Explore #5 on Monday, May 18, 2009 Hmong, Sapa -- We are planting the Rice now. The paddies are flooded with water and plowing and repairing the edges starts early and continues for a few weeks. Here is Ho, doing the final plow before planting the rice shoots in the next few hours. The greenery on the edges was scraped and mixed as fertilizers. You can see woman in the background pulling the green rice that will be replanted in the proper spacing. Its 8:00 am, we started at 6:00am The rice planting season has just start and everyone will be busy in the labor intensive process, as i will show in this this set. The following set of images was taken 3 years ago. To answer many questions here; I spend all my time with them, morning to night… in the paddy up to my knees... I will describe it later. The buffalos don’t especially like me and standing in the narrow paddy needs some watching, they could be temperamental… the buffalos :) See the rice set here The Black Hmong are the 3rd largest minority in Vietnam with nearly 900,000 people. In the Sapa region there are about 35,000 residing in the surrounding 17 villages and they account for about 50% of the area population. The Hmong started migrating to Vietnam from china in the last 300 years. They live of the land and believe in the spirits.