Merry Christmas to everybody! We would like to thank everybody who supported us in funding a new irrigation system for DEPDC's Half Day School's (HDS) rice field. In June 2015we started the rice growing project by ploughing the field and shaping the single ponds. For the four months from July to November the rice grew in the fields. By mid-November we harvested the rice with the help of all our students and staff at DEPDC's Mae Sai site. Now our first season's rice harvest is over and it's time for its conclusion.
We harvested an overall amount of about 10 bags of unhusked rice. That's about 300kg.
Considering 600-800g of edible rice per 1kg of unhusked rice, we expect an overall harvest of about 180-240kg of edible rice.
We suffered major losses from grubs eating the pith of the rice plants, causing them to die.
Spraying herbal pest repellent stops the grubs from damaging the rice plants, but needs to be applied immediately.
Another risk for the harvest are birds eating the grain shortly before reaping. For which we have some solutions but are still developing better ones.
The overall harvest was a bit lower than hoped and expected, but we are optimistic that we learned from this season's mistakes and are able to improve the results during the next growing season.
For the upcoming cold and dry season the rice fields will be used to grow vegetables, because of the lower need of water. During that time we will build the irrigation system and hope that the next rice growing season will be more successful.
DEPDC's staff, volunteers, and especially the students would like to thank everybody who helped us to fund this project. THANK YOU!!!
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The rainy season in Northern Thailand is over and the time for harvesting rice has come. Four months after we sowed the rice at our Half Day School (HDS) for the first time, we are now busy reaping it.
During the last week, the students and staff of DEPDC's HDS have been busy cutting the rice in the fields, bundling it, and finally threshing it before the harvest could be brought to the rice mill.
After the harvest, the rice fields will be transformed into vegetable fields until the next rainy season, due to lack of water during the following cold and dry seasons. We have not yet gained the funding for the new irrigation system, so we are still depending on water from our small well. Growing rice during that season would not be possible due to drought, especially after the last rainy season’s very limited rainfall in Mae Sai and many other parts of Thailand.
We hope that the water from the well will be at least enough to grow some vegetables that are able to grow with little water until the next rainy season arrives. Then we will transform the fields back into rice fields and hope that by that time we have funded the irrigation system to grow at least one if not two additional rice harvests.
DEPDC's students, volunteers, and staff would like to thank all donors for their kind support and hope to bring this project to a successful end.
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