Chương 58: Potato Harvest

Days 162-178 Medi 21st - Hydref 8th (September 21st - October 8th) Johnstone grinned and said, "Do you really think the bishop would have any men on his personal labor crews who were not level 20? These men are only Laborers, but they're top notch Laborers." I looked at him, my brow furrowed.

"You know," I said, ", ost of the time you're a pretty good guy, but sometimes your noble upbringing comes out." Johnstone smiled at me slyly.

"I'm downright egalitarian compared to most of my peers. And it was mostly a compliment." I snorted and patted him on the shoulder.

"Come on, let's go have lunch, then we'll tell them what they need to do for the potato harvest." Unlike the combine crew, who were only served cold sandwiches since Emily was helping on the combine, this harvest crew got a full spread of food for their first lunch. We had a late summer salad, roast pork, fresh loaves of bread, cornbread, and a keg of small beer. I'd bought a keg of brown ale for dinnertime as well. Tomorrow, we would begin pulling out the rest of the salted elk.

We had enough left over to make an elk and vegetable stew that should suffice for lunches for the next ten days or so. The stew had an ingredient that I was sure almost none of them had eaten more than once or twice - potatoes. I'd needed to make sure that the potatoes were ready, so I had already pulled up a batch a few days ago. We'd invited the Newtons over so I could show them all the ways they could start cooking their potatoes. I'd made sure they brought plenty of butter, cheese, and sour cream too.

We had fries, baked potatoes, twice baked potatoes, hashbrowns, and potato salad. Their minds were absolutely blown by the twice baked potatoes. I cooked them up with cheese and chopped up bacon, then I had them slather sour cream and butter on top once they came out of the oven. I'd always been a fan of a good potato salad with hard-boiled eggs and a mustard mix for the sauce. We had tons of hard boiled eggs available, and Emily had grown mustard, so that was easy to do.

People might not have gone crazy for the potato salad in the same way they did for the twice baked potatoes, but everyone still enjoyed it. My fries were only good, but the kids loved them. I was more of a shoestring-fry kind of guy, but I couldn't quite get them right since we didn't have any vegetable oil or a strainer. I ended up frying up homestyle fries in a frying pan. When the work crews had eaten their fill, I had everyone gather around me just inside the potato field.

Johnstone told me to give them a good explanation since they were the bishop's sworn men, so I gave them the full rundown.

"Gentlemen, today we are going to start harvesting a field of potatoes." There were a few odd glances, but no one said anything, so I walked over to where a vine was sticking out of the ground and took a pitchfork with close-set tines and put my boot on the edge with the pitchfork angled towards the middle of the row. I made sure the tines went all the way down so that they were below any potatoes and gave the handle a good bit of down pressure.

I was strong enough at level 20 that it didn't take too much effort to pop all ten of the large potatoes that had been attached to the vine out of the ground. I picked up a couple of the massive one-pound brown-skinned russet potatoes and showed them to the crew. The workers all began murmuring loudly to each other before one asked, "Sir, is the whole field going to look like that?" I couldn't keep the smile out of my voice when I said, "Yup, sure is." That set off even more conversation.

I let it go on for a couple of minutes longer before I gave out a sharp whistle to get their attention. Once they'd quieted down, I said, "What I need all of you to do until we are done is begin digging the potatoes out of the ground and loading them into wagons to bring over to where I've set up next to that cabin over there." I pointed to my original cabin where I'd be doing the sorting.

"I'll teach some of you what potatoes I want to keep, and which will go on wagons. After speaking with the good Wizard here, he has told me to keep back enough potatoes to plant three plots next year." I didn't mention that he'd said I would plant three plots if the Bishop and the Emperor didn't decide I was too much trouble and make me disappear instead. I continued on, "That means we will need to keep roughly fifteen percent of the potatoes behind for next year.

It would normally be thirty percent in the same situation, but I used my big bonus and am getting almost fifty percent more potatoes than I would without System shenanigans." One man raised his hand, an action that made me laugh. Apparently, even here, raising your hand was ingrained in people. I called on him and he asked, "Do you just plant a whole potato? And it becomes ten potatoes?" I was impressed; that was a good question.

"No, great question though. One of these big potatoes," I held the large russet in my hand up so they could see.

"Might grow up to fifteen little spots that we call eyes. We cut one inch square cubes out of the potato around those eyes. You leave them sit for a couple of days to get hard so they don't rot." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Another guy asked, "So you'll take the largest potatoes for planting next year?"

"No," I said.

"I want the smaller ones. You can't actually get fifteen eyes out of a potato, not enough space. Smaller ones should still get four, while realistically a big one one will only get six or eight. If they're all this large then we will though." I saw the men nodding in understanding so I continued on, "What we're going to do is start sorting the potatoes out. I'll sort them, and I'll have one or two of you all bag them up and load wagons.

The Trade Guild will have wagons rotating in and out of here just about non-stop for the next two or three weeks." I spoke with the three foremen, and we decided we'd have everyone do some digging today, with some light supervision on my part, to make sure no one was having issues with stabbing potatoes.

