Rice Harvesting

Let's see. What's new? The school had a rice harvesting event last week, which I watched. I helped out a little bit, but I couldn't stay long. I did take a whole bunch of pictures at the beginning, and came back for the end, so you can see the whole process.
So, the Board of Education owns this rice field. It's probably 10 meters x 40 meters. Every year the second-graders (you'd call them eighth-graders) harvest the rice. They use machetes to chop the stalks at the base of the plants. While some are doing this, others are binding them with 400 stalks at a time. The seeds were planted in little pockets of 20 each, so each cut yields 20 stalks. Twenty groups of these 20 stalks make the 400-stalk bundles. After sufficient space is cleared, they start putting up poles on which to hang the bundles, upside-down. Then they leave them like this for, well, I'm not sure how long--probably a week or two. I'll let you know what they do after that--some sort of smacking the stalks against a board to separate the individual rice seeds, I hear.

Yesterday, we harvested the rice. The second-graders did the cutting a few weeks ago (all the stuff above), and yesterday the first-graders harvested it. They took the bundles of rice and put them in the big red thresher-sort-of-machine, which filtered the rice seeds into bags, and disposed the rest back onto the field. Then, they took the posts and put up on the truck to be taken back to the school until next year.