these are pictures i took for about 10 days from our 7th floor balcony of paddy harvesting activities in the fields below. from cutting, drying, heaping, threshing, winnowing, packing, to readying the fields for next plantation. busy busy women and men, and a bit of fun for the children.
when we'd arrived in pokhara, it was after october's tihar deluge that had ruined a lot of ready to harvest paddy in many parts of the country. farmers in pokhara seemed lucky in that the rains had not harmed the crops too much.
this is the general view of the fields that i zoomed in on from above... 
in some of the fields where the paddy had not been cut, most were still standing...
... there were only a few patches where the paddy had bowed down due to their weighty ears...
... elsewhere women were busy cutting the stalks of paddy and lining them in neat rows to dry them up a bit ... 
...rows upon rows of paddy sunning themselves up...
... those who had started early had already marked out the area for threshing the paddy...
... in a day or two, the paddy was bunched up ...
... gathered into bales...
... and carried over the stubbled field...
... to a paddy stack (no, not yet haystack!)
... the finished paddy stacks...
... larger fields had two stacks... ... a movie hoarding flex was turned to protective gear for an unfinished stack...
... meanwhile women were busy removing stubble nearby to prepare the threshing ground...
... the ground was levelled...
.. and then plastered with mud and cow dung (said to have anti bacterial properties)...
.. and the ground is then ready for the next step...
... a flurry of 'speeded-up' activities by men in threshing the paddy in the bigger field...
... in the smaller field the bales were then carried in small bundles for threshing...
... on a rock in the middle of the cleared area...
... the paddy was then winnowed ...
... the cleaned up grain were then filled into sacks and taken for storage...
... the hay put away to the side made great rest area for the adults and play area for the children...
... while some of the hay was carried as cow feed in the neighbourhood...... the rest were loaded onto tractors...
... and driven away ...
... any remnant grain on the ground were gathered and whisked...
... in the evening any remaining husk, hay, and other leftovers were burnt...
... time to prepare for the next set of crops... the first was to reload organic fertiliser into the soil. it meant carrying the manure...
... unloading them...
... all over the field...
... and then scattering them...
... next came the tiller tractors... going from field to field in the area...
... then the women turned the sod around...
... and the next morning the tractor came back to smoothen out the field...
... time for digging the field into furrows...
... and planting potatoes...
... to be continued for the next harvest perhaps ???
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