Hello Hive

I am more than happy writing this blog to tell our homesteading community that soon enough we would be able to eat some rice from our farm. It's a joyful thing to plant some seeds, watch it grow and be able to eat the fruits thereof. Rice, beans and groundnuts harvest are the three crops we are looking forward to their harvest any moment from now.

Although guinea corn is there but that one hasn't shown signs of producing any seeds up until now, it has only been growing taller as the day passes by.

We just spotted some of our rice grains drying up and I'm so happy about that. Growing crops can come with a lot of challenges, but after we have crossed every hindrances to better some good yields and have start seeing signs of positive growth and maturing fruits/seeds it is often a joyful thing.

Should I call this ripening of seeds? The once green tender rice pods are now getting stronger and ripening. The color changes is happening rapidly and I had to observe the plant, touch and press the grains to ensure that the seeds withing are strong enough before this ripening.

Rice could produce pods like this without still giving us any food because it is possible that the pods will develop poor seeds or not carry anything within at all such that at harvest we end up harvesting only chaff. Some of the factors that can cause this to happen is when there is no adequate rainfall for the seeds to be properly develop, or when there are been some bird attack on the grains. Birds suck out the sap from the seeds that would otherwise become matured into some rice grains.

One of my greatest surprise this year is that we haven't had any bird attacks in our farms. It's so unusual and I'm so happy about it.
Normally at about this time we would have placed some scarecrow at different locations of our farms to keep off the birds but this year has been gracefully different.
Maturing grains that are ripening like this shouldn't take more than a month before we begin to prepare for harvest.

It's about a week and few days for this this month to be over and I'm hoping that by before November ends we would have become busy harvesting rice and storing in our barns before we enter the festive months.