The rice in this area also has single and double cropping seasons. Xiao Changyi and An Jing planted double-cropping rice. They had already harvested the early rice, and now they were planting the late rice.
When Xiao Changyi was plowing the field, An Jing was pulling up rice seedlings in the nursery. By the time Xiao Changyi finished plowing, An Jing had also almost finished pulling up the seedlings.
Then, the two began transplanting rice seedlings into the field.
The people of Jiuping Village, having seen Xiao Changyi and An Jing raising fish in their fields, followed suit. After transplanting rice seedlings, they started raising fish in their fields, hoping to enjoy fish at the time of the rice harvest. They didn’t expect that the newly transplanted seedlings would be disrupted and float to the surface due to the fish, causing them the trouble of replanting.
But after replanting, the fish disrupted the seedlings again, causing them to float up. If this continued, the seedlings certainly wouldn’t survive, let alone grow and produce ears of rice.
With only so much farmland at home, they couldn’t afford to have no harvest. With no other choice, everyone had to drain the water from the fields to let the fry swim away. They no longer raised fish in the fields. Then they refilled the fields with water and retransplanted the rice seedlings.
Without the fish causing havoc, the seedlings did not float up again.
Everyone was annoyed and found it strange - why were An Jing and Xiao Changyi able to raise fish in their fields with no damage to the rice, while their own rice was ruined by the fish?
An Jing, upon learning that the people of Jiuping Village had tried to emulate her method of fish farming in the rice paddies and resulted in damaged seedlings, thought those people were foolish for not noticing when she released the fry into the fields.
Last time she and her husband released the fry, it was more than twenty days after the seedlings had been transplanted. By then, the seedlings’ roots were well-established in the field, and the fish could swim without damaging them.
But now, they had just transplanted the seedlings, and the roots had not yet taken hold in the field, so the fish swimming around naturally caused the unsteady seedlings to float up.
What’s more, she and her husband had not yet started raising fish in their fields.
An Fu and others also wanted to raise fish in their fields, but seeing those from Jiuping Village failing, they sensed something was amiss. They then sent Shi Xiaolan to ask An Jing if there were particular tricks to raising fish in rice paddies.
If someone else had come to ask, An Jing might not have shared, but since it was Shi Xiaolan, An Jing told her about what to pay attention to when raising fish in the fields, as she wanted to help increase the yield for Xiaolan’s family.
It’s known that although Shi Xiaolan’s family has one acre and a bit of farmland, they only harvested three hundred catties of rice this year. An Jing’s family, with only one acre, harvested more than six hundred catties.
Shi Xiaolan actually came with an attitude of giving it a try and didn’t expect An Jing to really share the tricks. After listening to An Jing’s advice on raising rice-field fish, she immediately thanked An Jing profusely.
After expressing her thanks and hesitating for a while, Shi Xiaolan still asked softly, "An Jing, can I tell the people in my village the tricks to raising fish in the fields?"
Having married into An Village, Shi Xiaolan was no longer considered a part of Jiuping Village in her eyes or in the eyes of others. She had become a person of An Village. So naturally, by "my village," she meant An Village.
"Of course," An Jing readily agreed. She wasn’t living off rice-field fish farming. Whether others farmed fish or not was actually none of her concern.
Upon hearing this, Shi Xiaolan was immensely grateful.
She was thankful to An Jing for buying so much tofu from her family, making their lives much better now.
And the people from her village were all good people who had helped her family a lot in the past. She wanted to let them raise fish in the fields too, hoping to make their lives better as well.