Before planting, rice fields are prepared to hold water for the early growing season. In the case of Oyama Senmaida, which uses rainwater and no pumped irrigation, the timing is especially important. We’re coming out of an exceptionally dry winter and rains are finally starting, so this week we worked on drainage channels. We’re almost a month behind the same tasks last year.
I joined the work crews twice this week. I have the usefulness of a child. I did what I could, but I am still such an ignorant helper that my most handy skill was carrying tools and supplies from paddy to paddy. While Iku-chan and Takao-san did all the work, I did my best to learn from them. And I took photos so you can learn, too.
Some of the fields have masu embedded into their banks. The concrete channels are sunk in deep on the steep banks to direct the water down to the next field. But sometimes water makes its own route, eroding the earth around the masu instead of flowing into it. That eventually leads to embankments collapsing.
So part of the work is finding the holes around the concrete, digging them out, refilling them and tamping them solid. At the same time, we assess the height of the boards holding the earth back and adjust with more boards or replace rotting ones.
One of the things I get to do in this case is saw to boards to length and use the nata knife to split the boards to height. I also shovel and tamp, but my skill is clumsy and I am slow. I feel bad that as the youngest member of my three person team, I did the least work. Takao-san and Iku-chan are efficient.
Not all of the fields have masu. When the paddies have less elevation between them, they have simple notches in their dikes and the water spills over the edge and makes its own path to the next paddy. The filling process is easier on the hand dug channels – plop a few shovels’ worth of dirt into the notch, pound it down and make sure it’s level with the rest of the edge. After doing a few of these together with Takao-san, I was trusted to work on them myself. I think someone checked all the ones I did, but they never fixed my work.
Rain is forecast on and off for the next week, so we will start to see this work in action. Expect photos of flooded fields soon.
