Slowly Waiting

Zhou Chenglei followed the bamboo rhizomes and dug up twelve bamboo shoots.

Jiang Xia stared at the plump bamboo shoots of varying sizes as they were dug up one by one, her face full of astonishment. "So many? Did they all grow from a single bamboo?"

Zhang Rui had dug for ages and only found three. He could not help saying, "Sister-in-law, educate Fourth Brother quickly. He's wiped out an entire family's descendants from someone else's bamboo grove. Isn't he afraid he'll dig them all up and leave no bamboo in the future?"

Jiang Xia also felt that "bamboo-shoot abundance" had become vividly real at that moment!

Her Second Uncle chuckled. "No, winter bamboo shoots generally don't grow very large. As long as you don't damage the bamboo rhizomes while digging, it'll be fine. Spring bamboo shoots are the ones that grow into mature bamboo. If digging up all the winter bamboo shoots meant no bamboo could grow, we'd be worried too! Many people in the village rely on selling bamboo and bamboo products to make money. They wouldn't do something like that."

In truth, winter bamboo shoots were equivalent to the bamboo grove's "backup plan."

Moso bamboo produced large numbers of winter shoots to ensure that a few could survive the bitter winter and become supplementary mature bamboo in spring.

Spring bamboo shoots were the "main force" of mature bamboo. Once the surface temperature rose, they broke through the soil all at once, relying on the abundant spring rain and sunlight to grow rapidly into mature bamboo.

When villagers dug up winter bamboo shoots, especially the deeply buried, weak shoots, they reduced the waste of nutrients from the bamboo rhizomes, allowing the remaining spring shoots to receive more resources and grow into higher-quality bamboo.

It was the same principle