: The Farmer Boy

Stardew Valley has four distinct seasons, and its soil naturally possesses rich elemental energy, making it the most suitable place to grow tree fruits and cones.

However, agriculture is a vast field of study, and different crops require different growing conditions. The soil itself is often the most easily overlooked of these conditions.

"It feels like reading a book written in a foreign language... Every type of tree fruit has different soil requirements and environmental conditions. How did Grandpa and our ancestors summarize and classify them?"

The more you understand, the more you admire.

Xia Ming found his grandfather's farming notes, a thick book that mixed diaries, farming tips, and conditions for planting trees, fruits, and cones.

The contents are not only written by my grandfather, but also by his great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, that is, my grandfather's father, and even my grandfather's great-grandfather, my grandfather's great-great-grandfather, and so on. At least seven or eight generations have worked together to create this complete agricultural encyclopedia.

By the time of my grandfather's generation, the contents of this book had been basically completed. Unless new tree fruits or cones appeared, this notebook could be declared to have nothing left to record.

With this notebook, Xia Ming could quickly grow into a qualified farmer, but for now, he is just a novice who has just begun to learn.

Name: Cranberry

Type: Short-stemmed tree fruit

Flavor: Spicy, Astringent

Seasons: Summer and Autumn.

Planting related:

The outer part of the cranberry is spicy, while the middle part is slightly sour and juicy. To ensure that the grown cranberries are of perfect quality, these three aspects must be addressed.

In summer, cranberries tend to be slightly spicier, while cranberries harvested in autumn are more astringent in the center and have a slightly lower juice content than those harvested in summer.

First, the soil is crucial. Cranberries planted in the summer must be kept moist, with a water content slightly higher than the rainfall in the past seven days. However, the soil must not be flooded, otherwise the roots and stems of the cranberries will rot severely, resulting in large, astringent fruits with a rotten, soaked feel, making them almost inedible.

For cranberry plants planted in the fall, the soil moisture content should be slightly lower than the rainfall of the past seven days, while the soil compaction should be slightly higher than the normal level for loose soil, to ensure that the roots are firmly embedded in the soil.

If you are planting cranberries for summer planting and autumn harvest during the transition from summer to autumn, please be sure to manually water and loosen the soil daily to ensure that the soil moisture content is at the average level of the rainfall over the past twelve days and the soil compaction is at a standard loose level. Ten days after the complete transition to the new season, you can move them to normal planting conditions.

...............

In addition, when you plant cranberries correctly, there's a hidden reward for diligent and experienced farmers among the perfectly grown cranberries—silver and gold berries!

"Bang~"

"Huh? Has almost an hour passed without me realizing it? I just finished looking at the soil loosening, rainfall, major fruit varieties, and cranberry cultivation."

It wasn't until Pangolin brought Young Gilas to remind Xia Ming that he realized more than an hour had passed without him noticing.

During this period, he only learned the basics and read the perfect guide to growing cranberries.

In fact, it's perfectly fine to grow cranberries even if you don't strictly follow the instructions in the notes. The only difference is whether you can obtain "silver" or "gold" berries that are comparable to Pokémon items.

Those are treasures that only occasionally appear among trees with perfectly good fruit, a reward for hardworking, studious, and conscientious farmers.

However, this is clearly not something Xia Ming should be considering right now. He only intends to plant the seeds he ordered from Pierre. The key now is to accumulate initial capital.

Only after he has enough experience in farming will he consider planting perfect quality fruit trees in large quantities.

Moreover, he couldn't accomplish such a complex and massive task by himself; he also had to specially train two or three teams of Pokémon for agricultural planting.

For example, there are the Diglett family, which specializes in loosening soil, and the Water and Ground-type Pokémon, which specialize in watering. There are also Grass-type Pokémon used to care for plants, and even Bug-type Pokémon used to pollinate some fruits.

In short, farming is a long and arduous task.

"Young Gilas, you continue to learn from Sandslash as you did last night. I'm going to get the tools to measure the planting area."

"Yukichi Yukichi~"

"Debang."

Sandslash and Young King said they had no problem.

After assigning the tasks, Xia Ming first put his notebook away, then picked up some simple tools from the room and went out to measure the land.

Stepping outside, a vast, flat expanse of land came into view, probably several hundred thousand square meters in size. It wouldn't be wrong to call it a large, man-made flat area amidst the mountains.

Although it was land passed down from our ancestors, it's hard to say how it was originally developed.

Different fruit trees have different planting area requirements; good spacing allows the fruit trees to fully absorb nutrients and water.

Cranberries are a type of short-stemmed fruit tree, and the advantage of short-stemmed fruit trees is that they can be planted intensively.

Xia Ming did not plan to plant too many at once, so he adopted the traditional rectangular acreage system for farmland. He first divided the land into acres, then measured it into smaller plots, and finally calculated the approximate number of seedlings needed for one acre of land.

"According to the notes, the optimal spacing for cranberry bushes is six plants per block, with each block covering ten square meters, planted in two rows and three columns."

Xia Ming murmured, picked up a small wooden stake and inserted it into the land he had measured with a measuring tape. It was located in one corner of the one-acre plot. Then he inserted three more wooden stakes into the other three corners, connecting them to form a rectangle.

This was one piece, and then Xia Ming used this piece as the edge to fill the land with rows and columns.

"After deducting the area required for spacing between each plot, there are about sixty plots per acre, which means that 360 cranberry seedlings are needed. If losses are taken into account, at least 400 seedlings are needed."

Xia Ming did a quick calculation and found that this acre of land actually had quite a lot to plant!

According to the notes, an ordinary cranberry plant can produce 3 to 6 berries, and an acre of land can yield at least a thousand berries.

Currently, the price of a single cranberry on the market fluctuates around thirty Alliance Coins, and an acre of cranberries can sell for at least thirty thousand Alliance Coins, and that's not even for cranberries of perfect quality.

Perfectly grown cranberries can yield 6-9 berries and even double the price, reaching 60-70 Alliance Coins per berry.

Of course, if that were all, Xia Ming wouldn't have the confidence to raise the first and second teams he planned.

What gives Xia Ming such confidence is the ability of this land to allow almost all tree fruits to be harvested at least twice a season, and to make it easier to grow perfect quality tree fruits!

At the same time, compared to tree fruit, cones are the most profitable economic crop in the world, and the land beneath his feet just happens to have the natural conditions to grow cones!