Farm Girl's Manor

Now, the seedlings raised in early April by the Mo Family were grown, and the terraced fields were filled with spring water, just waiting to be transplanted. Transplanting is easy work, aside from getting a bit sunburned, and having sore waists and legs from bending for too long, it didn’t require much effort. Each day, there was also a wage of fifteen to twenty wen, so every villager who had time and could transplant quickly made their way to do so.

The rice variety was a hybrid from a previous life, and there were certain requirements for the spacing between seedlings and rows; they couldn’t be too dense, or it would lead to decreased yield, and weeding and pest control would also be inconvenient.

Despite having cautioned them at the beginning, Mo Yan still worried that some people would transplant according to the spacing used previously. Once she was done with the tasks in the herbal garden, she made a special trip to that terraced field.

When she arrived at the field and saw the dense clusters of seedlings that had been transplanted too close together, with spacing only half of what she had mentioned, Mo Yan didn’t know what to say.

An old man Ding, seeing her troubled expression, earnestly advised her, "Yan girl, I’ve farmed all my life, and I’ve never seen anyone’s seedling spacing as wide as you say! The soil layer of this paddy field is shallow, and it’s unused virgin land. If we transplant at the spacing you suggest, the seedlings will certainly not close up once they grow, wouldn’t that be a waste of good land?"

Knowing that old man Ding meant well, Mo Yan wasn’t angry but simply pulled up a few seedlings to explain, "Old man Ding, you are skilled at farming, and what you say makes sense. It’s just that these seedlings really are different from before; their tillering is quite strong! Look, ordinary seedlings, once raised, are all single stocks, while what you hold now has at least grown into three stalks. Isn’t this tillering better than previous seedlings? Continuing this way, once they take root and start tillering, they will be even stronger. But with such narrow spacing, they will not have room to grow, and in the end, they will crowd each other and surely die!"

Hearing the old and the young debate, the other villagers, while transplanting, pricked up their ears to listen. They too noticed the difference in these seedlings; however, they had also raised seedlings before and had never seen ones like this. They didn’t fully believe Mo Yan’s words, thinking these seedlings, as she said, were new varieties brought in from other places and thus required wider spacing when transplanting.

Old man Ding looked at the seedlings in his hand compared to those he’d raised before displacement, and couldn’t help but nod, "Indeed that’s the case. The seedlings have been raised in the same amount of time as previous ones, but their tillering is much more vigorous. Just transplanted, they look as if they’ve been in the field for seven or eight days."

Seeing that he finally acknowledged this point, Mo Yan pressed on, "Old man Ding, I don’t know what’s changed with these seedlings, but since they tiller so quickly, they will certainly tiller more than the original seedlings. With such narrow spacing, won’t they be crowded? Moreover, wider spacing means we harvest a bit less grain, but if it’s too narrow, the stalks in the middle of the field will probably die from overcrowding, and then we really would have a total crop failure!"

At the mention of "total crop failure," old man Ding’s expression finally changed. Peasant families rely on the land for their livelihood. If crop failure was caused by incorrect seedling spacing, wouldn’t that be devastating?