Chapter 621: Spring Planting, Busy in the Fields

To get a good harvest during the Calamity Years, one needs hardworking farmers, fertile soil, quality water sources, biological agents to kill pests and diseases, and greenhouses that can keep out the Calamity Rain — plus quality seeds.

When the base selected land and staked out territory outside the safe zone, it took soil and water source conditions into account.

The soil and water quality in Northern Zone One are both decent. The river flowing through here is lightly polluted; outside of Calamity Rain or Calamity Snow periods, the Calamity element content in the water is between 14–17‰, and it can be used to irrigate fields directly. But if one wants to prevent the crops' quality from declining, it's still best to filter the water before irrigation.

The cost of filtering irrigation water is too high, so apart from Territory Seven, all the lords irrigate directly with river water. This means the crops are exposed to more Calamity element during growth, the Calamity element content within the plants rises, and quality drops.

This means the biggest obstacle to expanding production for the lords is the lack of sufficient quality seeds.

In territories that can't afford to build standardized greenhouses that isolate Calamity element, the lords can only pick out crops with a 1% chance of being a breedable optimized seed from what they've planted, to use as seeds for the next crop.

If no breedable optimized seed appears, they can only use points to buy seeds at a high price from the Territory Management Department or other lords who are selling.

The appearance of Yi-element soil can ease this problem to some extent. Because crops grown in Yi-element soil see the Calamity element content within the plant rise more slowly — or not at all — which gives lords the conditions to cultivate quality seeds within their own territory.

In other words, Yi-element soil can maintain seed stability at low cost, and even cultivate even better seeds.

The Yi-element soil within Xia Qing's territory forms a narrow, winding strip that follows the underground flow of the unpolluted spring water.

The unpolluted spring is at the top of the lower-slope planting strip; the spring winds upward over 200 meters to the upper-slope planting strip, and at the top of the upper-slope planting strip stands Ram Boss's big catalpa tree. Another 250 meters north of the catalpa tree is the Northern Isolation Belt.

Xia Qing has organized this planting strip into 25 terraced fields — 12 on the upper slope and 13 on the lower slope. Although there are quite a few terraces, each one is only about 50 square meters, and the total area of the terraces is just 1.7 mu.

Other territories in the Territory Alliance also have Yi-element planting areas, but this is considered internal classified information, and everyone tacitly agrees not to inquire about each other. So Xia Qing has no idea how large the Yi-element planting areas are within her fellow alliance members' territories.

However, Xia Qing guesses they probably don't have as much as she does, because their territories don't have an unpolluted spring.

These 1.7 mu of terraces Xia Qing has divided into two greenhouses — upper slope and lower slope — carefully protected, meticulously tended, and planned for high-efficiency use.

She intends to use these terraces to maintain the quality of her territory's existing crop varieties while improving the quality of the crop seeds. So this spring, every crop variety planted in her territory will have some planted in the terraces.

Xia Qing has promised her idol that she'll use three years to raise the Yi-element content of her spinach to above 9‰, so this spring the first crop she plants in her terraces is Yi-element spinach.

To avoid drawing too much attention, Xia Qing plans to plant only 150 Yi-element Green-Light spinach seeds in the terraces this year — exactly the number of seeds the base issues to lords. However, she won't be planting the second-generation seeds the base cultivated, but rather the first-generation seeds originally produced in her own terraces.

This bit of spinach won't fill up one terrace, so Xia Qing will use the remaining space to plant the Calamity-element-sensitive plant she obtained through trade — Green-Light purple sweet potato.

Calamity-element-sensitive plants need to be isolated from Calamity element throughout their entire growth cycle, which happens to match Xia Qing's plan to use Yi stones to protect her spinach seedlings throughout their growth. So these two crops can be planted together in the same terrace.

Although she just made a windfall and now has nearly a hundred Yi stones, she has no stable source of Yi stones, so she needs to use them sparingly. Right now she's hoping my lord the Queen finishes her month of confinement soon, and that Broken-Waist Wolf comes to visit quickly — she's already prepared a big refrigerator, a microscope, and cotton pads, just waiting for Broken-Waist Wolf to come trade.

