Patience is a virtue

June 6, 2013

It was time, at last, to sow the seeds we got from other people. Team Tagumpay must have been the slowest of the planters because it took us two hours to finish sowing seeds. But to be fair, it was the first time for some of us to even be in a nursery. Even though it was quite hot when the team worked, it was all fun... at the beginning. As the first hour passed, planting rice started getting monotonous. Patience was starting to thin.

I wondered how people working in the field handled the slower pace in life.

But of course! There's music! One of the bird ladies (women who stayed in the fields to shoo away the birds) started walking about with her portable radio blaring. Just following the woman's lead, I started playing music from my iPad. Maroon 5 was on top of my Dropbox starred music list so I played the band's songs. If wifi signals could reach the nursery, I would have played the classical music podcast; but there was no wifi in the field.

June 7, 2013

One of my group mates, RK, told the rest of the group, that we'd start seeing something the following week. Me being me, I just had to drop by to visit the nursery to see if anything's happening yet. Since it's been only a day after sowing, nothing's popping out of the ground yet. I felt like Sam Gamgee going around the Shire checking the plants he had sprinkled with Galadriel's gift.

June 11, 2013

So, I visited the field again, with Jen and Maya. Five days into planting and green things started emerging from the ground! I had a sigh of relief because we know we'll have something to transplant after 16 more days.

Just to make sure that the plants we were going to plant were strong enough to withstand the stress of pulling and transferring to a different field, we gave the plants an initial helping of fertilizer. With the rains just around the corner, these plants will have a lot of challenges ahead of them; so it wouldn't hurt to give them a head start. In seven days, Team Tagumpay will be back in the nursery to give these seedlings another boost of fertilizer. 

As we countdown to transplanting day, I can just say that the Rice Survivor Wet Season challenge teaches one important lesson that farmers all know:

Patience is a virtue.