Chapter 126 (1/2)

Chapter 126 Wheat Transformation

For villages and small towns, it didn’t matter whether or not they used the rotation farming system. However, for big cities where the surrounding land was scarce, this system wasted a lot of land. For example, Silver City, Fallen Dragon Ridge, and King’s City were such places, so every month they had to import a large amounts of grain from other cities.

The first step in using fertilizer was to collect the manure. This was also the reason why Roland decided to establish the public toilets as soon as possible. With the toilets, he could reduce the spreading of disease and even beautify the living environment; it was such as simple action but it offered so many improvements.

His goal was for the toilets to already be constructed by the time the rest of the new citizens have been shipped over. As for teaching them how to use compost and cultivate the arable land, Roland decided to select a small group of experienced farmers during the next few days and teach them the system first. After all, the land was still in its clean-up phase, and it would still need at least a week before it would be useable.

After finishing all the work at hand, he decided to go meet Leaves at the back garden and take a look at her experiments.

Since Leaves improved all categories of seeds, there could be seen many different kinds of crops in the garden. She has also followed Roland’s suggestion and divided her farming area into several small blocks which were all given a number. With this, she could compare the developments of two groups of test crops.

When Roland stepped into the yard, he was stunned by the picture of golden and dazzling wheat swaying in the wind in front of his eyes.

“Your Royal Highness.” When Leaves, who was squatting beside one of her fields became aware of the Prince, she immediately stood up and bowed in greeting.

“Are these the results of your improvements?” He waved his hand trying to stop Leaves from going through the ritual greeting went then to pick one of the wheat plants, feeling the caryopsis with his fingers.

Previously he had no idea what the wheat would look like, but in contrast with the wheat fields in the prince’s former memories, those were not only smaller than the ones in his hand, they also had a lot fewer grains.

Leaves nodded in acknowledgment, “I let the wheat grow with my magic, then I harvested the ripe seeds and then planted the seeds once more, what you have in your hands is the result I got out of it. However… I repeated this process several times, but after two or three rounds of planting, it became difficult to grow the wheat as long and large as before, and I just can’t understand where the problem lies.”

Unfortunately, I cannot help you with that, Roland thought. According to his own pitiful junior high school biology knowledge, it was probably because of self-intersection defects? In the southern area there were only rice seeds, which were poles apart from wheat. So in order to raise the output they always had to purchase new seeds. But even with only two generations of planting it still had a practical value, after all, one wheat plant can produce more than 130 seeds, and if he the let Leaves first transform the generation of seeds, and afterward let the farmers uses those seeds, he could still use the seeds for two years.

“Why is this one empty?” Roland asked when he noticed a field with only a few dry straws.

This is the area where I planted first, but perhaps because I had planted here too many cycles,” Leaves was clearly unsure. “I can only let the plants grow when I cast my magic, but when I remove my magic they will wither soon after.

It seems that even when she used her magic to let the plants grow she still used up the land’s supply of nutrition, and without the nutrition, the plants could not survive. Roland went to the last flower bed, there the planted wheat had a very strange shape, on an arm-thick stalk of wheat with several blue grain ears, and the center stalk even had several branches which were with green leaves. So, the volume of grains per plant were very large, but on the whole field, there were only two plants.

This was the area Roland has asked Leaves to create new plants like a ‘wheat tree’.

He had envisioned to turn a wheat plant into something similar to a banana tree, where he could harvest the fruit from the branches, with the possibility of a regular harvest, thus eliminating the need for sowing, and if they could grow even larger, they would get more green leaves, improving the photosynthesis and reducing the land requirements. But at present, the thick and solid wheat stalks together with its branches took a lot of space, furthermore the grain ears would only grow on the top of the stalks and branches which weren’t what he had originally imagined. Perhaps, should I ask Leaves to transform them in the direction of grape vines? Roland thought, after all, Leaves had never seen real banana trees, but grapes were not a rare product within the Kingdom of Graycastle, and as long as she had an image it should be easy for to imitate.

“The seeds of these three wheat plants cannot be used for sowing,” Leaves explained, “I tried already, but the seeds wouldn’t germinate after they were planted. However, they can still be harvested several times, you see the grains are the second batch.”

Can’t germinate means that every plant would be a unique wheat tree and that Leaves would have to personally create every tree, so for the current situation, it doesn’t have any true value.