How to Survive in the Roanoke Colony-Chapter 8: Potatoes

Chapter 8: Potatoes

Our farm property is about 13,200 square meters.

And of that, about 3,300 square meters is taken up by a 19th-century style green-roofed country house with gardens and driveway that my mother built with great care, inspired by her memories with "Anne of Green Gables."

The exterior and roofing materials were wood, of course.

Meaning, the exterior often falls off or gets damaged, requiring frequent repairs.

And frequent repairs mean building materials like wood and bricks are always stocked in the warehouse.

I decided to classify the various items I received as this farm's resource cheats into two categories.

First, various "consumables" that restore to their original quantity after midnight.

For example, the almost-empty aluminum foil in the kitchen runs out before you can wrap a single egg, but after time passes, it recharges back to its original amount.

Firewood, gasoline, basic medicines, and various other items fall into this category.

Second, "permanent items" that repair or restore if broken or damaged after midnight.

For instance, taking the chainsaw out of the storage doesn't create a new chainsaw after midnight. However, if the chainsaw gets stuck in a tree and breaks, it's restored pristinely in the storage after midnight.

Cars, forklifts, various farming equipment, tools, and weapons fall into this category.

What I was curious about was this:

Which category do house repair materials fall under?

The answer is "consumables."

Building materials come out endlessly from the warehouse even after you take them out!

Cedar boards for the roof, bricks for walls, exterior, and chimney, and even white and green paint to protect the wood - everything!

"Is there a bricklayer among you?"

"..."

"..."

"I thought not. Then let's use these red bricks that come from here."

According to Eleanor, in their previous settlement they even made fireplaces out of wood, but goodbye to such poor conditions now.

So when we added bricks, cedar, and white and green paint to the lumber I cut with the chainsaw... oh...

"The settlement looks so bright and cheerful!"

"...Indeed."

It's become quite... close to the atmosphere of the Anne of Green Gables animation (1979 version).

Mother, rejoice. Your dream has been realized here.

Anyway, the settlement construction is progressing smoothly like that.

Did I mention earlier that our farm property is about 13,200 square meters? Of that, our house takes up about 3,300 square meters.

Add to that the cold storage, equipment warehouse, small chicken coop, and the area including a section of low hills, totaling about 4,000 square meters.

So what's in the remaining 6,000 square meters?

Well, there's a grape farm consisting of three 1,650-square-meter smart greenhouses. If I don't emphasize that they're smart greenhouses, my father's retirement money poured into this would be sad.

Anyway, two of them are used for growing Shine Muscat grapes, and the remaining one was just expanded to grow various new varieties.

In other words.

This year's grape harvest is determined by two 1,650-square-meter smart greenhouses.

1,650 × 2 = 3,300 square meters.

3,300 square meters.

So about 10,000 bunches of grapes come from this... right.

"It's done! Everyone take a break!"

"I-is it finished?"

"Ahhhhh!"

"We'll live!"

30 free laborers...! What would normally take days is somehow solved in half a day when you throw in enough manpower...!

We've successfully harvested 10,000 bunches of grapes!

Good. How to deal with those...

Let's think about that later.

There's no answer right now. Even if all 33 people here ate one bunch per day, it would take 1 year and 8 months to eat them all.

Whether to dry them into raisins or whatever, it's not something to think about now.

What we need to think about now is...

Food to eat right away!

Thinking this, I turned my eyes toward the cold storage where the Shine Muscat grapes were piled up.

Then near there... I saw potato sacks.

Those dozens of potatoes will be our food from now on.

No choice. We're not going to grow rice here anyway, but our house's rice is so cleanly polished that planting it would only produce dirt. There are other crops like tomatoes and cabbage in the vegetable garden, but not enough to be staple food.

'Come on, remember, remember what Mr. Shoji next door who grew potatoes said...!'

I took out my notebook and frantically wrote down everything that came to mind. Even seemingly trivial matters are knowledge gained through decades, no, centuries of trial and error.

A single problem can multiply or reduce future potato yields several times over.

"Light sprouting, then cutting with sterilized knife, curing... got it. This should be fine."

