Hello Hive

Happy New week to all and sundry. May the new week favor us all, and may we find the good health we need to stay strong and healthy and be able to go about our daily tasks.

Circumstances have made it compulsory for us to visit the farm now, even on a Sunday. Our religious people consider it inappropriate for people to visit the farms on resting days, solely obeying the scripture to the letter, especially the part of the commandments that urges us to stay at home on Sunday as God rested on the 7th day, and hence we are to follow his footsteps to rest at home on Sundays and do no work.

For the time that we are now, it is absolutely necessary to check in on the farms on Sundays as well. During the other days of the week, we are often in the farms all day, making it impossible for people to either steal our harvest or for any bushfire to raze down our farms at this time. Until harvest is completed, we have to stick around here.

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We have visited the farms on two occasions now only to find some animals feeding on our crops. I can recount how they had completely destroyed a portion of our beans last week; I was surprised to see that those animals actually came back to the farm even after we had left and ate up the remaining portion of the beans.

For now there is nothing more to harvest from that portion of our farms; hence we have to keep an eye on the remaining crops. And for now we have to visit the farms that are close to the house even on a Sunday.

After going for Sunday service in the morning, we have gotten home, had our lunch, and headed to the farm.
Everywhere is so dry as if rain never fell this year. The river beside our farms has gone down so much that little children were seen fishing by its banks already. With the manner in which I am usually scared of water, I don't see myself standing close to this river even if it has dried off more than this.

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Ok, on several occasions this particular river has taken people's lives; even when it is low like this, villagers often troop in here because of the scarcity of water in the dry seasons. They come to wash, clean, and do laundry by this river, while parents go about their tasks; we have the children play so much or swim in the water until one of them falls into some deeper parts of the water. The community cannot even count the number of children that have died here. The uneventful occurs frequently, and they soon forget only for it to reoccur again.

The guinea corn planted by the riverside has been really fat and flourishing compared to the ones planted by the mountainsides some distance away from here. At a particular time, there was flooding that had almost overshadowed this plant from the river, but that soon gave way without affecting the plant.

While the guinea corns from other locations and that of other farmers are struggling to produce seeds at this time due to the extreme dryness with no source of atmospheric moisture for it to survive, this one by the river has been doing so well.

Myself and my brother were surprised to see some white sorghum in a field that was planted with only red sorghum; this is how pollination and fertilization work. Mixing different species of crops from different farms. It's funny to see that you can plant one variety of a particular crop and have it pollinated with another variety of the same crop from neighboring farms.

The harvest of rice has taken the top priority for this week, and you will be seeing all of our workers in the rice farms as the day passes by.

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