Lady of the Lord From the East

In the past, the wheat maturity in Sardinson County was basically in the middle and late June, and it would even be delayed until July. This is also the wheat maturity time of other regions on the same latitude in Europe. The difference is basically not big.

But this year, because I learned a lot of field management knowledge and increased the rational use of fertilizers, the crops generally grew better than in previous years, and they also matured earlier.

Taking Sardinia as an example, after Wei Wei decided to harvest some of the mature wheat fields to replant oats earlier, she found that the wheat fields in the manor were basically mature in advance, but some of the wheat fields had already entered the wax maturity stage for the best harvest, and some were still It is in the mature stage, and it will take a while for it to wait.

And this time is only in the first ten days of June, and the serfs did not expect the wheat to grow so fast. Most people judge when the wheat is mature according to the past time, and ignore the diligent use of some of the fertilizers. The fast-growing wheat has reached the point where it will start to reduce production if it is not harvested.

And this situation basically happened in Felix's private plot, which is the lord's land. Whether it is field management or fertilizer use, it is more delicate than the land rented by the serfs themselves, but if I really want to say, the serfs are more concerned about It is still their own land. They will stare at the wheat in their fields every day to check whether they are ripe, but they will not care about the situation in the count’s fields every day. Plus this year, the wheat looks better than in previous years, serfs They were all excitedly guessing how much harvest they could have in their fields, and they ignored the count's private plots a little bit, which led to the fact that some of the wheat in the private plots quietly entered the wax-ripening stage, and they didn't notice it.

The wax ripening period of triticale is 3-5 days. After this time period, the wheat will enter the full-ripening period, and the wheat grains in the full-ripening period will begin to turn yellow and hard, and the notice of water loss will also consume a lot of money due to the respiration of the wheat. The organic matter leads to the loss of nutrients. In addition, the situation of wheat shattering and shattering will also increase, which will eventually lead to lower yields. Therefore, the best harvest time is the three or five days of the wax ripening period.

But in the past, everyone used experience to start harvesting after the wheat had completely turned yellow, because they had no concept of nutrition, and believed that harvesting the yellow wheat could save time for drying, and it would be fine if the wheat grains fell out. Gleaming with sacks, so the green wheat that hasn't fully receded at the wax-ripening stage isn't actually ready for harvest in their opinion.

But they didn't know these things, but Wei Wei knew very well. When she wanted to harvest ahead of schedule, she ordered the stewards to check the fields, and told them that as long as the wheat plants in the fields were yellow from top to bottom, with a green belt in the middle Yes, it can be harvested.

So they happened to catch up with the wax maturity of the wheat. This time is nearly ten days earlier than last year.

After checking again, they found that the wheat in the manor this year generally showed signs of early maturity, which means that the harvest time this year is earlier than in previous years.

The first wheat to be harvested was from private plots. The serfs were used to giving priority to the nobles. Every year, the harvest started from the earl’s private plot. This year, because Wei Wei asked to harvest the wheat before it turned yellow, many serfs Not very happy, I think this will affect the collection.

"The weather is so good this year, and it hasn't rained recently, so there's no need to hurry up to harvest. Wouldn't it be better to let the wheat dry in the field?"

"Yeah, maybe it can grow longer."

"So much wheat is not left in the fields to dry, where are we going to dry it? Isn't all the open space in the village used to build pigsties and houses?"

"That's right."

The serfs talked a lot in private, but no one dared to complain about going in front of the countess. Fortunately, the first harvest was the plot reserved by the count's family.

Only a few serfs who had matured prematurely because the wheat in the fields were too good had a bitter face, and their hearts twitched when they harvested their fields.

But when the harvest of the earliest ripe wheat was completed, and the astonishing numbers burst out from the mouth of the weighing steward, their thoughts were completely different.

Obviously, the wheat harvested early did not reduce the yield as they thought. On the contrary, the increase in yield was terrifying, and the harvested wheat grains were plump and large. They peeled off the shell and threw them into the mouth to chew. More delicious than ever.

Such wheat, if sold, is of the highest quality, and can be bought for a higher price.

And Wei Wei also took advantage of the exaggeration to tell the serfs present about the best time to harvest wheat, and told them why they couldn't wait until the wheat was fully ripe before harvesting.

Backed up by past deeds and those amazing wheat yields, her words are very convincing.

"Sure enough, the Countess is really good at farming. It's right to listen to her."

