Our farm property is about 4,000 pyeong.
And of that, the nineteenth-century-style green-roofed country house my mother poured her heart into, inspired by her memories with Anne of Green Gables, along with the garden and driveway, takes up about 1,000 pyeong.
Naturally, the exterior materials and roofing were wood as well.
In other words, the exterior often falls off or gets damaged, so repairs are frequent.
And frequent repairs mean that materials like wood and brick are always stocked in the storage shed.
I decided to classify the various items that had received this farm’s resource cheat into two broad categories.
First, various “consumables” whose quantity returns to its original state once midnight passes.
For example, the bit of aluminum foil left in the kitchen runs out before I can even wrap a single egg, but after time passes, it recharges back to exactly the amount that was originally there.
Firewood, gasoline, first-aid medicines, and all sorts of other supplies fall under this category.
Second, “permanent items” that are restored if they are damaged or broken once midnight passes.
For instance, taking a chainsaw out of the shed and using it does not make a new chainsaw appear after midnight. However, if the chainsaw gets stuck in a tree and breaks, it will be restored, good as new, in the shed after midnight.
Cars, excavators, all kinds of farming tools, equipment, and weapons fall under this category.
What I was curious about was this.
Which of the two would materials used to repair the house be treated as?
The answer was “consumables.”
Even if I take them out of the shed and use them, building materials come out endlessly!
Red cedar planks for the roof, bricks for building walls, exteriors, chimneys, and even white and green paint to protect the wood—all of it!
“Are any of you bricklayers?”
“...”
“...”
“I thought not. Then let’s use the red bricks that come out of here.”
According to Eleanor, in the settlement they had built before, they had even made the fireplace out of wood, but that wretched environment was now goodbye.
And so, when I added bricks, red cedar, and white and green paint to the lumber I had cut with the chainsaw... Oh...
“The settlement looks incredibly bright and cheerful!”
“...It does.”
It had become quite... close to the atmosphere of the Anne of Green Gables anime from 1979.
Mother, rejoice. Your dream has come true here.
Anyway, construction of the settlement was proceeding smoothly like that.
Did I say earlier that our farm property was about 4,000 pyeong? And that our house took up about 1,000 pyeong of it?
On top of that, the low-temperature storage, equipment shed, small chicken coop, and a section of a low hill altogether take up about 1,200 pyeong.
Then what’s on the remaining 1,800 pyeong?
What else would there be? A grape farm made up of three 500-pyeong smart greenhouses. If I don’t emphasize that they’re smart greenhouses, my father’s severance pay poured into this place would weep.
In any case, two of them are used to grow Shine Muscat grapes, and the remaining one had just been expanded to grow all kinds of new varieties.
In other words.
This year’s grape harvest is determined by two 500-pyeong smart greenhouses.
500 pyeong × 2 = 1,000 pyeong.
1,000 pyeong.
That means roughly 10,000 bunches of grapes come out of this...
“We’re done! Everyone, rest!”
“W-we’re done?”
“Uwaaaah!”
“I’m saved!”
Thirty pieces of free labor...! Something that would normally have taken several days somehow got finished in half a day once enough manpower was thrown at it...!
We had successfully harvested 10,000 bunches of grapes!
Good. As for what to do with those...
I’ll think about it later.
I can’t come up with an answer right now. Even if the 33 people gathered here each ate one bunch a day, it would take a year and eight months to eat them all.
Whether we dry them and make raisins or whatever else, that isn’t something to think about right now.
What I need to think about right now is...
Food to eat immediately!
Thinking that, I turned my eyes toward the area near the low-temperature storage where the Shine Muscats were piled up.
And there... I saw sacks of potatoes.
Those dozens of potatoes would be our food from now on.
It couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t as if we were going to grow rice here, and the rice at our house had been cleanly milled, so if we planted it, all we’d get was dirt. We did have crops like tomatoes and cabbages in the vegetable garden, but they weren’t enough to make into staples.
‘Come on, remember. Remember what Mr. Choe next door, the guy who grows potatoes, said...!’
I took out a notebook and began scribbling down everything that came to mind. No matter how trivial something might seem, all of it was knowledge discovered through decades—no, centuries—of trial and error.
A single issue could make our future potato yield multiply severalfold or plummet.
“Diffuse-light sprouting, then cutting with a disinfected knife, curing... Done. This isn’t bad.”
Fortunately, the precious knowledge imparted to me by Mr. Choe, weekend farms, and farming YouTube still remained in my head.
