Soon after planting, the rainy season begins — usually in the middle of April — and the Palokhi swiddens quickly become full with the shoots of growing crops, and weeds. This marks the time when the laborious task of weeding must begin. It is also the time when the Palokhi Karen must prepare their wet-rice terraces for planting. The beginning of the wet season thus introduces a period when labour has to be allocated among a number of tasks. For some households, the stocks of rice from their previous year’s harvest may, in fact, be depleted or exhausted so that they also have to look for wage work in order to obtain rice. In these circumstances, they are faced with even more difficult problems in allocating their domestic supply of labour among competing demands on their time.

In the early stages of the wet season, in swidden cultivation, weeding is however a pressing necessity because the growth of weeds takes place faster than that of the rice crop and threatens to choke out and overshadow the growing rice shoots. Weed growth, moreover, occurs continuously throughout the rainy season and so there is a great need to keep it in check. Weeding is, as Kunstadter observes, “the most time consuming, most labour consuming, most uncomfortable, and most disliked portion of swidden agriculture” (1978: 90). Because of the many competing demands for their labour, the Palokhi Karen are unable to organise the weeding of swiddens on a regular, concerted, co-operative labour exchange basis. All Palokhi households are busy attending to their various subsistence tasks during the wet-season and this makes the co-ordination of weeding among households difficult. Instead, weeding is usually done on a household basis and it is spread out over the rainy season. It is most intensive in the early to middle stages of the wet season when the weeds are rapidly growing. Once the weeds are removed (or as much of them as may be managed by each household), this offers a respite during which time the rice and other crops have a chance to grow and, to some extent, contain the growth of weeds by shading them out. The sporadic weeding that takes place in the later stages of the wet season then suffices to keep weed growth in check which allows the rice crop to mature.