"I have long said that the Countess will not let us do meaningless things. She let us harvest earlier, it must be because it can harvest more food."

"I will listen to her arrangements in the future."

It only took one day to go from complaining to complimenting.

The news of the harvest spread in a very short period of time, and Sardinson Castle entered the harvest period ahead of schedule. All the serfs and freemen put down other work and devoted themselves to the hard work of harvesting wheat. Ma took the slaves to pick herbs and brew herbal tea for everyone to drink.

And Wei Wei's words also spread to the ears of the free people in the manor with the mouth of the serfs, and then followed them in and out of the manor, and spread to other places.

The people who had heard of it immediately went to their fields and followed the method in the news to determine whether the wheat in the fields had entered the wax-ripening stage. I called my family to grab it. After all, this stage is only for a few days. If I miss it, the production will be reduced.

Not to mention, the biggest advantage of choosing this stage to harvest wheat is that the drop of wheat grains is greatly reduced. It will not happen that every time a piece of land is harvested, there are wheat grains everywhere in the field. In the past, they could only harvest wheat. Let the young children in the family pick up slowly in the field. The adults first harvest all the fields and then go back to pick up the wheat grains. Often at this time, the wheat grains in the field will be sent to others by birds, voles or other adults. The children who picked up the leaks in the field picked them up.

And this kind of thing is not easy to stop, because everyone does it.

But now, they are harvesting the wheat in the front, and the children are picking up the wheat grains in the back. After the harvesting here, the other side can be roughly cleaned up. Although some of them will still be snatched by small animals, at least it will not be cheaper for others.

As the whole of Sardinson County entered the wheat harvest ahead of schedule, the construction of various places had to be suspended. This year, everyone has planted more land than in previous years. It is inevitable that there will be some shortage of manpower during the harvest. There are too many people who can’t be harvested by themselves to hire those migrant workers. These people are basically people who have no land at home and no place to rent, so they don’t need to go back to their hometown to help when the farming is busy, but they have been working in Sa Dinson County is working part-time. The recent road construction project has been suspended due to the earl's request. The young and strong laborers who are temporarily out of work do not want to rest, so they go to work part-time.

And those foreign merchants are also staring at the harvest in the fields, but it is not that they want to harvest the grains - they also know that the pasta factory of the Count is there, and it is impossible for these wheat to be sold out - they are just curious, Sa Is the yield per mu reported in Dinsonburg really true?

Having never seen that scene, most people can't believe that there is really a wheat field that can yield more than 2,000 catties per acre.

In their impressions, even the best high-quality fields can produce 1,500 catties of wheat, which is a miracle that can be widely publicized. 2,200 catties, that is only in God's fields. Some output?

What's more, the rumors are not just about the harvest of a piece of land. What they heard is that the wheat fields belonging to the earl in the entire Sardinson Castle estate have an average output of about 2,000 catties, while the fields rented by serfs and freemen are in the field. The output is less, but the average yield per mu is also 1,700 catties. This is because some of the inferior fields in their fields that have not been well cared for have been delayed. Otherwise, the average can be raised even higher.

When discussing this rumor, most of the outsiders do not believe it. These outsiders are basically businessmen. Many of them don’t know anything about farming. They only know some basic common sense. How much, but no more understanding, and grain merchants may know a little, but unfortunately, the merchants who buy grain all know that there is no wheat in Sardinson, so they will not arrive this month. from Sardinson, but to other areas where they could sell wheat.

Merchants who don’t know much about farming go to the nearest field out of curiosity to see the unharvested wheat, except that they can see that the wheat is growing well, the grains on the wheat ears are full without empty shells, and the heavy ones are all heavy. The wheat straw was almost bent, and it was impossible to estimate how much the output of the field could be.

However, the curious merchants were willing to wait for the territorial people to harvest and dry the wheat with flails and then send the grains to be weighed.

Not every village has a weighing scale, but there are in Dingle Town. This is where most foreign merchants gather. Naturally, what they want to see is the townspeople in Dingle Town. to weigh the results of the grain.

The time to weigh the grain is also the time to pay the tax, so the tax officer also came to the door at this time.

In the past, some tax officials who were responsible for taking tools to the villages and responsible for weighing and collecting taxes would do some tricks on the scales to make the residents pay more taxes, and the extra food was basically greedy for them, but this year they did not. people dare to do so.

Or they can't do it if they want.

