...just too wet to plan on anything more that two days ahead. Finally we just harvested when we could and made a series of videos for our interested followers with a webinar to discuss and answer questions. Thanks to Natalie Walker for filming, Steph Hughes and Joji Brar for editing, and to the Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security/Seed Change for supporting our efforts to produce good, organic rice seed and a rice crop with great potential to help Nova Scotia achieve food security.
HARVESTING THE RICE
This first video shows us (Niki Clark and Ian Curry) harvesting a small planting by hand, and a large planting with a rice harvester.
The small crop variety Yukimochi (below. left) produced only thin heads, but the seed is viable and we will resow it another year to learn if it has potential.
This is the new variety Nikian21, also grown as a small batch, harvested by hand and hung to dry. Note the full, mature heads. Great potential here!
Can't wait to taste it!
This is the Khudwani rice as it comes from the harvester in bags to be laid out to dry in a green house. It still requires lots of hand threshing and picking to be clean seed.
DRYING THE RICE
Small plantings harvested by hand sickle.
New variety Nikian21
Large planting of Hayayuki rice harvested with a mechanical harvester.
Hayayuki, drying now for 2 weeks.
DEHUSKING THE RICE
Our amazing dehusking machine that removes the husk and leaves us with beautiful, brown rice, ready to eat!
YUM!
And this concludes our blog series "Rice Growing 101". We hope you will be inspired to try growing rice and making it a regular part of your diet. For your information, using the 2023 planting of Hayayuki rice, we include here some typical numbers worth mulling over:
Hayayuki rice grown 2023
Paddy measurement
112 ft. (34 m.) x 30 ft. (9.25 m.) = 3,360 sq. ft. (314.5 sq. m.) area
Plant spacing
Transplanted at 1 ft. apart = 3,360 rice plants
Weight after drying
At 15% moisture, 227 lbs. (103.5 kg.)
Weight after de-husking (removing (husks, most immature seed and debris)
De-husking removed 23% of weight, leaving 176 lbs. (80 kg.)
This could feed several families for a year, even if you "eat a lot of rice!"