Madeleine poured Jasmine and me elderflower tea while we took the table at the back. Her oven was cooking new bread and other meals, but, save for light conversation, she wasn’t that concerned about The Hart Stop until we found a way to solve the supplier and Silent Path issue.
That was a problem for another day. So Madeleine tended to her own business. Jasmine stared at me, before smiling. “Don’tcha worry, Ashy. You weren’t THAT bad at the inn.”
I didn’t look at Jasmine, and instead pulled out the Mortis Agrariae and placed it on the table. The green cover shined, and I idly flipped it to the page on harvesting.
“We want The Hart Stop to be legitimate, right?” I began, looking over the notes for my crops. “I guess we can’t really ignore making a plan.”
“Right. So what have you written?” Jasmine said, scraping the chair against the floor until she was sitting to my right. I just pushed my grimoire to her so she could look at the prices. Her lips pursed.
“Oh, and you already accounted for the fact you can’t just keep making the same thing! But why don’t you have the open-market prices listed?”
“I don’t know ’em,” I responded.
“Mmm… One moment!” she said, and her eyes looked upwards. They scanned over nothing, before turning to me. “Okay, I know the masterwork prices, and I think we should aim to go to that immediately. Can I have your book? Also, some of your prices are just wrong.”
“No. You can tell me. I’m the only one writing in this book.”
Jasmine pouted, but leaned over. With her help, I got the vendor price and market price for each of the crops. She turned to me. “The thing about the market price is that it’s if the market is stable. Like… look at lettuce. Twelve silver pieces sounds great, but if you made 8,000 lettuce, Ashley… no one’s going to buy that much before they spoil. And because you made so many, it’s going to make them worth a lot less. I mean, we could try to start shipping it outside, but… that’s so far in the future, that’s not even worth thinking about.”
I looked at Jasmine, and rolled the quill around my fingertips. “I know. But I think that’s why you’re also not in charge of farming. Making that much lettuce at one go is… not great for the soil. Let alone how labor-intensive that actually is.”
“Because your workforce needs to worry about labor costs?” she needled, and I looked at my hands.
“Actually… you don’t really need that much labor if you’re doing it well. I mean, you’re right that I don’t have to worry about it, and it’s not like the dead are going to cut into our profits, but…”
I leaned back in the chair to think about how to explain it.
“So, Pa just created corn. Always corn. That drains the soil quality fast. Lettuce isn’t really bad for the soil, but it’s not good either. You have to rotate crops in and out or you kill the soil really fast.”
“Then isn’t that why you dump manure on it?”
“Nah; manure is like… setting the soil to a certain quality. I mean, at some point of being rich you can just ignore all of it, but if you need… what, 8,000 bags every month…”
“Yeah, Laura’s husbandry doesn’t even produce that much,” Jasmine correctly pointed out.
I nodded. “So, it’s mostly about maintenance. I mean, I could accomplish the same thing as manure if I was willing to spend several years just making low-cost crops. And I’m pretty sure Blood Crops—not that we’re making any—drain the soil faster.”
“So, what are you suggesting?”
“Crop rotation. My limiting factor right now is just… the seedmakers, and I don’t have any leads on how to make a masterwork.”
“...A [Farmer] makes them, when they have enough ranks in [Craftswoman].”
“Then it’s a summer problem,” I concluded. “The way to think of it is this, Jazzy. I need to plant two crop restorers per feeder.”
“Uh…”
I filled out more of the table.
“Neutral, Restorers, Growers?” Jasmine asked.
“So… soil has something to it that makes crops grow. Certain plants, like peas, are really good at restoring the soil—the quality of it. That’s the point of manure and compost, by the way: it just restores the dirt back. But crops can do it too.”
“Or, apparently, magic,” Jasmine added, looking at Madeleine.
I nodded. “But I don’t think it’s something Maddy or I can do. She’s not actually magic, and for me to do it, I need to drain more from the land. Which, as you said, is kind of a bad idea. I’ve enough for my workforce and the fields to always be at a healthy level. That gets rid of Winter’s Veil.”
“Yeah… the soil always looks bad after winter,” she agreed. “What’s the plan then?”
I looked over the crops, and quickly noticed something. “I can see two routes, actually.”
“Oh?”
“Well, if we want to focus on The Hart Stop exclusively, we can do the normal route of peas, potatoes, and strawberries for the spring; broccoli, watermelon, and peppers for the summer; and then cabbage, wheat, and grapes for the fall.”
“Three crops each?”
“Yeah, a restorer to keep the seeds going, one feeder to use it, and then the trellis crops. Those will have to be restored through manure regardless, since placing a trellis there is going to prevent us from making a restorer.”
“And I’m going to make the trellis?”
“I… I know how to make a trellis. It is just sticks all connected together,” I admitted. This made Jasmine pout.
“I was hoping to make it! I love building things.” She gasped! “Do you think my [Craftswoman] can be a role for when I advance?”
“Yes, pipelette, but, again, you are upstairs. Please watch what you’re saying if there are customers around.”
“There are no customers, Madsy!”
“Not yet. There will be when I’m done baking.”
I then looked at Madeleine too. “Do monsters like wine and beer?”
“Oui, chérie. Why?”