During the grain harvest last year, the tax officials made the scales and Wei Wei discovered the problem. Originally, when she was just watching them use the scales, she suddenly remembered that when she was watching the news, she often saw black-hearted businessmen using the scales. The scale was short of two pounds to sell things to customers. As a result, after the customer found out, they found someone to make a theory, and finally made a mess on the news.

So out of curiosity and suspicion, Wei Wei went over to check the balance, and she really found out that the weight on the balance was wrong.

She didn't show it on the spot, but turned around and immediately told Felix, who directly asked people to raid and check the balances of all the tax officials. As a result, once they were accurate, basically all the weights were faulty.

If this situation spreads out, the residents will definitely make a scene, so in the end the matter was not revealed, but all the tax officials who were found to have problems were dismissed, and their homes were searched again, and a large number of them were found. The money and food that should not belong to them, then these people were put in prison according to the law, and their property was confiscated.

Although Felix's order did not spread on a large scale, there were still more or less rumors in private, and the new tax officers who were on duty urgently were warned, and no one dared to do so again.

In fact, they can't do anything. The scales that used to be called food were kept by the tax officer, but now these things are stored in the warehouse of the castle, and they will be sent to the tax officer when they are needed. And there were people watching them all the way to weigh them, and the food collected after weighing was directly carried away by the soldiers, basically no longer in the hands of the tax officials, so it could be said that they were not given any chance at all.

Of course, this is only a temporary method at this stage, and will continue to be improved in the future.

But now, the tax officer, who only took office last year, is feeling a lot of pressure under the onlookers of a group of people watching the fun.

The place where the food is called is the small square in the town, which is the place where the announcement is usually posted. The mayor leads people to call the food for the people in the town, and the tax officer watches and records it, and calculates the tax they should pay. Then, after weighing the grain in the town, he used the scale brought by the tax officer to weigh out the share of the grain to be confiscated, and the scales used by the townspeople have also been checked to determine that there is no problem.

If you go to those villages that don't have standard scales to collect taxes, then you will use the scales brought by the tax official from beginning to end.

In fact, even if there is no standard scale, the territorial people will find a way to determine the output of their own fields in private. After all, no one is stupid. The hands and feet are kept secret, and the loss of food alone is not much. Based on the idea of ​​​​not fighting against the government, as long as it is not excessive, they will endure it silently.

Therefore, before the tax officer came to collect the tax, the residents already knew how much output they had in their fields, but they didn't quite know whether other people's homes were the same as their own, so now they are all the same as those Like foreign businessmen, the person responsible for weighing reports the number.

This is a relatively long time, because every household has a lot of land, and their grain is pulled over by trolleys, and there is only one scale. Although it can weigh up to 500 kilograms at a time, it is still not fast enough. where to go.

Fortunately, there are not many places in Dingle.

The people of Dingle Township are not full farmers, so their respective fields are much smaller than other farmers, like the serfs in Sardinson Castle, they used to rent at least 15 acres of land, of which three One part needs to be left fallow, so the actual planting area is about 10 acres each year. This year, they returned most of the fallow land to the count, and only a few families with a large population will leave some to cultivate.

This year, the three-plant system is no longer popular in Sardinson County. The land in the county is no longer fallow, and those that cannot be cultivated will be returned. Naturally, there will be less land in the hands of everyone.

This year, the townspeople in Dingle either set up their own shops to do business, or work in factories. Fewer people are willing to wholeheartedly farm the fields, and the fields of every household have shrunk a lot.

"John's house, two acres of medium field, 3,053 catties of wheat, three acres of low-grade field, 3,845 catties of wheat."

"Ho?!"

"Joel's family, three acres of prime field, 5015 catties of wheat, six acres of medium field, 8974 catties of wheat."

"Oh, God!!"

"Tommy's house, ten acres of inferior fields, 12,970 catties of wheat."

"Is he really talking about inferior fields?!!!"

...

The young tax officer who was recording finally couldn't bear to turn his head and threw a sentence to the group of outsiders behind who gasped every time they heard a report: "Can you be quiet? What's so surprising about this?"

This tax officer came out of Sardinson Castle and had only served the fields of Lord Count before. After seeing those even more astonishing figures, now these are simply trivial.

But for those who didn't believe the previous rumors at all, the numbers were terrifying, okay?

