The Great Qin Empire---Qin Li

The bundles of things that Heifu placed on the ridge of the field were called "Zhuzhe (zhè)". Heifu accidentally found them in the wild when he went to "Pinghu Li" by the Yunmeng Lake to handle a case a few days ago.

He thought it was a small bamboo forest at first, but when he got closer, he found that the stems were like bamboo, each as thick as a wrist, with nodes, green-yellow skin, and about ten feet high.

The guard Yuliang was a local, and he flattered that this thing was called Zhuzhe, which was very common in the wild, and fishermen often used it to quench their thirst.

As he said that, Yuliang immediately drew his sword and cut off a stem and handed it to Heifu. However, he saw that under the hard skin was white stem meat, which smelled a little sweet. When he put it in his mouth and tasted it, Heifu was immediately happy.

"Isn't this sugar cane!"

It turns out that the Yunmeng Lake in Chu State is one of the origins of sugar cane. This fruit was once loved by the nobles of Chu State. It was planted in the gardens and squeezed for juice as a summer drink. Song Yu, a Chu man, said in his "Soul Summoning": "Boiled turtles and roasted lambs, with some zhu zhu juice..."

In his previous life, Hei Fu was a person who loved chewing sugar cane. In summer, he often ate it as a fruit to quench thirst. One person could chew two! However, the sugar cane he ate was mostly black and purple, slightly different from the green and yellow "zhu zhu" in front of him.

Hei Fu was greedy for a while, so he pinched a peeled zhu zhu in his hand. He ate this thing, just like Gu Kaizhi, from beginning to end, so that he could gradually get into the mood.

First, I tasted the tip of the stem, which was only slightly sweet. Then I tasted the root of the stem, and found that it was not very sweet either, and even a little bitter...

I thought it was just a problem with this one stem, but he cut several stems in this wild mulberry field, and they were all the same, with a taste as light as water, and some were even bitter...

Heifu was very disappointed. He thought he had found a good raw material for making sugar, but who would have thought that the sugar content of these mulberry trees was so low.

"If sugarcane is not sweet, what is the point of calling it sugarcane!" He complained secretly.

But thinking about it, Heifu felt relieved. He was indeed spoiled. Most of the crops in later generations were actually the result of thousands of years of artificial breeding.

Not only livestock are domesticated, but plants are also like this. Like wheat, rice, etc., they all started from wild barnyard grass and wild grass, and were slowly domesticated into crops with higher cultivation value. The ancestor of corn is the dogtail grass that can be seen everywhere on the ridges of the fields!

Under the conscious cultivation of farmers, they gradually survived the fittest, becoming larger seeds, easier to peel, higher yields, shorter growth periods, and even spicier and better tastes. This is the result of artificial selection.

Cash crops are no exception. The sugar cane of later generations is also the descendant of the carefully selected sweet cane for more than a thousand years, and the sweetness has increased by dozens of times. And these wild sugar canes in front of them are like children without parents, with thick skin, astringent taste, thin stems, and hardness. How can they be compared? Hei Fu remembered that when he was a child in his previous life, he seemed to have encountered wild sugar cane in "Robinson Crusoe". Because it was wild and not cultivated artificially, it was not very delicious. He didn't understand it at the time. It seems that he has encountered a similar thing.

Hei Fu threw away the half-chewed Zhuzhe in his hand, but after thinking about it, he asked Yu Liang to help collect all the Zhuzhe that could be found near Pinghuli and hired a bullock cart to help him transport it back home.

In the last tomb robbery case, thanks to Heifu, Yuliang also received a reward of more than a thousand yuan, which improved his family's life a lot. Yuliang now obeyed Heifu's orders. Although it sounded strange that the pavilion chief asked him to collect worthless wild mulberry trees, he did not ask much and did it immediately...

In addition to Pinghuli, Heifu also asked everyone in the pavilion to bring some of the sweetest wild mulberry trees near their homes.

So when Heifu returned home a few days later, the people in the sunset were stunned to see that Heifu had brought back a whole cart of mulberry trees...

This led to the scene of Heifu and his elder brother Zhong standing in the field arguing during the spring plowing...

...

Zhong was very confused about his younger brother bringing back a cart of mulberry trees, and said: "This mulberry tree can be seen everywhere along the Yunmeng Lake. If you want to eat it, just pull one. Why do you have to plant it in the field..."

Zhong has been doing farm work for so many years, and he has never seen anyone planting mulberry trees in the fields. In his opinion, these good fields that have been reclaimed with great difficulty should of course be planted with millet, rice and other food that can save lives, resist hunger and pay rent and taxes, and at most add some beans and hemp. How can they be wasted on wild mulberry trees!

"Brother, I only plant ten acres, ten acres!"

Heifu couldn't explain it clearly for a while, and finally convinced Zhong to give him ten acres of land that should have been left fallow this year, so that he could plant sugarcane.

Heifu knew very well what wonderful uses sugarcane with high sugar content could play. It could be eaten and become a favorite fruit for children at home; it could be used to make sugar, which might be only brown sugar at first, and white sugar and rock sugar in the future; it could even be used to make wine!

