AnonymousFirst day of work!
And it went well! We worked 10 hours today, roguing paddocks for South Pacific Seeds. Today we learned a few things. Firstly, roguing is not just weeding, there are many weeds in the field amongst the crop that we don’t care about and just leave there. In each paddock, the things that have to be removed are the “off-types,” plants that don’t have the desirable qualities that the customer wants (for example, maybe the leaves are yellow instead of green) or “volunteers,” plants that seed themselves because they’ve been sown in the paddock previously and some seeds fall into the soil. Of these, the important ones to get out are any that are in the same family as the plant you’re cultivating, so when the plants go to seed, they don’t cross-pollinate. This is not desirable when you’re trying to get certain plant traits in your resulting seeds. What our day consisted of, pretty much, was driving around to different paddocks and then walking the rows (lots of walking) checking several on either side for nasties that don’t belong, and using a little hoe to chop them out when they were located. At times it was hard to be looking so intensely for such a long time, but mostly the incorrect plants just jumped out because it was obvious that they did not belong. All in all it was a good day, a bit tiring toward the end, but we met some nice people and had some good laughs and didn’t get rained on too much. Here’s to more fun tomorrow!
