Hello Hive
We have considered manually weeding a portion of our rice farm that is already producing seeds and not in the best conditions for application of herbicides.
The rice plants for this particular portion of our farm was planted very early and like every other rice specie, they often produce their seeds at the appointed time regardless of wether they are growing well or not .
For this particular rice you can see that they haven't grown up to the expected height, neither are the plant maintaining a proper green coloration showing a lack of sufficient nutrient. Nevertheless they are already producing seeds.
This particular field will not produce sufficient grains for all the reasons mentioned above. They haven't grown up to the expected height and haven't gotten enough nutrient.
The growth stage of the rice was badly affected due to the dry spells this made the rice to have a stunted growth. And during that period was when we were meant to apply herbicides on this for weed control before proceeding to add a little fertilizer to enhance growth and massive seed production. All of these couldn't be done at the proper time.
To save the situation now that the rice are already producing grains we have to do this rigorous hand weeding and again I'm not sure if applying any fertilizer at this time will be of any benefit to this farm at this time even though daddy is insisting that we add a little .
We have purchased some Urea for our farms and that will be added to all our other rice farm before the weekend, though I still have doubt about adding fertilizer to this.
The lack of rain and other conditions has been the reason this farm has experienced such poor growth and you can see how scanty the farm looks like. Normally with the spacing we have giving to these seedlings during planting, the rice plants were meant to grow and cover up the spaces in between the farms but you can see the suitation and look of things, hence there is no expectations of much harvest from this.
The manual weeding will not cause any drawback to the current growth stage of the grains while this process is very useful to protect yhe plants from rodent.