Those businessmen with only a little common sense only think that this figure is much higher than the standard figure they know that an acre of wheat yields about 1,200 catties even if it is a bumper harvest, and has not noticed other problems.

But the free people who came to work from other places were different. What they paid attention to were not only those ridiculously high numbers that seemed to be falsely reported, but also the grades of those fields.

Therefore, compared with those businessmen who do not know the specific conditions of the fields, these freedmen who also farm the land know that the so-called 1,200 catties of wheat per acre belong to the high-quality fields. If the middle fields can grow eight or nine hundred catties That's not bad, but the output of lower-class fields is even less, which is basically less than 600 catties.

Therefore, many people would rather spend more money to rent the upper-class fields than the lower-class fields. Only the poorest farmers will rent the lower-class fields to plant.

But now, even the lower-class fields can grow more grain than the high-class fields they recognize as a bumper crop. Is this world really real?

The man who thought he was daydreaming slapped himself hard, and the pain that followed told him it was true.

In fact, the so-called middle and lower fields in the eyes of these people are actually just the lack of nutrients in the fields, which leads to the decline of soil fertility, and there is no food. As long as the nutrients are replenished, it is not difficult to become the so-called upper fields again.

Even the top-grade fields have a lot of room for improvement. They are not comparable to Huaxia's standards for top-grade fields.

The numbers that shocked these outsiders to the point of numbness were still being reported out loud by the people being weighed. Even if it was not the first time that the grain owners knew this number, they couldn't help grinning and giggling. The tax collector took most of their food without making the smile drop.

So much grain, even if most of the leftovers are taken away, they will be able to eat for a long time, not to mention that there are other crops in their fields that are not mature, the most difficult wheat has a bumper harvest, and other crops that are easier to grow are harvested. The output will certainly not be too low.

And all of this is because they listened to the words of the Count and the Countess, and according to the set handed down from Sardinson Castle, they fertilized the fields, watered them diligently, killed insects and weeds regularly, and paid attention to avoiding the occurrence of pests and diseases. Only have the current harvest.

So they don't feel bad about the tax they have to pay at all. If they can have such a good harvest in the future, they are even willing to pay more!

Rather than complaining about the tax paid to the Count, they might as well complain about the tithe. After all, the grain given to the Count includes the tithe.

In their opinion, the harvest in Sardinson County has nothing to do with the church at all. They used to think that the tax was too much, and now they think so even more.

But after thinking about it, no one really complained. After all, they all send their children to the church to follow the priest to class. If they hear complaints, their children will not be able to study soon.

As for whether the tithes paid by the Count will be given to the church or not, it is not up to them. Anyway, they have already paid the taxes.

"I do hope that the Count will keep more for himself. You can see that construction is going on everywhere in Sardinson County this year. You can get paid for work and pay for food. The Count does not know how much money will be invested."

"Yeah, and our life has been getting better and better since the Earl took over, and it's very convenient. Just that road, we have all repaired it to my parents' house. I used to want to go home to see my parents and had to go back by myself. It only takes a day to walk, and now you can get on a horse-drawn cart and an ox-cart for a few copper coins, and you will arrive in two hours.”

"Who said it wasn't, now not only are we well fed and clothed, but we also have a little spare cash on hand. Once the field is harvested, the family's grain will be piled up on the beams of the house, and the unfinished ones will be sold to grain stores. It’s a huge sum of money again, and now my family can also buy a cow to work.”

"And the poll tax, the two younger ones in my family don't have to pay it if they are under seven years old, and the older one will pay half of it. That's a lot of savings."

"Yeah, it's a pity that we are not in the manor, otherwise we can send our children to study for free."

"Maybe it will be the same for our children in the future. The Count and Madam are not stingy people. In the past, if there was any good thing, didn't it start from the manor first, and then everyone else gradually got it?"

"Yeah yeah."

...

The townspeople who were waiting for the food to get together were talking about the changes in Sardinson County. All the good things they dare to think about fall on their heads, and they will definitely be better in the future.

Then a worrying question quietly spread through the crowd.

Their Count has done so many good things for the people, and each of them costs a lot of money. Is his money enough?

Such a good Count, don't spend all your savings because of the construction of the territory.

If those businessmen who do business with Felix know their thoughts, I am afraid they will sneer. That Earl Williams seems to be spending money like water, but he earns more, how could he become poor.

In fact, many people think that if Earl Williams was not engaged in large-scale territorial construction, he might be the richest noble in the Prady Empire now.