The Xu family spent their first New Year in Hexi in fear and anxiety. Fortunately, nothing happened overnight. On the morning of the first day of the Lunar New Year, Xu Rao, with a scraggly beard, returned home from the former government office.

Zhang Zhaoci boiled some water, and after taking a good bath, he lay down on the warm kang (heated brick bed) in the room and fell into a deep sleep.

After that, both Hexi and Yanmen Pass were outwardly relaxed but inwardly tense. The people in the county town didn't seem to be affected. After the Lantern Festival, the shops on the street opened for business, and the people in the villages below would set up stalls on the street to sell their own goods. Nothing much had changed from before.

Xu Di moved to the kang (heated brick bed) in the west room early on to live with the seeds he had planted. After the Spring Festival, several pots of them actually bloomed, and some even had small, tender fruits hanging on them.

Xu Di was very happy. There was spinach, cilantro, carrots, cucumbers, peppers, and most importantly, tomatoes. Not only did Zhang Zhaoci like to eat tomatoes, but Xu Di liked to eat them too. He liked to eat them raw, stir-fried, or mixed with white sugar. The best way to eat them was to make tomato soup. After making the soup, he would add some noodles and eat and drink a big bowl of hot soup, working up a sweat. Just thinking about it made him feel extremely refreshed.

Xu Di now spends his days by these large boxes, daydreaming about how he will cook the crops after they grow, and about the corn that will be planted in the ground after spring. He imagines how delicious it would be to pick a few tender ears of corn and boil them when they are fully grown.

After the Lunar New Year, Xu Rao was finally able to go to get off work on time. During this period, he had been worried and stressed, and he looked dark and thin. Zhang Zhaoci felt sorry for him and cooked soup and delicious food for him every day. Xu Zhi naturally ate and drank along with him. Granny Lu was now very worried. She was going to have Xu Zhi be her tutor in the future. A tutor is not only responsible for teaching children manners and etiquette, but also for their figure. Look at Xu Zhi now. After the New Year, she has become more and more chubby. The Xu family of three always enjoys feeding their good daughter and little sister. The five-year-old girl is already showing the shape of a thirteen or fourteen-year-old. But looking at this chubby little dumpling, Granny Lu was really afraid that the little girl would continue to be so chubby. Not only would it be difficult for her to find a husband, but she would probably also be ridiculed.

Although the Xu family is currently stationed outside the capital, they will eventually return to the capital. While thinness is no longer considered beautiful, teenage girls still need to have a graceful figure to be appreciated. A chubby girl will be laughed at by her peers, and may even be used as a source of ridicule. Can a teenage girl bear that?

Granny Lu still tactfully told Zhang Zhaoci her thoughts. Zhang Zhaoci knew all about these things, but the child was only a few years old and was growing rapidly. He needed to get proper nutrition. In this small town, there wasn't much good food. The only high-protein foods were eggs and beef and mutton. She couldn't stop the child from eating them.

Zhang Zhaoci said, "Granny, a child's figure will eventually resemble that of their parents. Look at me and Third Master, neither of us are fat. Our Little Nine is just too young now and hasn't grown taller yet. He'll slim down when he grows up. I was personally taught by our old master, so how could I be wrong in judging people?"

After hearing this, Granny Lu had no other choice but to accept it.

Last early winter, the winter wheat that Zhang Zhaoci had planted in the fields between Hexi County and the General's Mansion has now begun to turn green again. The old farmer that Zhang Zhaoci hired was an expert in cultivating crops. Zhang Zhaoci and Xu Di took corn seeds there and asked the old farmer to help prepare the experimental field before planting the corn kernels.

The old farmer had never seen corn before and didn't know how to plant it. Xu Di had spent some time in the experimental fields with his senior from the agricultural college, so planting corn seemed like a simple matter to him. In many places, corn is planted in the middle of the winter wheat ridges or on the furrows between the ridges when the winter wheat is filling out. This way, the corn seedlings will have already sprouted by the time the wheat is harvested. But now everything has to start from scratch, and it's even uncertain whether the seeds are suitable for this land. Xu Di can only figure it out little by little.

After the corn is planted, we start cultivating sweet potato and potato seedlings. This involves getting the sweet potatoes and potatoes to sprout. Sweet potatoes and potatoes are not quite the same. For potatoes, you need to cut off the part with the sprouts, roll it in wood ash to disinfect it, and then bury the tuber with the sprouts in the soil.

As for the sweet potatoes, Xu Di thought of many methods, but none of them worked. He didn't dare to start right away. It wasn't easy to transport this sack of sweet potatoes back from the south. If the experiment failed, there really wouldn't be anything left for him to mess with.

Finally, Xu Di prepared several earthenware pots in the house, filled them with water, and soaked the bottoms of the sweet potatoes in them. After a few days, some new sprouts actually grew. Xu Di knew that sweet potatoes were grown from sweet potato vines, just like pothos. So, when the sweet potato vines were a little bigger, he broke them off and planted them in the ground when the time was right.

Xu Di did all this, and Xu Rao was involved the whole time. Even Xu Zhi assisted him. After everything was planted, Xu Di stayed there permanently. Sometimes he didn't even go home at night and slept with the farmer in the shack at the edge of the field.

Zhang Zhaoci didn't stop Xu Di from doing these things, and even Granny Lu didn't say anything. Granny Lu felt that her eldest brother was a boy, and as long as he could do something that she considered a good thing, she would fully support him. Granny Lu's support was not like Xu Zhi's, who would cheer Xu Di on when he came home for dinner. Granny Lu took care of Xu Di's logistics, making sure he had three meals a day. Sometimes, when Xu Di couldn't come home for dinner, Granny Lu would still prepare the meal and have the family's groom drive the carriage to the experimental field to deliver it to him.

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