Life Cycle of Paddy Cultivation using natural farming techniques - Phase 1

 Namaste!

In earlier posts, I have posted the blog on relevance of having cover crops to provide required fertility to the soil. Also I have written about the importance of desi cows and usage of it's by products such as cow urine, dung and butter milk.

In this blog post, we would discus about the stages of paddy cultivation.

we have chosen the naturally farmed paddy that was grown without any fertilizers and pesticides as the seed.

Since we would need 3 cents of seedlings for 1 acre paddy cultivation, Choose your seedling bed size accordingly before going to the below mentioned steps.

Make sure you put ghana jeevamrutham (prepared with desi cow dung, urine, natural sugar cane powder and gram flour )during preparation of seedling bed land for soil fertility.

9th May-2023:

We have prepared the Beejamruttham (there are many videos on YouTube, how to prepare this liquid) 24 hours before bringing in the paddy seed. After beejamrutham fermented for 24 hours, we took 6 bags (30 kg each) and spread that seed on mat under tree. Luckily, we have couple of neem trees at our Ankuram organic farms.

Sprinkle the fermented solution on Paddy seed and let it soak for couple of hours. This solution would act as fungicide and cleanse the seed before going to farm land.

After paddy soaked for couple of hours, put the paddy back into Jute bags and place them in water tub for 12 hours. After 12 hours, remove the water from tub and cover the bags with tarp and place the weights on them. Make sure to keep the bags wet by sprinkling water few times for next 24 hours. By next 24 hours, we would notice the paddy gets sprouted. Make sure it gets sprouted properly before spread them on seedling bed.

Meanwhile prepare the seedling bed land properly and it should be watered enough few days before sprinkle the paddy seed. On the day of paddy sprinkling, ensure you don't have any water and it shouldn't be too muddy. If the soil is too loose, sprouted paddy seed would go the bottom of the soil and it will take much time to come out as seedling. So the soil texture should be just right., neither too loose nor too tight.

Please make sure you bring in an experienced person to sprinkle the sprouted paddy seed on prepared land.

Ensure it get sprinkled thick enough. It should never be thin. We will have to face issues during paddy transplantation if we have thin spread.

Give one inch of water to the seedling bed as soon as sprouts were sprinkled.

Make sure you put few small posts with plastic bags to scare away the birds. you don't want to feed your sprouts to the birds. Of course birds are very useful at later stages of paddy cultivation life cycle, but not right now!

Remove the water from seedlings bed after 12 hours.

Give fresh water of half inch for next couple of days until you would notice the seedlings from sprouted paddy.

Next 25 days, we will have to take care of the seedlings with proper watering. If it's summer season, please make sure to remove the water by 2 pm during hot days and give the fresh water after that. Otherwise, tender seedlings would get boiled in hot water and eventually die after that!

On 15th day, we have sprayed gokrupamrtham (an advanced version of jeevamrutham) on seedling to promote growth. On 25th day, we have sprayed the fermented butter milk (1:3 ratio) as a precautionary measure to avoid any pest to the seedlings.

We were supposed to start the paddy seedlings transplantation right after 25th day but we couldn't do due to labor shortage.

we had to wait until 35th day and it caused the seedlings were rooted properly and we had tough time to pull them out from seedling bed.

We learned this lesson during this season and recommend any future farmers to avoid this mistake.

We also recommend to apply neem cake to the seedlings bed right after 20th day and it will loosen up the soil. Also we were told to apply desi urine with sand couple of days before seedlings transplantation.

Meanwhile, we would prepare the required area of farm land., first with cultivator and then using rotavator.

Land should be watered enough and it shouldn't have more than half inch of water during seedlings transplantation.

Well, on 35th day we have successfully finished the transplantation.

 

 

We are excited to write and share what happens next!!

Thanks

Brahma

Natural farmer.