Fields

Since we live in Taipei, we don't see a lot of fields and farms. Although, the citizens of Taiwan, city or rural take advantage of every inch of land they have. Even in the bustling inner city you can find small garden patches amoungst the big highrise buildings.

These pictures were taken at the National park near Taichung...the same place we fed the baby cows and cooked the chicken underground. The big open fields were so refreshing to us! The boys, Clayton and Calvin, worked VERY hard and with a little help from gravity, they
managed to roll the BIG hay bale down the hill.
The girls, Courtney and Joyce, had a little bigger job...rolling it back up. But they were up for the challenge!

I'm not sure exactly what all they were growing in these fields. Some kind of red flowers. They were also some vegetables and a small area of canola growing as well.

On a more recent trip we had the priveledge of taking the train all the way around Taiwan. So we got to see the countryside around the coast
on all sides! We saw a lot of fields from the train window. Many rice fields, a few corn fields and lots of vegetable gardens. The kids enjoyed seeing all of the scarecrows. I was fascinated by watching the workers in the fields. Almost all of them were wearing the pointy hats like Shawn had on in the refrigerator picture. I didn't notice any fancy machinery like I see on our farms back home. I'm sure that many farmers must have some modern equipment for farming but a lot of the work is done by hand. Shawn and Courtney saw one farmer working the land with a plow pulled by oxen. That was fascinating to them.


Another unusual sight for us is in the orchards here. Every single piece of fruit, (orange, guava, dates) is covered with a small paper bag and tied shut to protect it from insects, etc.. It's unfathomable to think of the time it would take to do this! I'm sure glad that this isn't customary in Illinois. For I know whose job it would have been to wrap the apples on our trees on the farm where I grew up...and we only had 2 or 3 apple trees...not a whole orchard!