From Seedlings to Seed Again!!!

A shot from my field trip to Magdi, Bangalore.

Nursery of paddy variety called "Rathnagiri", a vary tasty rice as claimed by the local farmrers. Once the nursery of seedlings is about 25 to 30 days old, they are transplanted into the main field where they will take another 4 months or so for maturing. Then the rice is harvested, dried, processed (boiled and dried) and pound to get rice. And before the paddy is processed, the farmer selects the best grains and dry them well and keep them in special seed storage bins with pest repelling plants so that he/she has quality seeds for the next crop. So from seeds to seedlings and back to seeds or rice, how much work is there ?!!!

Imagine, if the poor farmers did not toil, what will we do for our delicious food grains?

Agriculture is one area where indigenous knowledge and expertise is so much that even the experts dont fully understand the systems in its wholeness. A thousand salutes to the poor Indian Farmer !!!

A meeting and a "touch me not" flower...

Recently I had been to Pune for a meeting and the meeting venue was a bit far away from the town. The organisers had taken great pains to select the venue in such a place that no mobile phones will work there, and hence the programme will go on smooth with no mobiles beeping and singing and crying (these days they are capable of everything in polyphonic tunes!!).

In the evenings we used to go out and walk through the narrow pathways and I could see innumerable plants and flowers and we used to see in our childhood... and one such flower was this (http://www.fotolog.com/tprmenon/24455550).

The rains that had just lashed the forests had already shrunk the leaves of the plant but the flower was still bloom...What a refreshing sight...