Paddy fields at sunset with a cloche covering a seedbed of sprouting grains
Much of the land around Thành Công village is parcelled up amongst the villagers who grow two crops each year: rice, and maybe ground nuts or sweet potatoes. Behind the village the hills rise towards 3,000 feet and between them and the village is a large reseroir. The hills and the ground beyond the villagers' fields are wooded with recent planting of eucalyptus and pine.
Rice grains are often sown in seed beds like these, then the individual seedlings are planted out into the fields
The fields are flooded for the young plants
Here there are two lots of planting: those on the left a day or two old, and on the right a couple of weeks - but growth is very much temperature dependent
Within a month the rice is a foot high
Chickens and weeders - heads down
The reservoir sits between the hills and the village
The water is surrounded by trees which run over the hills, and with this scrubby sandy terrain, which in fact converts well to productive ground
Tree with bowl collecting gum, part of the regime of managed woodlands that is now in place
One of the concrete signs placed by the government as part of its replanting scheme. These exhort people to protect, and not destroy, the woodlands which, it stresses in red, belong to us all
The history of these woods, as throughout Vietnam, is poignant. The combination of the U.S. destruction of vegetation, and the near famine conditions that resulted from the ensuing American economic blockade, left the land denuded. The governments response has been the massive planting of fast growing eucalyptus and pine.
The fields, village of Thành Công, and hills beyond
This tomb and enclosure by the village has been newly rebuilt - debris is still visible
Young eucalyptus and grazing animals
Other tombs in the woods. For more on tombs
go to a page on graves in Tĩnh Gia
Clearly a cycle has been the inspiration for this homemade seed dispenser
A cart on a path to the fields
The small fields, that surround the village, stem from the de-nationalisation of land at which time each household was given a number of these patches, this allowed the good and poorer land to be divided fairly amongst the community.
Neighbours watch as the man shows how his seed dispenser works
The constant and backbreaking job of weeding dominates working life
Furrowed land with some form of young cucurbitaceae (cucumber family)
Another shot of the fields around Thành Công, but maybe you can see that the man is no longer led by a cow or buffalo, but by a motor plough. All the
animals dotting the area
beyond him will be used for work as they have been for thousands of years, but change is coming everywhere in Vietnam
The next page
shows something more of the animals that work for the village - the cows and buffalos.
The last page was about the village of Thành Công
A page about Lũng Cú - the most northerly village in Vietnam
Mã Pì Lèng Village
