river water to keep it alive

This way it makes it easier to have some stems to plant in a coming year rather than struggling to grow some potatoes from the tiny tubers all over again.

The comings days are getting dried faster than we can imagine and the potato plants are getting dried already. We are hoping to see if we can still harvest some tubers from here before we finally preserve the leaves but it seems like the weather is fast catching up with these and they may not produce a thing by the time we come for harvest of tubers and preservation of the leaves.