After planting comes harvest and that’s exactly what I did yesterday. I spend more than half of my day yesterday in the farm harvesting maize. It.was Saturday and weekend so I sees the opportunity to go to farm. I went along with my siblings and thankfully they were of help as we were able to completely finish the harvest.
The farm was the only one left of all my maize farm. I have looked for a time to go make this harvest and thankfully yesterday gave me the opportunity. Though there was a deliberate intention to leave it late for a reason. Maize is best harvested when the whole plant dry matter is between 30 - 38%. When you harvest your maize crop too early, it may result in a yield with poor quality fermentation. Late harvest on the other hand can result in a loss of quality as plant leaf and stalk increase in fiber and become less digestible.
Crops that dried when harvested lately are also difficult to compact properly. The harvest was done Manually using our hands to plug off the maze from its stands after which we remove the husk from the plug maize. Maize can be harvested using combine harvester but that’s applicable mostly to only to commercial farming.
As subsistence farmers we use our hands. It took us about 5 hours to completely finish the work. Much grateful to God for what we got this year.
After all we were left with our hands hurting for the work done but it’s normal and it’ will be better in a shit while.
