（日本語版はこちら）

In 2023 I grew several ancient rice varieties in buckets at the Elementary school where I work.
I’ve been working as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) at an elementary school in Nagasaki City since December 2021 and while it’s been fun, my real goal has always been to become a farmer here in Japan. To that end, I have been looking for ways I can get any kind of farming experience in Nagasaki. One event I came across was a rice planting experience at the local penguin aquarium.

Now you might be thinking ‘hold on a minute, penguins don’t live in rice fields!’ Well, as far as I’m aware, you’re right. However, this aquarium has what is known as a ‘biotope’. A park-like area adjacent to the main building that is curated to simulate various natural environments. As part of a small stream and pond system there is a rice paddy. It is here that the rice planting takes place.

The Biotope information board and map (right). Biotope rice paddy in July where the rice was planted (left).

The event was on the 3rd of June and the first thing I noticed on arriving was that the event was aimed at children. Nursery to elementary school children were putting their boots on ready to go into the rice paddy while the organisers were preparing the trays of seedlings to transplant. I had brought some other ALTs I work with along and while it was fun just watching the children trying to maintain their balance in the mud, I had an agenda to stick to. A friend had informed me the day before that he would also be doing some rice planting in his fields. It was apparent that we’d be able to get stuck in at his place more than here, where we’d have to wait until all the kids had their turn.

What was particularly interesting to me about this event though, were the rice varieties they were planting. They had three varieties of ancient rice cultivar, and I was curious because I thought they might provide some answers about growing rice more sustainably. I asked the person leading the event and they kindly let me take some of the seedlings, even giving me some plastic bags to put them in. After packing up the seedlings we sped off to my friend’s place where we got good and muddy planting rice.

Tray of Green Rice.

I had got some seedlings but where was I going to plant them? My balcony didn’t get nearly enough light and it wasn’t as though I had a garden. “Aha! The school!” I thought. By planting them there I could find a suitable location and it would enable me to involve the kids in growing the rice, too. I researched online about how to grow rice in planters, and it seemed to be a common thing in Japan to grow rice in buckets at schools as an enrichment activity. Some schools in Japan even have mini rice paddies!

Preparing the buckets – getting students to help plant.

The seedlings had suffered from being in a hot car and living in plastic bags for a few days. You can see in the picture some leaves had even withered. As soon as I could, I got the seedlings into a bucket with soil from a nearby weedy flowerbed.

I had received 6 aluminium buckets (that had at one point been used to transport school lunches!) from the school groundskeeper and after discussing with the teachers about a suitable location, I separated the seedlings out evenly between the buckets. At the time, I was working at two elementary schools, and I separated the buckets equally between them. This blog is about school A which I spent more time at. However, there were some interesting challenges I encountered growing the rice at school B which I will talk about some other time.

Because the health of the seedlings was so varied I didn’t count the exact number I put into each bucket but instead made three somewhat even groupings for each type of rice. 

I was originally only going to grow the rice as an experiment without worrying about how much I could actually harvest. however, I started thinking if I bought more buckets, I could potentially get enough so that a few students could try eating the rice.

I went to buy more buckets at the home and garden centre Nafco first, but the cheapest bucket they had was 500 yen. On a whim, I checked the 100 yen shop next door and miraculously they had perfect sized 10 litre buckets. I bought all the stock they had and ended up with 8 buckets in total at school A.

13 days after I had initially divided the seedlings between the 3 buckets the seedlings were looking a lot healthier. I recruited some volunteer students to join me in further transplanting the seedlings from 3 to 8 buckets. With me supervising, we dug up more soil from the flower bed (it wasn’t being used I promise!), put that into the buckets and mixed it with water. When the consistency became like wet cement, we then gently insert 1-5 seedlings into each bucket.

There were some seedlings left over after transplanting so as an experiment I planted them in a corner of the school vegetable plot. Dryland rice is often cultivated in parts of Asia with high elevation and less access to the water needed for paddy fields. This kind of rice cultivation was also practiced in Japan before dams and other technological developments provided better and consistent access to water in mountainous regions.

While they are still young, the three different varieties of ancient rice are almost identical, and I couldn’t tell them apart just by looking. When I first received them, I labelled the bags and made sure to keep track of these labels while they were successively transplanted. To make the rice buckets more interesting, I recruited students from various grades to draw pictures that I would use as labels. I got a lot of wonderful submissions but chose the best, cutest and those that most fitted with the different colours of rice (red, black and green). The rest I used to make a hanging decoration around the buckets.

All seemed well but I realised later that I had marked the bags of seedlings incorrectly from the start. That means in the pictures here that although red rice is labelled correctly, green rice is incorrectly labelled as black, and black rice is incorrectly labelled as green.

When you grow rice (and likely any crop) it’s important to count the number of days since planting. Cultivated rice generally takes around 120 days from transplanting until harvest (IRRI, Kubota). I counted the last time I moved the rice as the transplantation day which would mean the 20^th of June 2023 is day 0 after transplantation.

Rice Growth and Insect Appearance.

After transplantation the rice started growing steadily but noticeably larger. On the 24^th day (after transplantation) some insects must have also noticed the growing rice and came to visit.

The most surprising of these was a stick insect. I’m not sure if I had ever actually seen a wild stick insect before. Did it come to eat the rice? I wasn’t sure of that either, but it did a very good job of blending in with the black rice variety, which had a mixture of green and black colours along the stems. The 2^nd grade students at the time were collecting insects to display in their classrooms, so I caught the stick insect to give to them. Compared to the woodlice and grasshoppers on display, it was very popular, and the kids were incredibly pleased.

Next, I noticed some leaves had been eaten away and on closer inspection they had been rolled into a tube shape. Opening the leaf up, it contained what I think could be a larva of a moth called the rice leafroller, a common pest of rice. By removing them while they were still small, I could prevent most of the damage.

Unsurprisingly, grasshoppers also started to show up. Sometimes even eating half a leaf blade before I found them.

Both of these insects would appear occasionally throughout the growing season, but because there were only 8 rice buckets to check, it was easy to remove them before they could complete a life cycle and start reproducing.

When I told some of the teachers at the school about the insects, at least one responded with a concerned look on their face asking, ‘will you use pesticides to get rid of them?’. I was shocked anyone would suggest that for just a few buckets of rice. A number of insects is completely expected when growing any crop. I can’t be too critical of that thought though when the teachers were just trying to be helpful. Additionally, for people who are not familiar with nature or farming perhaps any amount of insects would seem to be a cause for legitimate concern.

Checking on the rice I had planted in the vegetable plot as dryland rice, I expected for them to be worse off than the buckets, having been surrounded by weeds and potential pests. In fact, they hadn’t been affected much at all. This despite there being clear signs of insect damage and insects on the surrounding weeds. Perhaps the weeds were tastier?

Overall, thanks to my efforts to ensure they were regularly watered, they were in good health. Without watering, I’m not sure how they would be faring.

The next week I spotted another insect which is also commonly found in rice paddies, a leaf hopper. This insect feeds on the sap within the stems and leaves of the plant and can be a problem because it might carry rice plant diseases in its saliva.

The rice plants continued to grow healthily and the most important job during this time is managing the water. It’s preferable to have a layer of standing water in the bucket but as long as the soil is still wet its ok. If the soil gets dry, however, then the rice plant can die very quickly.

Keep an eye out for my next post in which the rice plants enter the heading phase!