Fortunately, the precious knowledge passed down from Mr. Shoji, weekend farming, and farming YouTube channels still remained in my head.

Wow, thank you, Mr. Shoji.

I'll build you a statue later with a name like 'Saint of Potatoes' or something.

Getting unnecessarily excited, I hauled several dozen-kilogram potato sacks to where the English settlers were. Seeing me sweating profusely, Eleanor, who was moving lumber, got startled and helped carry the sacks.

"No, why are you working so hard to bring these? Are you alright?"

"...I'm fine."

Thanks to that mysticism thing, I can't even scratch when mosquito bites itch in front of these people. I wiped the sweat from my face lightly and gave Eleanor a thank you with another mysterious smile.

After struggling like that to reach the edge of the settlers' village, we collapsed with our legs giving out.

"Ugh... wh-what is this? It looks like a monster."

And only then checking the contents, Eleanor wrinkles her expression. Even I, thinking 'it's not that monstrous,' looked inside the sack and... uh... similarly frowned.

The potatoes with long sprouts from neglect did look surprisingly similar to tentacle monsters, I had to admit.

Still, I quickly picked up a potato with slightly fewer sprouts and held it out to Eleanor, who unconsciously flinched before leaning in closer at my gesture.

"Look. It's a potato."

"Po... tato?"

Huh? They don't know yet?

It's been almost 100 years since Columbus reached America, yet they still don't know about potatoes?

"Is it... a clump of dirt? Or animal droppings? Is it firewood?"

"...It's food."

"..."

No.

I'm not going to let that 'This... thing? We eat... it?' expression slide.

Forcing myself to shrug, I took out a boiled potato from my pocket that I'd prepared at home and took a bite.

Then, trying my best to maintain a nonchalant expression, I pulled out another potato and held it out. Eleanor, who had been suspicious, put it in her mouth and her expression softened.

"It tastes... decent?"

"This will be our bread from now on. It'll grow better than wheat here."

"Is this food?"

"Yes."

Only then showing surprise at my words, Eleanor examined the dirt-covered potato with curiosity.

"Then how do we eat these sprouts..."

"Ah, don't eat those. They're poisonous."

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"..."

"Don't eat the leaves and stems either. Only this tuber part is edible."

Though she made an even more bizarre expression hearing that, it couldn't be helped. Better than hiding it and mass-producing poisoning victims later.

Anyway, they looked unsightly, and for future farming, we needed to cut off the bad sprouts leaving only a little.

I took out my MacGyver knife and quickly trimmed the long sprouts, while Eleanor watching from the side helped.

"How long should we leave the sprouts?"

"About 1 centimeter is enough."

"...Pardon?"

"Oh, ah, like... a thumbnail length? Half a thumbnail? About that?"

"You mean between 2 lines and 1 barleycorn, or about 0.5 digits?"

"Ah... what?"

"I asked if it's between 2 lines and 1 barleycorn, or about 0.5 digits."

...What alien language is this now.

"Um, how many inches is that?"

"4 lines make 1 barleycorn. And 3 barleycorns make 1 inch."

"I see. Now I understand..."

"And 1 digit is 3/4 inch."

"..."

"So 2 lines to 1 barleycorn..."

"Just cut them about this much."

"...Yes."

Soon other settlers watching us came over one by one to help, and thanks to that, the work of cutting back the sprouts finished earlier than expected.

Originally we needed a process called "light sprouting" where you expose them to indirect sunlight in bright shade to grow short sprouts, but we had to do this because the sprouts grew long without that process.

...Right. Originally I didn't expect to get transported 400 years back and end up in this mess.

Holding back a sigh that was about to burst out, I called the villagers.

"Now, everyone bring the knives you're holding. There's something we need to do first."

Simply put, potato farming is the process of cutting sprouted potatoes into pieces, burying them, and letting those sprouts grow.

During that process, the tuber potato grows, and you dig it up to eat after about 100 days.

However, if you just cut potatoes with a knife and plant them, the wounded potatoes can rot from various bacteria, so the knives must be sterilized with bleach water.

I dipped the knives the settlers brought in bleach water diluted 500:1, then handed them back. Then I started teaching them potato farming methods one by one.

