Chương 93: 92: Wheat and Potatoes

End of Mawrth beginning of Ebril We finally planted wheat on the 29th of Mawrth. That was fifteen days later than I planned, thanks to another couple of rainstorms after I'd already corrugated, but it was more than two weeks earlier than I'd planted the year before. Of course, we had to bring out the Weston Fire Wizard, Brianan Innes, to help Rupert reshape my corrugator back into a useful farm tool. The man was a pompous ass, who treated Rupert like a peasant and me as little better than an oddity.

I had to break out the cultivator because of the rains, which led to some questions from the farmhands that I was appallingly unprepared for. I had a rolling basket-style cultivator that was designed to break up soil if it got too hard before planting. But I also had the same style cultivator attached to the back of the ripper disc.

Now, a big part of the reason I had the cultivator was that on fields we actually corrugated, we usually did all the field work in the fall, and we'd just roll out the cultivator to break up the soil before planting. It was also helpful if it rained a bunch right after we planted, and we were worried the soil would be too hard for the shoots to break through. My T9 definitely wasn't the ideal tractor to use with the cultivator.

That was better done by a wheeled tractor so you could set the tires at the correct distance apart to drive inside the divot, not on the top. Since the cultivator was relatively light, even this massive one that was forty-eight feet across didn't need more than a couple hundred horsepower to run. But I could chalk it up to the whole, my dad made sure I had everything I needed to do things on my own with one tractor, thing. Now back to my Farmhands…

"Mr Jacobsen," said Stephen.

"I realize I'm not an expert, heck, I was a dockhand, not a farmer. But, why can't we just corrugate the same day, or the day before you plant wheat?"

"Well," I said.

"You want to let the soil rest a bit before you corrugate." What does letting the soil rest even mean? I asked myself internally. I realized I'd never really thought about it. It was just one of those things my family had done for as long as I could remember, so I always went along with it. All four of my farmhands looked confused. I could tell they definitely thought I was just bullshitting them. Surprisingly, it was Laeth who asked the question they were all wanting to ask.

"Sir, uh Mr Jacobson," Laeth stammered out quietly.

"I don't know what that means, but I want to. Can, uh, you, uh explain that, uh to us?" I gave a nervous laugh.

"Well, gentlemen, I've gotta admit that's something that my family has done for as long as I can remember. First off, most people who have access to irrigation in my world water their crops. Now, that's not to say everyone does. Heck, if you went a few hundred miles to the north, or west of where I lived, there was still a lot of dry land farming being done. But the people who do irrigate make these corrugates." I saw Colin raise his hand. When had he even shown up to this?

"Yes Colin?" I asked.

"You said that you didn't use these corrugates on places you watered with big metal pipes." He said. He looked earnest, but if I didn't know any better, I'd say the little turd was messing with me.

"Yes," I said, giving him my best, you aren't helping things, look.

"But we don't have wheel lines here, and are unlikely to for a very long time. We need electricity to run the pump wells that suck the water up and distribute it."

"Alright, getting back on track," I said.

"To the best of my knowledge, it helps drain the soil so the seed crops can break through more easily. It makes sure the ground is stable, and our rows aren't falling apart." Laeth, who had asked about the potato planter, asked another question here.

"Sir, uh, Mr Jacobson. What about the potato planter? It has its own corrugator that's a part of it. We didn't corrugate that ground already." I did my best not to shake my head and laugh at the situation. Especially with Laeth truly looking earnest. I still wasn't sure if Colin was been messing with me, but I was 100 percent certain Laeth wasn't. I just decided to wing it and go with my best guess.

"Potatoes are different. First, the seed we'll be cutting up is massive in comparison to the wheat and corn seeds. Second, potatoes are fickle and delicate by comparison. The potato bed has a much wider row than corn or wheat too. Wheat is only seven and a half inches, corn is thirty, so I guess maybe the row would be more stable there. The potatoes are thirty-six. We also need to make sure that the potato seed is fully covered up." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

I took a breath to make sure I still had everyone with me. When I could see that they were all still paying attention, I said, "We call the corrugator on the potato planter a ridger, it actually pushes dirt up higher on the row. Any more questions about corrugating?" Surprisingly, they seemed satisfied with my response.

I was like seventy-five percent certain I wasn't spewing total bullshit, but even if I was, I was pretty certain it was done the way it was for a positive reason, and if I was the trendsetter for this world, then that was how it was going to continue to be done. We got the wheat planted on the 29th. Four fields were close to eighty bushels of wheat. My New Holland p2080 could hold a hundred bushels of seed. This year it didn't look pathetic when we poured all the seed into the hopper.

That felt like a huge deal to me. That even had Colin impressed.

