11 Chapter 11: Crops
Despite what was planned, in the end we decided that all the people available to work would be responsible for the size and preparation of the area where we will grow.
Unlike the prairies where each tribe is only allowed to cultivate in a certain area, which can not be exceeded unless you want to incur hostilities with nearby tribes. Despite these rules in quotation marks which are not written, they are still respected.
Compared to meadows, we can now have as much farmland as we want. But at the moment we will only use 4 hectares (10 acres) of land for cultivation.
-you'll be sure this will be useful- interrupting my thoughts while watching how people worked, Mors spoke to me.
-yes, even though you do not understand this, it is important for crops-
-well you are the boss- before my answer Mors continued with his work.
What he had asked them to do before the felling of the trees was to collect the earth at the foot of the trees, put them in the wagons and take them to a clear area. They did not understand why he wanted this land. Unlike them, I know that this land is compost resulting from the leaves of the trees fallen to the ground and subsequently degraded over time. This compost together with the organic waste from the village will work as fertilizer for the land.
It took around two days to collect and accumulate everything in compost from the area to grow. Once this is done we start with the carving of the trees. On this occasion, being a harder job, only the men did, the women were in charge of the rest of the minor tasks of the village.
After 5 days of felling and another 3 cleaning of the land, pulling the stumps of the trees, we can finally start with the cultivation. Luckily, it did not take us longer since it was now mid-autumn, and it was a good time to start sowing.
-then you intend to do the crops as you proposed in the meeting- Yoru spoke to me while I watched as people plowed the land using the plow pulled by the oxen.
-If, in this way the crops will provide more food and we will not have to change the place of cultivation as in the prairies-
-Well, I hope you're right, since the truth was always a problem having to change places for the village in the meadows-
At Yoru's words, I could only agree.
The cultivation plan that we will make is the rotation of four phases. This method is not used in the meadows, and therefore have problems with the fertility of the land. Thanks to this method we can make better use of the land and it will be fertile for long periods of time.
This method consists in dividing the cultivated land into four areas, in each area different vegetables are grown, each vegetable consumes and provides different components of the land, and every two seasons you change by rotating the crops if a crop was in area 1 passes to the 2, and the two for the 3 and so the 3 passes to the 4 and finally the 4 passes to 1. In this way the land will be more profitable. It took me a while to decide what would be the crops we would grow.
When we were still in the meadows we could only harvest wheat as it was a crop that we could do during all seasons, compared to other crops which had to be grown in certain seasons and did not last as long as wheat.
Now we can plant other crops. As the main crop, we will still grow wheat. In the other areas we will cultivate other crops. When the merchants arrived at the previous village, we not only bought grains of wheat, to profit and bought seeds of other crops. I had to spend more than expected since initially these seeds would be sold in the western steppes. I had to negotiate with the merchant to sell them to me, but in the end I got them.
Now I have different seeds to grow, but at the moment we will only use 5 of those bought from the merchant.
The first will be wheat, and the second area peas, they have a period of growth of 60 days compared to wheat that is 150 days, to match the change of crop areas between the four different crops, will make two crops of peas and between these about 30 days of rest of the earth. This during the autumn and winter season, in spring and summer will be grown in this lentils area.
In the third area, pumpkins will be grown during the autumn and winter, and during the spring and summer we will plant melons. These are separated from about 30 days in which the earth rests.
And in the last area, we will grow potatoes, these have a growth of 60 days and can be grown in the four seasons, will be cultivated and after the harvest will be left 30 days of rest to the land.
In this way we can match the wheat crop with the change of land of other crops without interfering with them.
For each crop we will allocate one hectare (2.5 acres) of land. In this way we will get a large amount of food for the whole tribe and for the animals that we have.
The first crops that we will harvest will be peas and potatoes. Something that I have to emphasize, which at the beginning nobody understood, was that in the areas where lentils and melons would be grown, peppermint plants would be grown, which I got looking for in the forest. These will work as insecticides for pests and will also be a way that the land is never uncultivated since lentils and melons have 90 and 120 day growth periods.
I also ordered that during the 30 days that the farm lands are resting, the animals would live in those areas, in this way we can take advantage of their excrement as a fertilizer.
At the end of the first day of plowing on the farmland, return home tired. At the moment the houses were simple wooden cabins, I would have liked to use other materials but as my ultimate goal was not to establish permanently here but on the island in the middle of the nearby lake, I decided to give up.
-Brother, brother! - Nao waits for me at my arrival.
-Hoho Nao, where are your sisters-
-Ellen went for water to cook and Aria after old Yoru's classes went with Mira- Nao sat on my lap while saying this.
Although I did not mind this, I still feel uncomfortable, I know it's my sister, but I can not help being nervous when I feel her body on my knees and chest.
During these days, the Yoru classes to the villagers who wanted to learn about magic continued, these were performed before sunset. Now only the twins are there, Mira and my sisters. The rest stopped attending because they felt that magic was not theirs, and decided to take this time to learn other things.
- Nao tells me how you go with your magic practice - before my question Nao gets excited and moves his body, this makes me more nervous since his movements are transmitted to my body.
-You see, brother, Yoru has begun to teach us how to feel the manna and I was the first to feel it- Nao was happy, I was not surprised that she was the first to see her MP statistics.
-very good- seeing his joy I could only caress his head. At this Nao snuggled closer to my body and I could see from behind that his cheeks were a little red and has a big smile on his face.
