Planting Season is Here

So planting season is officially underway out here. It means a lot of trips out to the village and being incredibly busy. It is a good busy though. I enjoy the village life. You wake up, go out to the field, and sit around the fire in the kitchen during the middle of the afternoon. It is pretty slow and boring, but there are a lot of opportunities to sit around and hang out with people. Last week my roommate and I spent the weekend down on the border of Laos looking at coffee. Some people had planted a few hundred plants that were dying. My roommate worked on a coffee plantation for a year so he is the local expert. The weekend there was fun, but it was HOT. I've realized how nice it is to be here where it is sunny and 70 degrees every day. We spent most of our time out in a village on the side of a mountain. It is amazing how just within a couple of hundred miles the culture is entirely different. Instead of being in the mountains and living in mud brick homes, we were in the middle of a jungle with people lived in wooden huts on stilts. The weekend was fun and I think we helped solve their coffee problem. We're still in the process of trying to find some coffee locations out here. We've looked in a couple of villages last month, but either the soil or the climate wasn't right at the locations.

We're also in the middle of corn planting season out here. Almost everyone here plants corn every year. We're working with a grant to do research on which corn varieties will perform the best in our location. Basically we get some land from a farmer in a village, plant nine different varieties, he plants his row next to ours the local way of doing it, and then at harvest we weigh the different varieties and see which one yields the most corn. It isn't rocket science, but it is an easy way to help out villagers (they can keep the corn since they let us use their land), and it also provides us ways to get out there for the next six months. So yesterday we went out and planted two different test plots in neighboring villages. One of the farmers who let us use his land was actually one of the guys I stayed with back in January. It was a great opportunity to reconnect with him, and I'll get to spend the next six months going to visit him. If anyone ever tells you that you can easily plant two fields in one day they are lying. We worked pretty much from sun-up to sun-down and barely finished before we ran out of daylight. We got it all done though. I think the game plan is that every Thursday for the next month we are going to be traveling to villages and planting corn and looking for coffee test plots. Anyway, that's about all that is going on out here. It is busy, but a lot of fun.