Rice Rice Baby

At Babylonstoren almost anything grows.  Our guests love risotto and the artists of Babel make it so yummy. Could we grow it ourselves? Lunatically we now tried our hands at planting Carnaroli – a risotto traditionally cultivated in the north of Italy, regions Piedmont and Lombardy. Carnaroli is considered “the caviar of rice”. But rice needs lotsa-lotsa water, and in South Africa it has never really been cultivated successfully.  So we dug a paddy and this is how it developed:

We started building the rice paddy in January 2014. Contractors dug a small dam just below the existing vlei. Then the floor of the paddy had to be levelled, but with a slight slant sideways where narrow channels provide drainage.

With help from his friend Attilio Dalpiaz, an Italian agronomist, our farm manager Hannes tackled his first rice harvest.  The seeds were planted last October, then the soil was thoroughly irrigated, mornings and late afternoons, until the seeds germinated. Once the plant had grown to about 30 cm high with four leaves, we flooded the paddy with water from the vlei. Rice grows in water about 30 – 40cm deep and the paddy is filled up as the plant grows. As the risotto starts to ripen, the paddy is left to dry before the harvest starts, some 150 days after planting.  (And the frogs then scramble back to the vlei next door.)

We faced quite a number of challenges in this first go.  How to get rid of reeds, how to regulate water temperature and (once the ears of rice starts to ripen) how to keep away birds – but the words “can’t be done” are not employed at Babylonstoren.

We can’t tell you yet about the harvest festival (see in the June issue of Taste magazine). But we’re waiting for a Zanotti Rice Mill to arrive from Italy. This thingy will remove the husk and polish the grain.  Then we’ll test what the artists of Babel can cook up.  As they say, the proof of the pudding …