Page 41

Before planting the Luring Grass, Qing Mengzhu had read the instructions in the personal center. The whole plant could be used, and its juice was what was needed.

Qing Mengzhu had originally planned to pulverize the small amount of chopped leaves in a blender. Then he worried that the heat generated by the blender might affect its induction function, so he settled on the traditional method: mincing them finely with a knife, then grinding them with a stone pestle.

Once the leaves were thoroughly ground, Qing Mengzhu put the small amount of grass pulp into a clean little bowl free of oil and water, added a tiny bit of water, and put the Dragon Rosy Cloud Fruit seed in.

The instructions in the personal center said it was best to soak the seed for half an hour to forty minutes.

Qing Mengzhu followed the instructions strictly, soaking the Dragon Rosy Cloud Fruit seed for thirty-five minutes before taking it out and putting it in a flowerpot full of humus-rich soil. He covered it with a thin layer of soil and sprayed the surface with water.

That was all there was to it. He only needed to put the flowerpot somewhere cool and wait for the Dragon Rosy Cloud Fruit seed to sprout and break through the soil, or, if the breeding attempt failed, return the seed to the Interstellar Mall.

After planting the Dragon Rosy Cloud Fruit seed, Qing Mengzhu was full of anticipation.

Having something to look forward to put Qing Mengzhu in a somewhat different frame of mind.

Tan Wenlei and the others all noticed.

That day, the village notified them to attend a planting class in the village committee's meeting room.

Temperatures had been high lately, and pepper diseases and pests were breaking out badly. Many farmers in the area grew peppers, so the leadership had invited an instructor from Tengcheng Agricultural University to give a talk, helping farmers control diseases and pests and increase their yields.

Qing Mengzhu had read many books before, but he still took the class seriously.

He sat down, pulled out a notebook and took careful notes. Tan Wenlei tried several times to chat with him, but without success.

The young instructor at the front slowly clicked through the PowerPoint slides. "...Peppers are very sensitive to heat. If the temperature rises above 35°C, you need to think about providing shade. Excessive heat can cause sterility or pollen abnormalities..."

Qing Mengzhu took careful notes from his seat.

With the air conditioner running in the meeting room, Tan Wenlei sat beside Qing Mengzhu and craned his neck to look at his notes. After watching for quite a while, he had no choice but to start taking notes clumsily himself.

At last, the talk ended. After everyone applauded and saw the instructor and the leaders off, Tan Wenlei leaned over to Qing Mengzhu. "What have you been doing these past few days? As soon as you finish tending your vegetable plot, you disappear."

Qing Mengzhu was embarrassed to tell him he had been busy breeding plants, so he asked, "Why?"

Tan Wenlei said, "My friend said you seemed to be thinking about raising shrimp. Have you decided?"

"Not yet," Qing Mengzhu said. "I'll wait and see for a while longer."

Tan Wenlei looked at Qing Mengzhu. "It's already so hot. If you don't start raising them now, it'll be harder once the weather turns cold."

Qing Mengzhu said, "I probably won't put it off until then."

Tan Wenlei put his notebook away and changed the subject. "Do you want to grow okra?"

Qing Mengzhu was a little surprised that he had suddenly brought it up. "Okra?"

"Yeah," Tan Wenlei said. "Huang Kebao's family worked with the agricultural university and apparently developed a particularly tasty variety of okra. I want to buy some seedlings. Want to come in on it?"

Qing Mengzhu hadn't considered growing okra before. "Is it okra planting season already?"

"It is," Tan Wenlei said. "Plant it now and harvest it in autumn-perfect timing. Okra salads have gotten really popular elsewhere these past couple of years. Okra sells pretty well, and the price is high too. I was thinking of growing some and seeing if I can sell it."

Qing Mengzhu nodded. Put that way, growing some okra did sound pretty good.

Seeing that he was interested, Tan Wenlei said, "But okra yields are pretty high, so I can't plant much. If you grow some too, we can buy the seedlings together. Otherwise, I'd really have a hard time asking."

"Let's grow it, then," Qing Mengzhu said. "I'll plant a bit more. I happen to have some empty land at home."

There was no time like the present, so the two agreed to go to Huang Kebao's house to buy okra seedlings.

On their way out, they saw Qing Changhong. When he heard they were going to buy seedlings, he said he wanted to get some too.

