Knowledge of cultivating Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice in Dục Tú Village

The Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice variety is one of the glutinous rice varieties favored and widely grown in Vietnam. With many outstanding characteristics such as disease resistance, good yield, and favored finished-product quality, this rice variety has attracted the attention of farmers and has been used to produce many diverse products. The Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice variety, also called yellow flower glutinous rice or nếp ả, is a rice variety of glutinous rice selected from local glutinous rice varieties; this variety offers a perfect combination of quality and high yield. The name Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice was given based on the characteristics of this variety. When nếp cái or nếp cái hoa vàng rice flowers, the pollen-bearing panicles are yellow. It is completely different from other rice varieties whose flowering panicles are white. Moreover, not only this difference but its fragrance is also very distinctive. Therefore, nếp cái rice is used to cook rice, make sticky rice, wrap cakes, brew wine, make fermented soybean sauce... and is loved by many people.

Đông Anh has a famous area for growing Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice, namely Dục Tú Village; Dục Tú Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice has round, sticky, especially fragrant grains, so it is often used to make sticky rice, green rice flakes, various cakes using glutinous rice, fermented soybean sauce, or to brew wine. Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice is only grown in the crop season, around the 5th to 10th lunar months.

Dục Tú Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice is characterized by very fragrant rice flavor and opaque white color. When cooked as sticky rice, it can be kept for 2 to 3 days and remains sticky.

Cultivation techniques:

+ Soaking and incubating seed rice: soak continuously for 2 days and 2 nights, changing the water once a day

+ Land preparation and sowing seedlings: make furrows into beds, broadcast basal fertilizer for seedlings, spread it evenly on the bed surface, drain all the water, then scatter the seedlings. When the seedlings are 7 days old, add water for the young seedlings; about 15 days later, apply topdressing. From 20 to 25 days, they can be pulled up for transplanting.

+ Transplanting rice: planting rows spaced 35 cm apart

+ When the rice takes root, apply topdressing, do not use chemical fertilizer, combine with weeding, mud stirring, and pest and disease prevention according to the growth cycle of the rice plant. When the rice has flag leaves, continue fertilizing so the rice is sturdy and does not lodge, because nếp cái plants are taller than ordinary rice. Wait until the rice is ripe, then cut it. From flowering to harvest is about 25 to 30 days.

To produce Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice grains characteristic of the local land, the factors of land, climate, and soil quality are the most important, and cultivation techniques in seed selection and zoning for planting so that pollination remains pure are also extremely important. According to experienced elders, in Dục Tú, in the land near Cổ Loa Citadel, growing Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice yields plump grains and a fragrance different from other places, but the area for growing this specialty is very small. Every year, the village organizes a ceremony to welcome the new rice, also called new sticky rice, on the 10th day of the 10th lunar month. The ceremony usually includes white sticky rice cooked with Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice from that year's October crop along with other offerings.

In Dục Tú, transmission between generations is mainly in the form of “hands-on instruction”, not through any books left behind; in families, children and grandchildren join grandparents and parents in the work from a young age and gradually learn the secrets, experience, and practice to make fragrant, delicious rice grains, so that when people mention Dục Tú, they immediately think of Yellow Flower Glutinous Rice.