"Here, cut into quarters centered on the crown part where the most sprouts have grown. Then bring them to me.

But if there are smaller potatoes, you don't need to cut them into quarters. For example, this is about 30 to 40 grams... no wait, how much is this?"

"Did you say 30 drams?"

"No. Grams, no, how much is a dram? Eleanor? Could you explain?"

"1 ounce is 16 drams."

"Ah, I see."

"But sometimes 1 ounce is 8 drams, like when measuring medicines..."

"..."

"Anyway, 1 ounce is 16 drams, and 1 pound is 16 ounces and 7,000 drains."

"..."

I closed my eyes feeling a familiar kind of terrible feeling.

Ah, this is that thing.

How much is 1 kin? For meat it's 600 grams but sometimes 500 grams, for fruit it's 375 grams, for medicine it's 40 ryō per kin and 1 ryō is 4 monme and 1 monme is about 3.8 grams so 1 kin of medicine is about... ah, forgot. These days red pepper powder volume is reduced so 1 kin comes in 540g, and wild ginseng being precious medicine counts as 1 kin at 300g...

That familiar terrible taste.

I gently closed my eyes and thought.

Ah, base-3 and base-4, it sounds horrible just hearing it. Do these British people actually have 12 fingers?

Dreaming of the metric system that would appear like a superhero on a white horse someday to destroy such unit systems, I kept my mouth shut.

"Anyway, yes. Cut them slightly heavier than 1 ounce per piece."

"Understood."

"And bring them when you're done cutting."

So we gathered the potatoes after cutting back their sprouts to "a length between 2 lines and 1 barleycorn" and cutting them into pieces of "roughly between 1 ounce and 22 drams."

So can we plant these cut potatoes now?

No.

There are several reasons why we cut potatoes into pieces instead of planting them whole.

One is to use seed potatoes efficiently.

If you cut one potato into three or four pieces to plant, you can gain that much more benefit.

Another is that giving shock and stress to the potato seed makes the sprouts grow a bit faster.

There are various other reasons, but those are the two main ones. In other words, cutting potatoes can be much more efficient in terms of time and area.

However, potatoes are vulnerable to pests and diseases. Earlier we sterilized the knives in bleach water when cutting potatoes due to concerns about virus infection, but planting them in the ground just like this? That means there's a higher chance the potatoes will rot.

Therefore, we need to go through a curing process where we leave them in a well-ventilated place for 4-5 days to let the cut surfaces heal naturally to prevent pests and diseases.

After curing the potatoes in a well-ventilated shade like that, we plant them in appropriately raised ridges.

"How wide should the furrows be? How many links or feet..."

"Make them 'this much' apart."

"How much is that exactly..."

"About 'this much.'"

"Then what about the spacing between potatoes..."

"Space them about 'that much' apart."

Ha, hahaha, you primitive pre-modern people. I've finally 'achieved enlightenment.'

So normally you just say 'this much, that much, about this much' - that's why the unit system was so terrible. I suffered unnecessarily.

My weak self who lived in the modern world where even screws are standardized to millimeters was wrong.

Anyway, usually fall potatoes are planted about 5 centimeters shallower, but that's also because of Japan's terrible unique rainy season, so ignoring that and planting them about 10 centimeters deep like spring potatoes is fine.

Now if we just wait about 100 days to harvest, our food worries are over. Since we're not selling them anywhere anyway, just occasionally spraying fertilizer and leaving them alone is enough.

...Well, now that's done.

With food and safety secured, I have no more worries.

Though it's sad to be suddenly separated from family and relatives and dropped 400 years in the past, if I can live a happy life here where my debts have disappeared...

"Ah, but what should we do with all those grapes?"

...Ah.

"...You shouldn't have brought that up."

"Pardon?"

Feeling tears suddenly wanting to come out, I looked at the sky for a moment.

The sky is... clear.

My grape farm that I poured my entire twenties into.

...with its 10,000 bunches of Shine Muscat.

Ha, what am I going to do with those?

Actually it's 5,900, but I wrote 6,000 to round it and make it easier to remember.