His family’s vegetables, once tasted, were unmistakable against others’. Even those planted in ordinary ground could be distinguished because they were watered with space water, giving a different effect, not to mention those transferred directly from the space—with a taste that was more pronounced and praiseworthy.
So, the adage holds true that you get what you pay for, depending on whether you recognize its value or not.
Zheng Long didn’t impart any advertising slogans to his vegetables because, in that era, claiming your product was "green and pollution-free" or "purely natural" was somewhat laughable. After all, chemical fertilizers and pesticides weren’t yet widespread, so the quality of vegetables had to be judged based on taste.
Sometimes, in an era lacking in oil and salt, even boiled vegetables tasted very good.
Moreover, his vegetables looked as appealing as they tasted—succulent and fresh, without a bug bite in sight, so clean they seemed to have been washed, making his workload much lighter. The cabbages were firm, the radishes large and juicy, the green beans lengthy, the cucumbers straight without a curl, and the tomatoes all large, red, and fleshy with an exceptionally good flavor.
Since he sold a wide variety of goods, he had no shortage of customers. Selling them a little of each was enough to keep them coming back for more. He even created a points card system, giving out a points card for every purchase of at least one yuan. On subsequent purchases of vegetables or fruits amounting to more than one yuan, a sticker would be placed on the card, and once it accumulated twenty stickers, the customer would receive gifts such as soap, towels, washbasins, cups, and so on, with the gifts changing every month.
But because the items he offered were hard to find elsewhere, they easily caught everyone’s attention.
To increase promotional efforts, he placed a blackboard inside the shop, detailing which gifts were available that month, and if customers inquired, he would bring them out for everyone to see.
In addition to these promotions, there was a daily special on vegetables, offering them at half their usual price with a limit on how much each person could purchase.
Once the space reached Level 15, he opened a ranch. Every day he would set aside two or three plots of ground for growing grass to breed two chickens, then collect their eggs. At the same time, he also raised chickens and quails at home, and every trip to the grain station for flour, he would bring back some bran, which was excellent for feeding the birds.
The chickens from the space could produce four eggs every eight hours, meaning fifty hours in a day allowed for five collections or twenty eggs in total. These eggs were too precious for him to sell immediately, so he saved them to sell later. ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʟᴀᴛᴇsᴛ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀᴛ NoveI[F]ire.net
In the early 1980s, the average egg cost between ten to twelve cents. He planned to sell his eggs for twenty cents each. Of course, before he could sell at such a high price, he definitely intended to have a discount sale—this would have to wait until he had a large enough supply.
At Level 15, he managed to expand to a total of twelve plots of land: three for grass, one for external sales, and the remaining eight were essential for the space’s upgrade in terms of Experience Points and Gold Coins, which were absolutely imperative and could not be delayed.
Zheng Long began his autumn harvest in June. During the harvest month, he only delivered vegetables, doing nothing else (steamed buns, steamed buns, dumplings, desserts).
The month of the harvest was almost free of idle time. Before dawn, he would deliver vegetables to the city—a two-hour round trip on his bike. Upon his return, he hurried to harvest the wheat. The fish and loaches in the rice fields had to be completely dealt with in the half month before the summer harvest, or it would delay the evaporation process in the rice fields, which was detrimental to the summer harvest work.