Chapter 434 - Greenhouses for Vegetables (1/2)
Zhou Yang was extremely surprised at this turn of events and he didn’t know quite how to feel. However, in the end, he couldn’t bear to leave his position at the Imperial Plantation and took on this task of managing the fruit orchard. Furthermore, he did a very good job in doing so.
In the future, Yu Xiaocao’s fruit orchard encompassed the entire hill and the fruits from the orchard were sold all throughout the country. These fruits were famed and well-known among the people. Zhou Yang resigned from his position at the Imperial Plantation and became the head steward at the fruit orchard. His position and treatment there was two-fold higher than when he was at the plantation. In addition, the master even gave him five percent of the profits.
Five percent may not seem like a lot but most people were poor for their entire lives and had never seen as much money as this steward got in one year from bonuses. All of his previous coworkers at the Imperial Plantation envied him completely! Obviously, this was all in the future.
The stewards and officials at the Imperial Plantation finally settled down and started to earnestly do work. With someone also especially in charge of the fruit trees, Yu Xiaocao could focus her efforts on Royal Prince Yang’s new farmstead and their melon vines. Since they had planted watermelons at a later date than usual, she had the little divine stone shorten the sprouting phase by a third of the time. In any case, there weren’t a lot of people cultivating watermelons in the capital. Furthermore, she was on the only one in the capital using this special grafting method to raise them.
After the melon sprouts were grafted on the vines, she had Royal Prince Yang handpick some trusted servants and then taught the grafting method to them. These people were not the tenant farmers on the farmstead. Instead, they were all trusted servants from Imperial Prince Jing’s estate and their loyalty to their masters were a guarantee.
After all of the melon sprouts were grafted onto the gourd vines, they were transplanted into the melon fields. They were irrigated with mystic-stone water from the well, so they naturally grew very well. The people who had been snickering behind her back, claiming that she didn’t know the first thing about farming, now had nothing to say. They no longer had a leg to stand on. After all, Yu Xiaocao managed to finish the agricultural tasks assigned to her in a timely manner and also managed to transplant her own fruit trees and watermelon vines such that they were flourishing. They now had to admit that she was very skilled in the area. The emperor’s decision to give her the title of an agricultural official was truly a wise idea.
There were countless people in the capital who were keeping a close eye on the Imperial Plantation. After two months passed, the tenant farmers on the plantation, under the management of the stewards, began to harvest the corn like wildfire. Which of the tenant farmers who worked at the Imperial Plantation weren’t old hands at farming and harvesting? These people all had giant grins on their faces as they picked the plump ears of corn. They discussed amongst themselves just how good the harvest was this year.
Minister Liu came over early that morning to inspect the Imperial Plantation. When he saw the ears of corn that had been harvested, he smiled so broadly that all of his wrinkles became apparent. The size of the ears of corn were significantly larger than the previous years and each kernel seemed to be plump and bursting with juice. Compared to the harvest from last year, this year’s harvest was of an entirely different grade.
After one mu from the experimental fields was fully harvested, Minister Liu personally took some people along to impatiently weigh all of the ears of corn. Oh my! One mu had actually yielded around two thousand catties of grain! He had originally thought that last year’s a thousand catties per mu was considered a high-yield. However, compared to their giant harvest this year, last year’s numbers looked really too wretched. As expected, having Miss Yu take on the position of an official and being given responsibility of the Imperial Plantation was a very wise decision!
All of the officials who had been keeping a close eye on the situation at the Imperial Plantation could only shut their mouths now. The vast majority of court officials rejected the idea of having a tiny little lass become an official at the Ministry of Revenue. However, the emperor was adamant. Minister Liu and Royal Prince Yang also supported this plan, so they didn’t stubbornly fight this appointment and decided to wait and observe instead.
If the harvest this year at the plantation was about the same as last year or even not as good, then they would have a leg to stand on to voice their objections. After all, the weather each year differed, which influenced the resulting harvest. This was the reason why there was this saying: ‘the common people depend on the heavens to eat’.
This year, the weather conditions had not been very good. There wasn’t a lot of rain after summer started and even the deepest wells at the Imperial Plantation had water levels that were incredibly low. After autumn started, a few downpours of torrential rain also occurred. Thus, these unfavorable conditions naturally influenced the growth of the crops. In fact, the commoners who lived around the capital all had their grain harvests decreased by about a third or even more this year. They were so sure that the little lass was doomed.
Contrary to their expectations, the Imperial Plantation was not affected by the poor weather conditions. Instead, the yield of corn there actually went up. The officials that were sent by the Ministry of Revenue had tallied up the numbers and the numbers were incredibly shocking. The farmers who had bought corn seeds to plant in their own fields also got yields around a thousand catties per mu. As things were going, corn, as a true high-yielding crop, would soon be propagated throughout the northern parts of the country. It was likely that there would be many more farmers standing in line to buy corn seeds. The grain stores in the capital would likely explode with popularity then!
The numbers from the farmstead in Tanggu Town also came back to court. The Yu Family’s farmstead, which now had over a thousand mu in fields (Author’s note: Royal Prince Yang’s eight hundred mu farmstead had been given to Yu Xiaocao so now the land was naturally a part of the Yu Family’s farmstead), had produced over 180,000 catties of grain. In other words, their fields had also reached a yield of two thousand catties per mu. It was rumored that all of the villages in the vicinity had sent out representatives to negotiate with Yu Hai as they wanted to buy these corn seeds at a high price. If the Yu Family agreed to this trade, then the high-yielding crop corn would first be widely planted in the areas around Tanggu!
Tanggu was the feudal lands of Royal Prince Yang, so they couldn’t let the royal prince monopolize the benefits of growing high-yielding crops alone. Consequently, for the next few sessions at court, there were lively debates about how to disseminate the high-yielding corn to areas around the capital and the process to do so.
The endless arguments at court didn’t have much to do with Yu Xiaocao, who was only a small sixth-level official. She, on the other hand, was currently busy making another fortune!
During the summer, Yu Xiaocao had planted a hundred mu with grafted watermelons at the farmstead next to the Imperial Plantation to test it out. These watermelons were now ripe and entering the market. From her rough estimations, she figured that this season they could harvest more than eight thousand catties of watermelons from the fields. Watermelon sprouts that had been grafted to gourd vines were more resistant to pests. In addition, the soil on these fields had some spiritual energy there, so this made the watermelons grow better. Furthermore, all of the people in charge of watermelons were very hardworking and did a good job in taking care of these plants.