Qing Changhong said, "Huang Kebao's family seems to have been growing it for quite a few years. They were already growing okra before my family started raising chickens. I heard they might start a new okra brand this year."

"That's pretty good," Qing Mengzhu said. "Are they still willing to sell seedlings?"

"I think so," Qing Changhong said. "Isn't starting a brand also a way to sell seedlings?"

Tan Wenlei said confidently from beside them, "They are! The seed he's been saving seems a little different from the seed the company sells. I asked around, and everyone said his family is willing to sell seedlings."

Huang Kebao's family wasn't originally from Pingkou Village. They had come to rent fields there only after the local planting industry took off, and because it was close to Vine City.

But they had been renting land there for more than a dozen years now, and everyone had plenty of dealings with them, so they were no different from people in the same village.

They went straight to Huang Kebao's house and knocked on the outer gate.

Someone answered from inside and came to open it-it was Huang Kebao's mother.

Tan Wenlei greeted her with a smile. "Sister-in-law He, we've come to buy some okra seedlings. Are you still selling them?"

He Jinxiu smiled. "We are! Kebao's inside. Go in and talk to him."

Huang Kebao heard their voices and came out, quickly offering Tan Wenlei and the others cigarettes.

Qing Mengzhu waved to indicate that he didn't smoke, so Huang Kebao gave cigarettes to Tan Wenlei and Qing Changhong.

Qing Mengzhu didn't want to go inside, where everyone would fill the place with smoke, so he spoke directly in the courtyard. "Brother Huang, we'd like to buy some okra seedlings."

Huang Kebao smiled. "How many? They're two fifty each, or two yuan if you buy a lot."

"I'll take sixty," Tan Wenlei said.

Qing Changhong quickly said, "Twenty will be enough for me."

Qing Mengzhu made a rough estimate. "I'll take a hundred and twenty. I don't have room to plant any more."

Tan Wenlei asked with a smile, "That's two hundred altogether. Can you give us a discount?"

"Sure, of course!" Huang Kebao said. "Come in and have some tea first. Once the sun goes down, I'll take you to the fields to pick them out."

Seedlings were generally pulled up at dusk after the sun had set or early in the morning before it came out, to keep the sun from wilting their leaves and lowering their survival rate.

Qing Mengzhu checked the time and reckoned it would be a while before sunset, so he had no choice but to go inside with them.

Fortunately, once they were inside and the fan was on, no one could smoke, so the air quality in the house was decent.

Everyone chatted in Huang Kebao's living room. He Jinxiu brought out sunflower seeds, peanuts, milk candies and biscuits for the guests, while Huang Kebao poured everyone tea.

Once the tea was served, they started talking about farming in the village, moving from diseases and pests to vegetable prices, then to which companies were fair and which weren't.

Qing Mengzhu quite liked listening to this. It contained useful information and was much better than everyday gossip.

As they chatted, everyone said vegetables were hard to sell this year.

It had been a good year, and everyone's yields were quite good. With so many vegetables around, they weren't easy to sell.

Tan Wenlei, for example, had a fairly wide network. He sold the vegetables from his fields to both Hongda Supermarket and Public Benefit Community Association, and also found restaurants like Di Caiyong's. He could sell almost all his produce.

Qing Changhong mainly raised chickens. Like the others in the village, he sold some vegetables to Hongda Supermarket, and whatever he couldn't sell, he chopped up and mixed with grain to feed the chickens, so it wasn't much of a loss.

The other villagers weren't doing as well. Some couldn't sell all their vegetables and could only leave them in the fields.

Qing Mengzhu sometimes saw vegetables piled at the edge of someone's field. He had thought they were vegetables with insect holes, but it turned out they simply couldn't all be sold.

It wasn't that they couldn't be sold at all, but that the price was so low people couldn't be bothered.

It was like the plums before: at a few jiao per jin, they couldn't be bothered with the trouble.

Qing Changhong said, "If you really can't sell it all, you could raise some livestock and feed it to them."

Tan Wenlei nodded. "The main problem is that meat prices aren't good either. If they were decent, everyone might have gone into raising pigs."

With meat selling for only a little over ten yuan, ordinary people really had no incentive.

Huang Kebao sighed. "It's hard to make a living in individual farming. Lots of big companies are entering the business now. Their yields are high and their costs are low, so they have an advantage over us."