Experience on Growing Pumpkin and Bottle gourd in farm

Growing Pumpkins and Bottle gourd :
                 Growing Pumpkins is not easy nor difficult. Mainly patience is needed. It took me Three and half to get my first Pumpkin.

                * There were Ridges with small canals at the ends of the farm.
                * Noticed it to grow some veggies which i would market in the Local Farmer Markets nearby.
                * Searched online to know what type of veggies to grow on the ridges mainly concentrated on easy to grow and easy maintenance type.
                * Grandmother suggested Pumpkin and she gave seeds also.
                * I thought to grow Bottle gourd (Long edible) with Pumpkin as Bottle Gourd had a good demand in the Local Farmer Markets.
                * Hence, I sown Bottle gourd seeds and Pumpkin seeds in the same Row. I didn't tilled up the land. I lined up the drip line for irrigation and sown both seeds.

                                                        Bottle gourd and Pumpkin
                   * After 9 days both sprouted as shown in the figure above.
                   * I applied little cow dung near by the plants.
                   * The Plant Growth was good.
                   * But after 45 days I noticed grey ash spots which was powdery on the leaves of the Bottle gourd.
                   * I grinded Vitex leaves to make a paste. After that I diluted it with water and left for 2 days in a shady place.
                   * I filtered the solution and sprayed with electric sprayer.
                   * After one week it grey spots on the bottle gourd completely went.

                                                            Bottle Gourd and pumpkin

                                                          Bottle Gourd and Pumpkin
                  * In the above figure you can see both Bottle gourd and Pumpkin growing well.
                  * As I didn't tilled by land weeds came up.
                  * Day by day, the vines of both Bottle gourd and Pumpkin suppressed the weeds. As the sunlight doesn't go to the land the weeds have been suppressed.
                  * Finally, Bottle gourd plants first started to yield. My first Harvest was after 52 days from Planting.
                  * Nearly 300 kgs from 25 Bottle gourd Plants I sold to Local farmer Markets. when the Bottle gourd Plants crossed 150 days I stopped selling to Local farmer Markets. As the Fruits were not uniform. Offered those  Bottle gourds to neighbors and farmers nearby.
                  

                                                      First Harvest of Bottle Gourd
                    
                      * The First Harvest of Bottle gourd, I sold for Rs . 60. Four Bottle gourds were rejected. Reasons : Long in size, Crossed Maturity, white in color, scratches while transporting.
                     
                      * I waited Three and Half months to get my first Pumpkin.

                                                                      Pumpkin

                                                        Pumpkin Female Flower
              
                    * Bees will pollinate pollen from male flower to female flower. In some cases we, manually need to pollinate the pollen.

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How to prepare compost tea and use compost tea as Growth Promoter or Fertilizer

Compost Tea :
               It is simple and effective solution to promote Plant Health. The effectiveness of compost tea  depends on the quality of the compost prepared. Many farmers  have observed that the Compost Tea is very effective against many pests and diseases.

Preparation of Compost Tea:
                
Materials Required:
                * Well matured Compost
                * Water

Method:
                 * Good quality compost has to be prepared by adopting heap, aerobic or Vermi composting Methods.
                 * One part of Compost is immersed in 10 parts of water in a bucket or barrel depending on the quantity required.
                 * The contents are stirred 5 minutes everyday for 5 to 7 days.
                 * The Compost Tea is ready to be used as a foliar spray after 5 to 7 days.
                 *  Before the application of the solution, it is filtered and then used for spraying using the knapsack sprayer.

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About the Farm and works.

About the farm and works Hi, Good evening to all, Would not able to update daily about the work going on the farm. Busy with the work. A window below will say it all..! Sorry for inconvenience... 🙂 Furthers complaints or suggestions you can use send messages dialogue box on top right side... ! Thank you ☺️

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Growing Rice - Food from Fields

Rice, before it is milled, is called "paddy" by English-speaking people in Asia. There are for practical purposes two sorts: rice that grows in water or "wet" rice, and "upland" rice. The latter grows on open hillsides, but only in places with a very high rainfall such as the Chin Hills of Burma. Ordinary, or wet rice is grown on a large scale in the United States and in southern Europe, and there is no doubt that its cultivation could be extended to more northern latitudes. It will grow and ripen in summer temperatures of over (min 20°C), but these must cover much of the four to five months that the crop takes to grow and ripen. The wheat-eating peoples of India have a strong sense of superiority over the rice-eaters and look upon rice as food fit only for invalids!

Sowing the paddy
The best way to grow rice on a small scale is to sow the seed broadcast on a dry seed bed when the ground has warmed up in the spring, rake it well in, and then flood the seed bed but only just. As the shoots grow, always try to keep the water level below the tops of the plants. Rice survives in water by virtue of its hollow stem, which takes oxygen down to the rest of the plant. When the plants are about eight inches (20 cm) tall pull them out in bunches and transplant them in to shallow standing water in an irrigated field. Simply dab each plant into the soft mud four inches (10 cm) away from its neighbours. Billions of paddy plants are planted like this every year
in India and China. Keep the paddy field flooded (never let it get dry) until about a fortnight before you judge the grain ripe enough to harvest. Then drain the field and let the grain ripen in the dry field.

Harvesting

Harvest with the sickle, thresh as you would, by passing through a plate mill or stone mill with the plates or stones open enough to hull the grain without cracking it, and you are left with "brown rice," that magical perfect food of the yin-yan adherents. It is in fact a good grain, very rich in starch but lower in protein and also in several other qualities than wheat. If you mill the brown rice more closely you get pearled rice, which is generally and wrongly called polished rice. This is
almost pure starch and a very incomplete foodstuff, even less nutritious than white wheat flour which is saying a lot. A further process, called polishing, produces true polished rice which is what most of us buy in the shops. If you live on practically nothing else but pearled or polished rice you get beri-beri. So the sensible thing to do, if you live on rice, is to eat brown rice and not go to the trouble of removing the Food from the Fields
Rice bran, which is the most nutritious part of it, and feeding it to the pigs.

Cooking rice

Unlike most other grains rice does not need grinding before it is cooked. The Western way to cook your own home-milled rice is to wash the grain well in cold water and strain, then bring 1 pint (0.6 litres) of water to the boil, add a teaspoonful of salt, and throw in 6 oz (170 g) of rice. Bring this to the boil
again and then allow it to simmer by reducing the heat. Cover the pan and simmer for fifteen minutes. When the
rice is tender, eat it. It will have absorbed all the water. Best to use the Indian method which is to bring much more water than you really need to the boil, throw the rice in, bring to the boil again, allow to simmer until the grain is tender (but not reduced to that horrible stuff: rice pudding!) which will be in about a quarter of an hour, strain the water out, toss the rice up a few times in the strainer, and eat it. Each grain will be separate if you do this properly and the rice will be perfect.
You can colour and flavour rice very nicely by tossing a pinch of saffron into the rice while it is cooking. For brown
rice, you need to allow forty to fifty minutes cooking time.

INDIAN RICE

Indian rice, can be harvested when it is ripe, and dried in hot sun or else "parched" by heating over a fire or kilning. This can be boiled or steamed and eaten, preferably with meat. It is very nutritious, but very laborious to harvest.

Coutesy : The complete book of Self sufficiency.

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