Wow, thank you, Mr. Choe.
Later, I’ll put up a statue for you with a name like “Saint of Potatoes.”
Needlessly excited, I shouldered a sack of potatoes weighing dozens of kilograms and dragged it over to where the English settlers were. When I was sweating buckets, Eleanor, who had been in the middle of carrying lumber, was horrified and split the load with me.
“Goodness, why are you bringing that over with so much effort? Are you all right?”
“...I’m fine.”
Because of that damn mystique, I couldn’t even scratch a mosquito bite in front of these people if it itched. I lightly wiped the sweat from my face and once again gave Eleanor my thanks with a mysterious smile.
After the two of us struggled our way to the entrance of the settlers’ village, our legs gave out and we sat down.
“Ugh... Wh-what is this? It looks like a monster.”
Only then did Eleanor check the contents and frown. I had been thinking, ‘It’s not so bad that you’d call it a monster,’ but when I looked inside the sack... uh... I frowned in the exact same way.
I realized that potatoes left neglected until long sprouts had grown out of them resembled tentacle monsters more than I had expected.
Even so, I hurriedly picked up a potato with slightly shorter sprouts and held it out in front of Eleanor. Eleanor flinched without realizing it, then brought her face closer at my gesture.
“Look. It’s a potato.”
“Pota...to?”
Huh? She doesn’t know yet?
It’s been almost a hundred years since Columbus reached America, but they still don’t know about potatoes?
“What is it... a lump of earth? Or it looks like animal droppings. Is it fuel?”
“...It’s food.”
“...”
No.
Even if you make a face that says, ‘Th-this? You eat... this?’ I absolutely won’t let you off.
I did my best to shrug and took a boiled potato I had brought from the house out of my pocket, then bit into it.
And when I took out another potato and held it out with as nonchalant an expression as possible, Eleanor, who had been suspicious, put the potato in her mouth and her expression relaxed.
“It tastes... all right?”
“This will be our bread from now on. It’ll grow better than wheat.”
“This will?”
“Yes.”
Only then did Eleanor seem surprised. She looked this way and that at the dirt-covered potato with curiosity.
“Then how do we eat these sprouts here...”
“Ah, you mustn’t eat those. They’re poisonous.”
“...”
“You can’t eat the leaves or stems either. Only these lumps on the roots are edible.”
Hearing that, she looked even more as if she found it grotesque, but there was nothing to be done. It was better than hiding it for no reason and mass-producing poison victims later.
In any case, they didn’t look good, and even when farming later, the bad sprouts had to be cut away, leaving only a little.
I took a MacGyver knife from my pocket and quickly trimmed the long-grown sprouts, and Eleanor, who had been watching from the side, helped as well.
“How long should we leave the sprouts?”
“About one centimeter is enough.”
“...Pardon?”
“Uh, ah, I mean... about the length of a thumbnail? Half a thumbnail? Around that much?”
“You mean about 2 lines to 1 barleycorn, or maybe 0.5 digit?”
“Ah... pardon?”
“I asked if it should be around 2 lines to 1 barleycorn, 0.5 digit.”
...What kind of alien language is this now?
“That’s, uh, how many inches?”
“Four lines make one barleycorn. And three barleycorns make one inch.”
“I see. Now I understand a little...”
“And one digit is 3/4 of an inch.”
“...”
“So 2 lines to 1 barleycorn...”
“Just cut it about this much.”
“...Yes.”
Soon, the other settlers who had been watching us approached one by one to help, and thanks to that, the work of cutting the sprouts short ended sooner than expected.
Originally, there was supposed to be a process called “diffuse-light sprouting,” where you expose them indirectly to sunlight in bright shade so that the sprouts grow only a little, but we hadn’t been able to do that, so the sprouts had grown long, which was why we had to do this work.
...Right. I hadn’t exactly known I would end up tripping four hundred years into the past and pulling this bullshit.
Holding back a sigh that threatened to burst out, I called the villagers over.
“Now, everyone, bring the knives you’re holding. We have something to do first.”
Potato cultivation, simply put, is the process of cutting sprouted potatoes into pieces, burying them in the ground, and letting those sprouts grow.
In that process, potatoes, which are tubers, grow, and after about a hundred days, you dig them up and eat them.
But if you just cut potatoes into chunks with a knife and put them in the ground, the wounded potatoes can rot from all sorts of germs, so the knives absolutely have to be disinfected with bleach water.
