The rain has stopped, the sun is shining, and the temperature is rising. Bavaria's short winter is about to end.
Xu Genyou and Tian Gui led dozens of people who came to learn to turn over manure and mud to prepare manure balls for early corn seedling cultivation.
Although it's a bit early to sow now, as long as you cover the seeds with thick straw to keep them warm, it won't hinder them from germinating.
The people who came from each village were all farmers. They only needed to talk to them, observe them, and do them themselves to master the skills and do them quickly and well.
So in three days, this group of free trainees finished the farm work in Jiangzhi's field.
He stayed and worked for two more days, hoeing the fields of other families in the village as well, which stopped the villagers who had some complaints from grumbling.
Initially, no one wanted to share their technology, saying that as long as their own village harvested more grain, they didn't care what others did.
Jiang Zhi thought this idea was wrong. People are always "fearful of inequality." When others are hungry, they will naturally look to those who are well-fed.
When chaos erupts, it becomes a situation where "you have grain, I have guns; your house is my granary." It's better to establish good relations early on so that everyone can make money and have full granaries than to have their grain stolen.
Those who came to learn didn't slack off; they helped with the work and satisfied the villagers.
In fact, everyone is satisfied, and the college students who come to learn also benefit greatly.
Leave some rows in the middle of wheat fields, intercropping corn, crop rotation, silage technology, using silage to feed more cattle and sheep and increase farmyard manure...
These are things they don't have from the farming techniques passed down from their ancestors, or they only know that this way of planting is good, but they don't know the reasons why.
Having operated for two years, Tian Gui and others shared all their experience with the villagers without reservation, allowing them to make arrangements according to the actual conditions of each village.
As for cotton planting techniques and corn artificial pollination, we need to come back to learn them again during the season. We can't learn them all in one go; we have to come back and do the work several times.
The experience was a pleasant surprise. When people from other villages asked where these techniques came from, someone immediately told a vivid and embellished story about how Xia Xiucai recited the "Treatise on Judging Cattle" and scared the cattle dealer.
"You have no idea, there's knowledge in this book! It has everything, including gold leaves. If you learn it well, turning the pages is like turning the pages of a silver note."
Look, our village is building a school now, so all the children can go to school. In the future, everyone will know how to judge cattle, and farming will be a piece of cake.”
The story of Xia Xiucai talking about "how many whorls grow on a cow's body" and singing a song that terrified the shrewd and capable cattle dealer in the eyes of ordinary people made everyone realize that there is knowledge in books.
Later, Jiang Zhi described all her outings as "going to the city to study."
Having gotten used to it, the people of Xujia Village now keep the saying "people should go out to learn often" in mind, and they firmly believe in the principle that learning makes people progress.
While people in the villages were learning, Jiang Zhi, though not personally teaching, was not idle either. She was discussing improvements to the mosquito coil workshop with Wang Xiaoju and Xu Gensheng.
The previous year, people were asked to mix the grass mud and distribute it to various stations, where it was pressed into strips using bamboo tubes and then coiled into shapes.
But Jiang Zhi felt it was too slow. Over the past year, she recalled the shape of the mosquito coil dish from before.
In modern mosquito coils, the two coils are tightly interlocked, and it is quite a skill to separate them completely, so it is clear that they were not coiled together later.
Jiang Zhi pondered this simple technique for over a year. It wasn't until yesterday, when she went to look at the pills, that she suddenly understood and regretted being such a fool.
"First, press the mosquito coil paste into sheets, then use a cutter to press it directly into a dish..."
Wang Xiaoju, Xu Gensheng, and Li Laoshi all looked completely bewildered.
Jiang Zhi spoke with gestures, but seeing that no one could understand her, she became anxious: "Hey, Xiao Ju, just have your brother make another cotton seed pressing machine! It needs to be bigger. I've already asked Er Rui to find a blacksmith to make the blades."
This time, Wang Xiaoju understood: "Auntie, you mean the big cotton gin!"
She used to squeeze out the cotton seeds when she was fluffing cotton.
