When she walked out of the village chief’s house, her face was slightly flushed with embarrassment, ashamed of her presumptions.
However, this also indirectly proved that fishing in this era garnered good results, unlike in later times when a short trip to sea in a small boat might yield just a few fish. It seemed that each trip they made brought a catch of several hundred to a thousand jin.
Since that was the case, there was no need for her to dwell on this issue any longer. Fortunately, the reserves in her space were enough for her to do business for over half a year. If that didn’t work out, she would come up with other ideas later; seafood business was not the only option. She would wait and see.
Nevertheless, the village chief did ask her about the Purple Star Grass, and Xiao Yu gave the same response,
"The Purple Star Grass is not poisonous, and it can be eaten, but it seems like no one believes me when I say that. It’s a matter of personal perception."
"But why don’t any of the merchants collect Purple Star Grass?"
You say you’ve eaten it, but where have you eaten it? If the merchants don’t collect it, it’s certainly not well-known.
Xiao Yu wasn’t there to argue, so she didn’t say much about this issue and politely excused herself from the house.
Well, she had originally wanted to help the villagers become wealthy, but it turned out that they didn’t think much of Huiben Building’s capabilities, which completely quashed her intention to have them plant some uncommon grains and vegetables.
In fact, she even felt that it would be easier to convince Zhang Quan than the close-minded fishermen.
Therefore, in the following days, she was not only busy with the restaurant every day but also occasionally visited Zhang Quan’s ten-acre farm. Since he had purchased top-quality land, she encouraged him to buy another four or five acres of third-grade land with loose soil. After the spring, they planted sweet potatoes and sesame there because only with an abundance of sweet potatoes could they produce starch and glass noodles, and sesame was needed for sesame paste.
Latter, she opened up a pond on a farm and planted lotus seeds in it, so they could harvest lotus roots in the future. Follow current novels on novel(ꜰ)ire.net
In three acres of prime land offered by the Shopkeeper, she planted tomatoes, which he had never seen before, and because tomatoes have high use, she devoted an entire acre to them. This way, they had the raw material for tomato sauce.
The rest of the land was sowed with lettuce, sesame, and other vegetables that could be used for rice wraps; chives that could be used as dumpling fillings, and so forth, choosing uncommon vegetables to plant. The aim was to maximize the restaurant’s sales with its own signature dishes.
As for seaweed, she had completely given up on the fishermen. Before she left, she and Yaya would gather seaweed early in the morning and then let Grandma Liu dry it at home, accumulating as much as possible.
Zhang Quan also reached out to the fishermen he knew to collect seaweed, offering them a purchase price of one copper coin per jin. Since seaweed was abundant and unharvested, they were willing to do the work and even delivered it after fishing it out of the water, but they were honest because the water content in the seaweed was so high, they would squeeze it dry before weighing.
The collected seaweed was then processed by Xiao Yu’s kitchen staff into the right size for seaweed rice wraps, and then spread out to dry all over the courtyard. When the restaurant’s backyard was insufficient, they dried it in her own home’s yard, which greatly saved costs and also provided the kitchen staff with the opportunity to earn overtime pay.
By mid-April, the farm work at the ends of the fields was almost done, including all of Zhang Quan’s lands. What followed was a waiting game for the harvest, as the weather grew warmer each day, and the crops would thrive and grow strong over the next three months.