Working in standing water?

[goodcompanion]

Thanks for the responses. Having never turned clay pasture into rice paddy before, I don’t know how gooey the mud on the bottom will be, or how deep a horse is likely to sink. I expect it will be rather gooey.

The goal of this kind of tillage is to turn a basin with standing clear water in it into thick mud by churning up the bottom so that the water is suspended. But since the water is stagnant, no flow through, during this process there is no erosion and the dirt settles uniformly back down onto the bottom. This is known in English as “puddling” and is the process of preparing the paddy for planting. After this there need be no more animals in the field until harvest when the paddy is drained. I hope to harvest with my reaper-binder, but maybe this is dreaming!

The only peer I have is Takeshi and Linda Akaogi, whose method I recently learned. I don’t think they have yet arrived at a good method for puddling. A tractor cannot do the job without special tires. However puddling by hand they have gotten good pruduction from hayayuki, matsumae, and yukihikare. I am trying hayayuki and matsumae. They are both cold-tolerant varieties from Hokkaido.

The only reason we don’t think of rice as possible in New England is because nobody has ever really tried. The more I learn about it the more I think it fits. I lived in Japan for a year, didn’t really care for the experience much, but rice growing is cool. The weird game shows and drunk businessmen and their schoolgirl porn I can do without.

[Rick Alger]

They used to use horses to drag seaweed (moss) out of coastal tidewaters in PEI. Maybe they still do.

Sensitizing to water should be doable, but sensitizing to unstable clay footing may be a stretch as others have said.

But it’s a righteous concept. I wish you luck.

[Carl Russell]

Here is a link to RFD-TV show tonight about using snow shoes on mules. Might have some application to using something similar in mud.

http://www.rfdtv.com/schedule_search.asp?searchText=Rural Heritage&show=

Carl

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