I briefly soaked the knives the settlers had brought in bleach water diluted at a ratio of 500:1, took them out, and handed them back. Then I began teaching them, one by one, how to farm potatoes.
“Here, if you look, cut them into quarters centered around the crown, where the most sprouts have grown. Then bring them to me.
“But if there are small potatoes among them, you don’t necessarily need to cut them into quarters. For example, this is about 30 to 40 grams... no, wait, how much is that?”
“Did you say 30 drams?”
“No. Grams—no, how much is a dram? Eleanor? Could you explain?”
“One ounce is 16 drams.”
“Ah, I see.”
“But sometimes one ounce is 8 drams. When measuring things like medicinal ingredients...”
“...”
“Anyway, one ounce is 16 drams, and one pound is 16 ounces and 7,000 grains.”
“...”
Feeling a familiar brand of fuckery, I closed my eyes.
Ah, this is that.
How much is one geun? When counting meat, it’s 600 grams, but sometimes it’s 500 grams, and when counting fruit, it’s 375 grams, and for medicinal ingredients, 40 nyang make one geun, and one nyang is 4 don, and one don is about 15 grams, so one geun of medicinal ingredients is about... Ah, I forgot. These days, the amount of chili powder has gone down, so one geun can be 540 grams, and wild ginseng is a precious medicinal ingredient, so 300 grams is considered one geun...
It was that familiarly fucked-up taste.
I gently closed my eyes and thought.
Ah, base three and base four. Just hearing it makes me feel like shit. Maybe Englishmen actually have twelve fingers.
Longing for the metric system that would one day smash those damned systems of measurement and appear like a superhuman on a white horse, I shut my mouth.
“Anyway, yes. Cut each piece to be roughly a little heavier than one ounce.”
“Understood.”
“And bring them to me once they’re all cut.”
And so, we gathered potatoes whose sprouts had been cut down to “a length between 2 lines and 1 barleycorn” and chopped into pieces of “roughly between 1 ounce and 22 drams.”
Then could we plant the chopped-up potatoes like this?
No.
There are several reasons why potatoes are cut into pieces and planted instead of being planted whole.
One is to use seed potatoes efficiently.
If one potato is cut into three or four pieces and planted, then you can gain that much more from it.
Another is that if you shock the potato and stress the seed, the sprouts grow a little faster.
There are various other reasons too, but for now, those are the two big ones. Cutting potatoes into pieces means you can be much more efficient in terms of both time and area.
However, potatoes are a crop vulnerable to disease and pests. Even when cutting the potatoes earlier, we disinfected the knives in bleach water out of concern for viral infection, but if we plant them directly into the ground like this? That means the chance of the potatoes rotting increases as well.
Therefore, to prevent disease and pests, they must go through a curing process for about four to five days in a well-ventilated place, allowing the cut surfaces to heal on their own.
After curing the potatoes in a shady, well-ventilated place like that, we would build up proper ridges and plant them in the ground.
“How wide should the ridges be? In links or feet...”
“Build them with ‘this much’ space between them.”
“About how much would that be...”
“Roughly ‘this much.’”
“Then the spacing for planting the potatoes...”
“Leave about ‘that much’ between them too.”
Ha, hahaha, you uncivilized premodern people. I have finally “attained enlightenment.”
It was because people usually just said “this much, that much, about this much” that the system of units could be this fucked up. I suffered for nothing.
It was my fault for being a weak modern man who lived in a world where every single screw was standardized down to the millimeter.
In any case, autumn potatoes are normally planted shallowly, about five centimeters deep, but that’s because of Korea’s uniquely shitty monsoon season, so I could ignore that and plant them about ten centimeters deep like spring potatoes.
Now, if we just wait about a hundred days and harvest them, our food worries will be over. We aren’t going to sell them anywhere anyway, so all we need to do is sprinkle fertilizer from time to time and leave them be.
...Then, that settles it.
With food and safety secured, I had nothing left to worry about.
It was sad that I had suddenly been separated from my family and relatives and dropped four hundred years into the past, but if I could enjoy a happy life here, where my debts were gone...
“Ah, but what are we going to do with all those grapes?”
...Ah.
“...You shouldn’t have brought that up.”
“Pardon?”
Because tears suddenly threatened to come out, I looked up at the sky for a moment.
The sky was... clear.
The grape farm into which I had ground away my entire twenties.
...And the 10,000 bunches of Shine Muscats that came out of it.
Ha, what am I going to do with those?