There goes the neighorhood

Our neighbors are rolling their eyes at us again. This time, not only do we have our pop-corn drying on the front step, but we have a pile of the dreaded hie (sawa millet drying as well>). This is looks like a rice shoot until it starts to bear seeds, at which time it becomes painfully obvious that what we thought was a nicely growing rice paddy, was actually a paddy full of weeds.

The big problem is that if it goes to seed, there will be hell to pay next year. I have been out there for hours every day and have all but one of the paddies "mostly" cleared. The traditional way to dispose of the millets is to throw them in the river so that they wash up into someone else's field downstream. We thought that is a bit motainai (wasteful) since the millet has all of the nutrients from our field in it. So, we tried a little test, giving some of the not-yet-ready millets to our birds and the love it. Since millet is so similar to rice, we also have hopes that we can use the dried stalks to make straw goods, as one of the problems we had last winter was that there is no straw available because everyone uses a machine to harvest now, which apparently renders the straw useless.

The neighbors are all worried, I'm sure, that the millets we are drying will get into their field or paddy.

I would write more about it, but I am off to the tambo to pick weeds before I join Tomoe and her niece at a local festival, followed by camping at the shrine.