"John, it doesn't look like you're just doing something to look impressive now! Your bin was pretty much empty last year! It only took us around eight passes to plant that field." Colin even sounded genuine. Now the twenty-acre field of barley that we planted on the same day still looked like a tiny amount, but there was always next year. His, "This is what the bin looked like," comment to the Farmhands was unnecessary commentary from the peanut gallery. Speaking of peanuts.

I knew they were grown in the southeast, but I had zero idea where they were native to. I kind of thought it was the Southeast in North America, but I didn't remember any stories about peanuts from early settler stories, so I was probably incorrect. Barley was another one of those crops on Earth that we usually planted in the winter. If it was planted in the spring, it was often just green chopped. We'd use a swather, just like with alfalfa.

We'd take the whole plant, green-chop it, and put it in a silage pit for animal feed. Since it grew faster than wheat, it made for a good cover crop where you could later put another crop, like a fast-growing corn variety, in the same field that year. In other parts of the country, they'd plant soybeans after green chopping barley, but I didn't know anyone who grew soybeans in Idaho. I was pretty certain soybeans were native to Southeast Asia, so they weren't a thing here.

When spring barley was planted, they'd often harvest it in the fall for the grains for animal feed or for use in making beer. I did like a good barley-based stew. Once we got the wheat in the ground, it was time for all hands on deck cutting up the seed potato we'd kept behind. Back home, we just bought seed from the seed company every year. They brought their own semis out to the field and even loaded them into the bin on the Spudnik planter. I simply set the gps and got to planting.

We'd only had trouble with the seed we'd received once or twice, and not on a wide-scale level. That time, the seed company had a bunch of small potatoes that made it through their cutting machine that were just a little too large to fit easily in the cups on the planter that set the chunks into the ground. We wanted chunks that were between an inch and a half and two and a half inches. I didn't have any cups that would fit other sizes with me.

They existed, but we planted almost exclusively Russet Burbank potatoes, and since they were large potatoes, we didn't need the smaller cups. I had all the Farmhands and the Farm Mistresses gather around the Spudnik potato planter for a quick rundown on how it worked. Everyone was going to be needed to get the sixty acres worth of seed cut up quickly and efficiently. I showed them how the cups rotated as the machine moved forward and set the seed in the ground behind the disc that opened a pocket up.

I even grabbed some of the spare cups and handed them out to everyone so if they had questions about the size of the chunks they'd cut, they could just use the cup to make sure their piece would fit. That was when Zack, who was the most likely to use his built-in UI tools, pointed out that we could just turn on the sizing tool on our UIs that could be set to make two-inch cuts. That was helpful to a point, but it still had to be manually set around the eyes to get the most out of each potato.

To do that, I sat everyone down and showed them the healthy green sprouts that were just little nubs growing out of the eyes of the potatoes. I demonstrated how I wanted at least one, and possibly two eyes on each piece they cut. The UI measurement tool couldn't choose the best eye, but it did give a good breakdown around the eye after a person chose a good starting point. Without modern machinery, it was a painfully laborious process that took us three long days.

We had far less waste than I anticipated thanks to the UIs, and as for the waste that we did have, I just buried it in a hole we dug in the ground. I had to explain the whole, don't eat potatoes raw, don't feed it to the animals, and especially don't eat the extra pieces we'd cut because they go bad in only an hour or two thing. I did wonder if they'd hurt people with levels. It wasn't like they were really poisonous or anything.

You'd have to eat a lot to make you sick, but it wasn't an experiment I was especially curious to run. I didn't need pigs with bellyaches either. We left the pieces to sit for an additional three days. On Ebril 5th, I wowed everyone with my Spudnik 8312 potato planter. Even the soldiers stayed around the homestead to watch the machine in action. When I pulled up to the potato cellar and started filling up the bin, everyone was awed by the shiny red planter.

I pulled up to the first field and used the hydraulics to spread out each wing. I checked my diagnostics one last time. I saw that everything on the potato planter was solidly in the green. It was in better shape than my grain drill, which was nice. I could fix the electronic components on all of my equipment now once I plugged it into one of the ports on my tractor, and amazingly, as long as the hoses were connected to my tractor, that counted for the hydraulic hoses as well.

For some reason it didn't count for the mechanical components on the implements, but maybe it only worked on the hydraulic hoses because they had the oil flowing through them. The fixes were like my tractor, they'd need to be redone every week, but it would give me an extra year if something went wrong with a hose in a year or two. I actually had Colin ride with me for this round because planting the seed was all about my bonus.

My Farmhands got XP for helping break ground with me, but they didn't impart the growing bonus that my tier 1 class did. Once we were done planting potatoes, we had a ten-day break before planting corn. I switched back to my wizard class and got ready to spend nine days imparting mana into the soil.