The raining season at North of Thailand has started. While our neighbors are busying planting corn for selling, we are also busy to prepare our paddy field and planting our staple food— RICE!!
As this is the first year we plant paddy in this new land, we will start with small and slow solution. We are planting also other plants such as pumpkin, black soy bean, long bean and many more as the ground cover. We got several kinds of local heirloom seed from local village and we also have our seed that we saved from last year. We will also experiment to have companion planting (paddy and dark soy bean) together.
Before we start to plant our paddy, we did the float test to make sure the seed that we are using are the very good quality one. Materials used are sea salt, egg (fresh), buckets. water, and sieve. This method is very effective for paddy seeds, however, if you are planting other kind of seeds, you have to consider about the buoyancy and the density of the seeds.
Diluting salt in water
Add salt into the water until the egg can be floating on water. Now, the water is really high density.
Put the seeds inside the water
Sieve away the floating seed. We will plant only the seed which is sinking.
We wash the seed that we are going to plant in normal water for 3 times. It is important to get rid of the salt because we don’t want that in our soil later. Before planting, we also soak our seed in EM that we made.
Sahai Nan Organic Permaculture Farm 