Then, once we were confident everyone was going to be okay, the lead foreman took ten volunteers to actually dig for the rest of the day; six men were on the wagon team, and the final two helped me with the sorting. The next morning, the men got their first taste of hashbrowns. I was practically giddy as I waited to see their expressions. I was not disappointed! Hashbrowns, eggs, and bacon were a tremendous hit.

Wizard Johnstone didn't come back early enough to eat, but after all the men were talking about how much they loved breakfast, he made it for day three, day four, and day five. It took him a week to grow tired of the novelty of the hashbrowns, but despite telling the three foremen I could rotate out to different meals, the workers requested my simple farm breakfast every day.

I switched things up and add sausage instead of bacon on some mornings, and I added in fried tomatoes, and bread with blackberry preserves, or even camp biscuits on occasion. But, the over easy eggs and hashbrowns were present at every single meal for the seventeen days it took to do the harvest. The crew also enjoyed the potato-filled vegetable elk stews, On the final night, I had Brendan bring out more butter and sour cream, and I made twice-baked potatoes for the whole crew.

I had planned for twenty-one days with my expected work crews, but almost every one of the eighteen men on the three crews I had were level twenty. I probably would have underestimated the time it would have taken if I'd had a normal work crew. It took me a few days, but I did finally wonder what happened to my original work crews. These guys were not residents of Weston. Johnstone told me they had been forcibly replaced by the System at the bishop's request.

They'd still been paid by the crown for the time they were supposed to work. It seemed odd that the bishop or the crown could have that kind of power over the System, but Johnstone had been confident when he told me what happened. Johnstone had begun to talk with me just about every day about things that seemed a little too above my pay grade.

He would tell me something about the power structure, or mention that the Emperor, an archbishop, or Bishop Smyth, who was a de facto archbishop in the Territories, or even the Noble Council, could somehow make the System do things. When I asked him about details, he told me that if I survived the upcoming meeting with the bishop, these were things I was going to become privy to. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me a bit of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Princess Bride.

I thought of the scene where Westley was describing his time as a captive on the Dread Pirate Robert's ship. He and the Dread Pirate would talk every day, and at the end Roberts would say, "Good night, Westley. Good Work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning." Now, as to why I would have underestimated the time it would have taken a normal work crew… When we were done, I averaged 500 bushels per acre thanks to my bonuses and the fertile soil.

That absolutely blew my previous estimates out of the water. Back home we were getting more than 700 bushels per acre, but even though we didn't have magical bonuses, we had perfected our growing procedures and had modern fertilizers. Well, if I wanted to be accurate, we sold everything in hundredweight, not bushels, which weighed sixty pounds, but here it was all bushels for everything. My grandfather had told me they used to get as few as two hundred when he was a kid.

I was estimating 275 with bonuses because of that. Of course, they weren't using modern fertilizers in the late 1940s, and they probably didn't have ground that had never been farmed before either. Those numbers were just insane. That was 10, 000 bushels from twenty acres. It took them sixty wagonloads and six riverboats full of potatoes to haul them all off to wherever they were being taken to. I only needed 1, 500 bushels to plant three plots; that meant that I could sell 8, 500 bushels at twelve gold apiece.

That was a grand total of 102, 000 gold! I had contracted my eighteen men at ten gold a day for twenty-one days. That was about 3, 800 gold. They'd only actually worked seventeen days, but they'd worked super hard, so in addition to the bonus four days because they got done early, I also gave each of them an additional 100 gold for their work. Johnstone had told me it was a terrible precedent to set, but I thought they'd earned it. Right after I paid the men, I heard loud exclamations from over half of the men.

When Johnstone and I went over to see what had happened, we found out that all six of the men who had Farmhand as their primary class evolved! Four of the Laborers had evolved as well! Evolutions for those classes were pretty rare. Only a few hundred men in the entire empire got the evolutions each year. I was pretty happy for them, but Johnstone pulled me aside and said we'd be lucky if there weren't some questions asked about how they pulled this off.

Apparently the System Stone was set up to flag things like this. Our only saving grace was that since these were all the Bishop's men, he could control when they evolved so one of his men should be at the helm when they evolved. By the time I'd paid out my workers and some other minor expenses, I had profited 96, 000 gold. I also found out banks were a thing at that point. I mean, I should have known that already, but I hadn't had enough gold for that to matter. Nearly 100, 000 gold was a different beast entirely.

When I asked Johnstone if I was okay to buy extra plots and the necessary buildings, he told me to go for it. I honestly thought about buying a wagon and taking as much gold as I could and fleeing with Emily and Colin, but I didn't know where I would go if I made that decision. The general sense of unease that I'd been feeling for the last couple of months certainly didn't ease off when I asked a couple of people in town what happened to those who ran afoul of the crown.

Their lands were made the personal property of the crown, so the fact that they were letting me buy extra plots and then improve them didn't mean I was in the clear. It actually worked out better if they let me do all of my improvements and then they took four plots instead of one. The Newtons were real pillars of support during this time, but I did tell them not to mention their own potatoes to anyone. They had their own bumper crop, but only had a few rows in their garden so they shouldn't be in any danger.

Enough people had somehow seen them that they wouldn't be disappeared just for knowing about them. Once everyone was gone, I got to work with my last twenty-two guaranteed days.