“The other option is we can become vintners,” I offhandedly said, looking at the two. That caused Jasmine and Madeleine to look at each other.
“It might be a long-term goal,” I continued. “We’d need to probably replace my meadows with a vintner itself, and then accept the amount of time it takes. We’d be able to focus on restoring the fields in spring, making hops in the summer, and then set up the entire trellis system during the end of summer to start growing grapes. Over the harvest time we’d actually make it into wine.”
Jasmine’s eyes lit up. “That… is a massive boost to prices, and it would legitimize The Hart Stop!”
I frowned. “The amount of grapes it takes to do that is intense though, Jasmine. It’s not like one grape is going to make one bottle of wine. It’s going to take…” I tried to think. “I don’t know,” I finally admitted.
Madeleine and Jasmine continued to stare at each other. “Okay, but why is that the harder route, chérie?”
“...Infrastructure? I mean, I’m glad you made the kegs below my house but that’s not really enough. We need an entire facility. And if we want to do ale too, we’ll need… just more. Actually, if we wanted to make alcohol all year round, we could do strawberries… but then we have three feeder crops, and the field would be dead.”
“So, manure,” Madeleine responded.
“Or, you finish blighting the rest of the place and don’t worry about it?” Jasmine offered.
“...And people would notice I’m never buying manure. As you pointed out yourself, Jasmine, Laura’s shop doesn’t have enough manure or compost for maintenance of a field that big, and even if it did, I’m just one farm out of a dozen or so.”
Jasmine slumped back, but Madeleine pulled cookies out of her oven. I was always impressed with what she had in the store; being a [Witch] must give her a lot of useful doodads. Her hand waved as they floated, being coated with cinnamon and sugar. She placed a few for us, but then put the remainders in small little gift baskets.
Jasmine immediately bit into hers, but I wasn’t that hungry.
“I’m thinking for now, we stay with the crop part. It lets me just handle the crops, and as a long-term goal, we can aim for a vintner.”
The two pouted. “Not even a small amount to test?”
“I mean, yeah, we don’t have to go all or nothing… but going that way requires a lot of work. And one of us would need to be—”
“ME!” Jasmine immediately pounced before I finished the sentence.
“—come a vintner.”
I looked at Jasmine and then patted her head. “So, for now, our idea should really just be about growing crops.”
Jasmine leaned back too. “Well, with 90 days in a season, it seems like there’s not that many harvests?”
I shook my head. “We’re looking at about three harvests. It’s why the repeater crops are the best… but then we have to fix the soil again.”
Jasmine sighed. “I am glad this is in your wheelbarrow, Ashley. If it was mine, I think I’d go insane.”
“I think the trick is mostly just… not trying to optimize like you’re doing. As long as I keep the feeders in balance with the restorers, we’d be fine. I don’t just have to use the same stuff, but it has to be the same rotation. Feeder, then restorer.”
“You could also just jump ahead if you took another loan and bought the masterwork seeds now, and masterwork compost,” Jasmine reminded me. “You’d be able to maintain that right now.”
I frowned, but looked at Madeleine. She didn’t stop wrapping the cookies up, but tilted her head to the side. “Take as much as you need, chérie. I can replace whatever is in that bag relatively quickly.”
I sighed and got up. I took the gold coins off the table, and then moved towards the exit. “Come on, Jazz. We gotta buy some seeds, and… I guess set up the trellis. You wanted to make it, right?”
“We’re doing both?!?” she cooed.
“I guess so.”
With Maddy’s money in hand, Jasmine and I went towards the farmers’ market to buy seeds.
I had purchased the following—nine each, and all masterwork.
For spring, I purchased: peas (restorer), potatoes (feeder), and strawberries (feeder).
For summer: broccoli (restorer), and then pineapple (feeder). Those two alone would take more or less the entire season.
For fall, since peas required a trellis in the spring, I could grow the grapes (feeder). On the fields where potatoes and strawberries grew, I’d grow cabbage (restorer) and turnips (restorer).
Since I had purchased nine of each, that meant that I had 81 crops. With 81 crops, and three types of plants at most, I needed about 250 bags of manure.
All in all… that was a massive business loan. The bags cost 250 gold alone, and I didn’t look at the prices of the seeds. Even Jasmine paled when she saw the total tag.
And yet, the small coin purse Madeleine had given us wasn’t emptied with that. Both of us dragged ourselves back to Madeleine’s shop, and handed her the bag back. She smiled, showing us the baskets she had prepared.
“Please, take one for yourselves. I’m preparing for my next alchemy class,” she said.
I turned to Jasmine. “You want to come with me, or stay here? I don’t need your help with the rest.”
Madeleine looked at me. “Keep her here, and when the night comes, tell Ophelia to come here too. You are correct, chérie, that the other part of the business doesn’t really need you right now. I have some options I wanted to discuss with us three, and then we’ll bring you back into the fold.”
I nodded, happy to be out of that part. The Silent Path worried me, and I vastly preferred just farming.
I turned around to go home. The walk was slow, but I finally got time to myself.
I could finally look into what being a [Necromancer] gave, and… more importantly, what a [Cryotheurge] did.
V. ON THE HARVEST
SPRING
SUMMER
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FALL
CROSS-SEASON
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