The third crop to be primarily cultivated in the terraces is peanuts.

Last year Xia Qing harvested 35 Green-Light peanut plants and 170 Yellow-Light peanut plants from her terraces; thanks to the red squirrel, she also harvested 195 Green-Light peanut plants and 315 Yellow-Light peanut plants in the hidden valley. Apart from what she traded to her idol, this past winter she only ate a small amount of peanuts, saving the vast majority of the mature peanuts as seeds. So now Xia Qing has 9,200 plantable Green-Light peanuts and Yellow-Light peanuts.

The number of seeds doesn't equal the number of seedlings that will sprout, because there's also the germination rate to consider.

Last spring the peanuts sprouted on their own, so Xia Qing didn't know the germination rate at the time. To accurately measure the peanut germination rate, last winter Xia Qing sprouted some peanut seedlings using unpolluted spring water, and found that Green-Light peanuts had a germination rate of about 50%, and Yellow-Light peanuts about 35%.

This germination rate is the lowest among all the crop seeds Xia Qing has. Even the Yellow-Light potatoes — which dance after dangerous Calamity evolution — have a germination rate of 40%. For another oil-producing crop, Yellow-Light sunflower seeds have a germination rate as high as 80%!

Even with a low germination rate, she still has to tend them carefully. To spread the risk, Xia Qing plans to plant two terraces of Green-Light peanuts and one terrace of Yellow-Light peanuts in the terraces, with the rest planted in her one-mu plot in the hidden valley.

The fourth crop Xia Qing plans to plant in the terraces is Green-Light soybeans.

The soybeans Xia Qing harvested in her territory last year were an evolved, freakish variety — so hard you couldn't bite through them. The Green-Light soybeans she now has — 350 of them were traded for Green-Light eggs with Li Si, and three jin were demanded from Territory Nine by Zhang San after Territory Nine secretly sent evolved water rats into Territory Three and Xia Qing caught them. Xia Qing plans to plant two terraces of soybeans, with the rest planted in the cultivated land down the mountain.

The fifth crop to plant in the terraces is Yellow-Light sunflowers. The purpose of planting Yellow-Light sunflowers is to use Yi-element soil plus unpolluted spring water, plus a little luck, to gamble on that 1% chance of a breedable optimized seed and improve the quality of the sunflower seeds.

The sixth crop to plant in the terraces is Yellow-Light potatoes, for the same reason as the Yellow-Light sunflowers.

Then come the important staple crops whose seed quality must be maintained and improved: wheat, rice, corn, and the important cash crop cotton — these four also need to be planted in the terraces.

Then there's the Green-Light perilla and Green-Light alfalfa that Ram Boss likes to eat — one terrace of each. And the Green-Light pumpkin, which grows in a messy way but tastes great and yields a lot — one terrace of that too.

The remaining four terraces will be planted with vegetables whose quality needs to be maintained and improved: garlic, ginger, scallion, water celery, cucumber, green beans, tomatoes, and so on, plus medicinal herbs like the chrysanthemums Xia Qing collected in Valley Two and the mint she traded with Seeing Xin Yu. The vegetables from these four terraces Xia Qing won't trade externally — apart from feeding herself, Ram Boss, and Sick Wolf, at most she'll provide some to her idol Zhang San and her shooting instructor Luo Pei.

Zhang San will definitely trade from time to time, and Luo Pei has mostly recovered, so she'll mostly be out on missions from now on and rarely in her territory. So even though Xia Qing wants to treat her teacher well, she won't have much chance.

In short, every crop variety currently in Xia Qing's territory will be planted in the terraces, to ensure she can eat quality food while doing her best to maintain and improve the stability of these crop seeds.

It's easy to imagine how busy Xia Qing will be once the planting season after the Calamity Rain arrives. So before the Calamity Rain, she needs to finish all the preparatory work she can, so that as soon as the climate is right after the rain, she can immediately start soaking and sowing the seeds.

While Xia Qing was busy with farm work, Yang Jin and Luo Pei took a helicopter and escorted Tang Rui, Tang Zheng, and five others back to Hui-Three Safe Zone.