Miniature Rice Field ( I was about six or seven)

Hema, the girl who used to be our nanny and our cook had previously worked in Polonnaruwa transplanting rice and she used to talk about how hot it was there and how it was full of viper snakes (polonga). Hema's heels were permanently cracked from the time she spent at Polonnaruwa. The cracks in her heels were like deep crevices like nothing I had seen before!

After hearing Hema's experiences about planting rice, I got it into my head to grow my own little mini rice paddy field. Hema helped me to pick a spot next to the garden tap for my mini paddy field since rice needs water all the time to grow.

So Hema went ahead and dug up the ground next to the garden tap with the triangle shaped mini hoe that my Grandfather had given me. Then, she proceeded to add water and made the field muddy. After that, she built a low mud wall (bund) around the rectangle shaped rice field and filled the field up with water.

Now it was ready to be sown with paddy (rice) seeds. Hema used the little rice seeds that she had saved from each time she cooked rice and sprinkled them over the rice field. Whenever Hema cooked rice she used to pick through the rice to weed out any rice that was still in its husk and collect it in a little jar. A few days after sowing the rice seeds sprouted up into little seedlings. The trick was to keep the field filled with water while the rice seeds kept growing taller and taller. It took around six months for the rice seeds to grow tall and green and sprout their own rice kernals. Once the rice kernals turned golden they were ready to be harvested.

The harvest from my mini paddy field was very small. But nontheless it was all collected and dried and the husks removed by pounding in a motar. Later I cooked this rice in one of my little earthen ware pots, I had to add some of the kernals collected by Hema from the jar to make a potful.