Daily Life in the Countryside After Being Reborn
Chapter 59: The Farming Competition Between Grandfather and Granddaughter

Chapter 59: Chapter 59: The Farming Competition Between Grandfather and Granddaughter

To strongly protest against going to school with Little Hai, Xiao Xian staged a sit-in for three days, but in the end, her protest was in vain.

She had to resort to another tactic: procrastination, claiming she would attend school after the rice was planted. The elderly patriarch thought pushing her too hard would backfire, so he agreed to give Xiao Xian another half month.

Half a month, however, is not enough to accomplish much of anything, let alone the full set of farming tasks related to spring plowing. At this time, Xiao Xian fully demonstrated the tenacity of Yunteng Sect’s "Blossoming Flowers," and still managed to accomplish quite a bit in that half month.

Although Zhu Shijun didn’t really take Xiao Xian’s rice paddy to heart, out of the principle of not discouraging a child’s enthusiasm and wanting Xiao Xian to develop a good habit of seeing things through from start to finish, he specifically had the village’s elder carpenter make a lightweight hoe just for Xiao Xian, and fitted a small-sized bucket for her, preparing a series of early seedling cultivation tools.

With the assistance of Sister-in-law Lian, Xiao Xian fenced off a patch of land at the entrance of the village, three acres in size, because one must cultivate seedlings before planting rice. The rotted alfalfa became a thick layer of humus, just as rich as what had accumulated from decades of water fir leaves; in fact, using alfalfa or purple geranium as fertilizer has long been a tradition of the Yunteng Sect, but this practice is not popular in this world. In the words of Zhou Xiaoxian’s master, Yun Qing, anything that grows from the soil should return to the soil.

Xiao Xian did not need to survey the mountain like Zhu Shijun to guess why the land of Leigong Mountain was infertile. Being in the rainy Southwest along the mountainside, the fertile topsoil accumulated by trees over decades was washed away by rain, and the mountain was planted with economically viable timbers that look rather than function, compounded by poor transportation and failure to transport timber down the mountain. Planting the same vegetation year after year exhausted the soil even more.

Despite the villagers using straw ash to fertilize the soil according to ancestral methods, the effectiveness of such fertilizer was only a tenth of that of alfalfa, and this also resulted in smoky miasma over the mountains after the autumn harvest, sometimes even causing wildfires.

However, merely using alfalfa as fertilizer could not guarantee the robust growth of the seedlings by 100%: the key to growing good rice is the seedlings. Xiao Xian, thick-faced, requested a gentle cut from the sugarcane seedling in exchange for ten jin (Chinese weight unit) of iron nails, and received a few pitiful drops of the Iron Immortal Liquid.

Since the sugarcane seedling absorbed that six-seater minivan, it faintly showed a tendency to grow new leaves. Learning from previous experience, it demanded Xiao Xian not to cut its seed leaves anymore, but was willing to offer an appropriate amount of sap in exchange for equivalent value.

After negotiating the price, Xiao Xian saw a few drops of light green sap, like jelly, appearing on the surface stem of the sugarcane seedling. After collecting the slightly sticky sap, Xiao Xian found a basin, drew some well water, dissolved the sap into the water, and then soaked all three large jars of India Fragrant Rice in the water. After soaking the seeds, Xiao Xian chose a good day to sun-dry the rice seeds for a day or two, to eliminate dampness and mustiness.

After soaking for a night, the rice grains had swollen up, and the mold spots that had grown on the seed surface for many years fell off. After lifting them out and draining the water, looking again, the rice seeds were now twice as big as when they were first purchased, and their surface shone with a golden luster.

Once the most basic work was completed, Xiao Xian began her "seedling cultivation" task. A total of three acres of rice paddy would require three parts of nursery bed. With Sister-in-law Lian’s assistance, Xiao Xian used a bamboo pole to measure out the size of each seedbed roughly. The width of the nursery bed was set to 1.5 meters, with a soil depth of about 7 or 8 centimeters. After cleaning the not yet fully decomposed alfalfa, they sifted fitting fine soil with a rice sieve to cover the rice seeds.

Enthusiastic Sister-in-law Lian also specially brought over half a bag of calcium phosphate fertilizer left over from last year, suggesting mixing it into the soil would make the seedlings grow stronger. After Xiao Xian inquired and learned that Sister-in-law Lian’s family only harvested a mere four hundred jin of rice last year, she firmly refused to use that bag of fertilizer.

"A fertilizer that yields only four hundred jin per mu would only poison my rice seeds," Xiao Xian made up her mind that those fertilizers were the culprits in impoverishing the soil of the mountains. They say China’s grain production has increased, but that’s all thanks to being smashed out by fertilizers (this is true, comrades, we are all eating chemically fertilized grains). If we continue like this, degrading the soil quality, in a hundred years, what will the Chinese eat?

Tip: You can use left, right keyboard keys to browse between chapters.Tap the middle of the screen to reveal Reading Options.

If you find any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc..), Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.

Report