Summer Grain Growing: Rice (I Hope)

In my last blog post, I shared our winter wheat harvest with you, plus some about the cutting and threshing process. Wheat yields quite a bit of straw, and we have a plan for that too.

The plan is to follow the wheat with a rotation of rice. I got this idea from Masanobu Fukuoka’s book on natural farming, The One Straw Revolution. He alternates a rice crop in summer with cool weather grains in winter. He adds clover to the seed and mulches it with the straw from the previous crop. With this method he has very few problems with weeds and has developed rich, fertile soil with no other additive than a scattering of chicken manure over the straw to help it decompose.

My rice seed came from last year’s rice growing experiment which, unfortunately, I harvested too early (the same mistake I made the first time we grew wheat). So I have some doubt as to whether or not the seed is mature enough to grow (hence, the “I Hope” in the post title.) Doing nothing will produce nothing, however, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try anyway.

I broadcast the seed and then Dan cut the wheat residue (and weeds) with our mulching mower.

Ordinarily, I would let the goats into the patch after harvesting to eat down the weeds and glean any seed heads they could find.

Impending rain and shortage of temporary fencing nixed that.

The idea with the straw is to spread it as a covering mulch, not a smothering mulch. To do that it must be spread in a scattered fashion rather than aligned as a mat.

I started with the barest corner of the patch. As we continue threshing the wheat and making more straw, it will cover the rest of the field.

So there it is at present. It’s an experiment, so I don’t know what to expect. We’ll learn something from it one way or another, that I know for sure.