Chapter 438 - 6: Strange Plant - Vincetoxicum Fern
The scorching sun blazed down, and on the edge of the open fields of the farm, Zhuo Feng clenched a sweet potato leaf in his hand, attempting to fan some breeze towards himself.
Feng Xing was repairing the farm’s hedge fence; the blistering sunlight of early July had turned his face as red as a half-baked sweet potato.
"Take a break, we can fix it in the evening," Zhuo Feng felt sorry for his man. Putting aside the sweet potato leaf, he brought out a bowl of mung bean soup from the kitchen. When they moved last time, Zhuo Feng found the refrigerator too cumbersome and sold it, and now he regretted it to the point of turning blue. The couple didn’t have leftover food to worry about, but in such hot weather, not having a refrigerator to chill cold drinks and fruits was indeed inconvenient.
"By the time evening comes, there won’t be enough time. How did the fence get misaligned? I checked the field; there are some footprints. Someone must have been stealing sweet potatoes," said Zhuo Feng. This year, from the three acres of land, the first batch of harvested sweet potatoes was not insignificant. Following the directions given by the young expert who visited that day, one acre yielded as much as six thousand five hundred pounds. The other two acres produced a little less, with each still amounting to three to four thousand pounds.
Watching his peeling ears, Zhuo Feng felt a twinge of heartache and pulled him to the cool shade beside the house, "Let them steal. We have no place to store them anyway. Even if we did, it wouldn’t stop them from rotting. I told you earlier: we might as well not dig up the remaining five or six hundred pounds. If we can’t sell them, it’ll be a waste of effort."
Sweet potatoes are easy to grow, but digging them up is tough, and finding buyers is another problem. Earlier, Xiao Xian and Zhuo Feng trucked sweet potatoes to the agricultural market to sell them. The couple tried several more times afterward; though sales were good at first, they were not as brisk later on. After contacting two brothers in Shandong and transporting sweet potatoes out of the province, they sold over two thousand pounds and earned seven to eight thousand yuan, but after deducting transportation costs, they had less than three thousand yuan left.
Since June, temperatures in Beijing had soared, and the farm lacked a dedicated storage warehouse, leading to even more severe spoilage of the sweet potatoes.
Every day, Zhuo Feng had to clear a new batch of rotted sweet potatoes, and there were several hundred kilograms of sweet potato vines left from digging that needed prompt disposal; otherwise, the rotted sweet potatoes and leaves would attract swarms of flies.
"How can we let the land go to waste? Nothing else would survive if planted in this season," Feng Xing said naively, smiling as he drank the bowl of mung bean soup his wife had prepared.
"It’s all my fault. When we started planting in spring, I didn’t think it through and planted all sweet potatoes," Zhuo Feng lamented. To minimize waste, they had sweet potato porridge for breakfast, sweet potatoes for lunch, and a bowl of sweet potato soup with dough drops for dinner. Zhuo Feng felt like he was about to sprout sweet potatoes from his mouth.
"It’s fine, at least our digestion is good. I think we should speed up and encircle the fence with a wire mesh. In a few days, Xiao Xian will be coming on vacation. She’s a little girl with small courage, and she might be terrified if a thief gets in again. Don’t worry about the sweet potatoes. We can sell the vines to pig farms. We can work out something for the sweet potatoes," Zhuo Feng advised, but seeing that Feng Xing wouldn’t heed her advice, she grabbed an umbrella and followed behind him.
Their "timid" niece Xiao Xian, was drenching in sweat at the moment, but she wasn’t fortunate enough to have someone bring her mung bean soup.
Counting the days, Xiao Xian had been at Meijia Village for almost a week, and she had only been doing one thing: helping chop firewood. This task didn’t seem too different from the chores she did back at Yunteng Sect.
Meijia Village was an almost idyllic place, where Xiao Xian often saw elderly men with beards as white as their hair, with just gums in their mouths, carrying a hoe and a basket, loosening the soil or agilely picking cherries the size of longan fruit. When the seniors got tired, they would massage their backs, look up at the clouds drifting across the sky, and live their days leisurely.
Worried that Mei Nian would truly go to Zhuo Feng and his wife, Xiao Xian didn’t dare wander about. She woke up just a bit later than the rooster and slept a bit earlier than the moonrise. Her body was full of Spiritual Energy, but it also led to another problem.
In July, the roses in Cherry Valley bloomed gloriously, and cherries weighed down the branches. Everyone in the village, young and old, became busy. Sister-in-law Hua even switched to having two meals daily instead of three, just to facilitate the harvesting of the abundant Cherry crop.
Poor Xiao Xian, accustomed to the dietary habits of modern people, went so hungry every day that her stomach stuck to her spine. But she was too embarrassed to ask for food. From her observations, the people of Meijia Village respected Mei Nian greatly. Mei Nian was not always in the village; he appeared about once a week, sometimes only returning after two or three weeks.