Of course, the last one was illegal, but the Qin State banned alcohol because it was afraid of wasting grain by making wine. What if it could make wine with a higher alcohol content without wasting grain?

Although those things were exciting to think about, they were still far away. What Heifu had to do now was to complete the first artificial breeding.

He had to plant the sugarcane that tasted a little sweet in the ground. Maybe if he fertilized and cared for them carefully, they would grow sweeter? After breeding several times, he might get the real sugarcane he wanted.

Maybe, maybe... farming is so painful. Unless you use the science and technology of later generations, you can only rely on luck forever. But aren't the excellent foods eaten in later generations all grown by generations of farmers who relied on luck?

This is the greatness of agriculture. The hardworking hands, spring planting and autumn harvest, change the world silently. Based on this, human civilization can move forward step by step.

According to the scene of planting sugarcane in the village in later generations, Heifu asked Jing to help cut the zhuzhe into one-foot pieces, soaked them in water for half a day, and then placed the sugarcane seedlings horizontally in the muddy water in the field ditches, and then half of them were buried with soil... Repeatedly, like sowing seeds, the zhuzhe in the ox cart was scattered on ten acres of land...

While they were busy here, Zhong was still driving the yellow-haired plowing ox that Heifu had just bought, stepping on the plow, and plowing the family's several plots of land one by one.

Speaking of which, as Heifu became a Shangzao and Yu became a Gongshi, they were all rewarded with new land. Because Yu and her sister had moved to the county town, the family's land was entrusted to Zhong to take care of. So the family's land increased fourfold to more than 400 acres.

Zhong was a good farmer in the family. He could grow all kinds of grains well and drive oxen well. But Heifu was afraid that his elder brother would be tired, so he paid money to hire four farmers in the village, and asked them to work for a year with one-third of the grain harvest as a reward.

Unfortunately, there was no one called "Chen She" in it.

Originally, others suggested that their family buy a few slaves, but Heifu couldn't accept it. His mother and Zhong were also kind people and felt that their family really didn't need slaves.

"Fortunately, we bought oxen, otherwise so many fields can't be cultivated by people."

When Zhong was resting, he couldn't help but sigh that their family used to have cows, but later died of illness.

Heifu asked Zhong and his neighbors carefully, and then he knew that there were very few oxen plowing in Anlu County. People in the village had never even seen a plow. It was not until the Qin State ruled Anlu that it became popular.

This is also the terrifying part of Qin. The extreme emphasis on farming made the government do its best to promote advanced technology. The power of the government is always much faster than the subtle spread.

But only Qin can do it, but the six countries can't. It is said that some officials of Zhao State did not want to fight the Battle of Changping with Qin. One of the reasons was that Qin used cattle to plow the fields and doubled the grain, but Zhao State did not have such conditions...

Because only Qin State can extend the government's tentacles to the level of villages and villages. In Zhao, Chu and other countries, the countryside is still controlled by the feudal lords and nobles, extremely closed, and water cannot be poured in.

The same is true for the treading pestle made by Heifu and others. In just one month, Anlu County Warehouse has replaced all pestles and mortars with treading pestles. Not only are the slaves and concubines happy because their lives have become easier, but the rice produced has also increased a lot.

"Perhaps in a few years, treading the pestle will spread throughout the north and Bashu, just like Qin promoted farming to Nanjun."

Thinking of this, Heifu felt that he had done something really remarkable. Not only did he improve productivity in pounding grain, but he also indirectly liberated half of Qin's people...

Chatting in the field always goes by quickly, and the farmers will soon have to get up and get busy again.

Zhong said that since Heifu had already planted the mulberry trees in the field, he couldn't just leave them alone, and he had to take good care of them. As he said that, he asked Heifu and Jing to shovel the manure from their own oxen in the past few days.

As early as more than a hundred years ago, using animal manure for fertilizer had become something that every farmer knew. Mencius said: "In a bad year, fertilizing the fields is not enough", and Xunzi also said: "Covering the surface acres of the land, planting grass and grain, and fertilizing the fields with more manure are the things that farmers and common people do."

However, Heifu only saw Zhong scoop up some fresh cow dung with a wooden shovel and put it next to the newly buried sugarcane seedlings. He looked back at the neighbor's field, which was also fertilized with fresh cow, horse and human dung.

So Heifu called Zhong and said to him: "Brother, is this how you fertilize?"

"What else can you do if the dung field is not like this?" Zhong looked at his brother with a strange face, wondering if he was used to being a pavilion chief these days and didn't even know how to do farm work.

"I heard a merchant from the north talking about the method of planting and fertilizing the fields in Guanzhong. I heard that it can increase the yield per mu a lot!"

Heifu smiled and said: "Brother, do you want to try it?"

"The method learned from Guanzhong? Tell me about it." Zhong immediately became interested. Guanzhong was a famous granary in the Qin State, and the yield per mu could reach two or three times that of Nanjun.

"It's very simple."

Heifu pointed to the black fresh cow dung in the shovel and said: "Compost!"

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