A cotton gin is a machine that separates cotton seeds from their grain by passing them through a gap between two rolling wooden rollers.
“Yes, it can also be used to press dough. Make it bigger with three rows of wooden sticks, so you can make a wide dough sheet at once.” Jiang Zhi breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that Wang Xiaoju understood.
In traditional Chinese medicine pharmacies, the process of making pills involves first rolling out the outer skin of the medicine, and then pressing it into the shape of a pill using a fixed mold.
The same method can be used for mosquito coils: first press them into a flat surface, then cut them out using a ring-shaped cutter.
However, this spiral-shaped knife is a bit challenging. Jiang Zhi has already drawn the double spiral of a mosquito coil on paper and asked the blacksmith to follow the pattern to forge the knife.
Errui took the blueprints into the city to find someone to process them, and also went to deliver "monthly rice" to Xiang Dejin's family.
Qiaoyun gave birth to her second child on the eighth day of the first lunar month. Two days ago, Dejin's wife also gave birth. Xiaoman happened to be in town when she found out and quickly came back to tell her. Now Errui is going to deliver the gifts.
Wang Xiaoju is most interested in improving technology and how to increase production.
"Roller pressing, knife cutting...the remaining scraps of clay are thrown back into the mixing bucket for the next pressing. The finished mosquito coils need to be dried in the sun!"
"Then we'll need to build another drying room!"
"This is easy to build. There's already a medicine shop with a drying room, so we can dry mosquito coil trays quickly without worrying about rain!"
Under Jiang Zhi's guidance, the group of people, one after another, slowly designed a makeshift assembly line.
As for the settlement of wages, Jiang Zhi did not offer any further suggestions. The three people present were all very shrewd and would eventually come up with a comprehensive solution.
Now that the raw material for medicinal herbs has been secured, once the production line is up and running day and night in shifts, production will increase several times over.
Wang Xiaoju and the other two became excited.
Last year's mosquito coil sales barely covered the village's expenses, with no profit. If production doubles, it means everyone's pockets will be fuller.
“I have another suggestion. If the mosquito coil workshop is to produce in large quantities, it would be best to rent out the land to those two later migrant households for cultivation. This would also allow the Shi family to cultivate more land,” Jiang Zhi reminded them at the opportune moment.
Although the two migrant families who settled in the village built houses, they had little land to cultivate and were excluded from the workshops outside, resulting in a disparity in income.
Jiang Zhi couldn't convince the villagers on this point either, since she had made that promise back then.
The village chief can take in migrants into the village and into their homes, but he cannot arbitrarily assign people to work in the workshops; this must be decided by the group leaders.
If they want to live a good life, they can only rent land from the villagers at low prices.
If the villagers want to work on the assembly line to earn money, they certainly won't have as much time to do farm work as before, so they can hire people to cultivate their land.
The same applies to the Shi family. Although they were allowed to enter the workshop, the family was slow to react and their movements were out of sync with others, which slowed down the progress.
Moreover, with Wang Xiaoju, who is known for her "deadly bucket of water," on the assembly line, things are bound to be fast.
The Shi family would be better off cultivating a few more acres of land; the various grasses there would be perfect for feeding pigs.
After all, raising pigs in Shijiazhuang is not bad.
Peppa Pig's piglets have been in the Shi family's pigpen for over a month, and the Shi family women are taking very good care of them.
For the first half of the month, Xiaoman's grandparents would go over every day to give instructions on what to do, and the women of the Shi family would follow along.
To get the pigs to develop the habit of defecating and urinating in a designated spot, several people took turns guarding the pigpen day and night for ten days, not allowing the pigs to defecate or urinate indiscriminately.
Now I spend every day looking for pig feed in the fields and mixing it with crushed oak branches to feed the pigs.
Clean the enclosure thoroughly, and also clean every room in the house.
It has to be clean. If the stone monkey sees it dirty when he comes home from school, he will sweep it up in the dark. He won't eat if he doesn't sweep it up.
When the eldest and second eldest sons of the Shi family come back from working outside, they will make a fuss if they see that their precious son is not eating.
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