In mid-December, the construction teams that had completed the roofing and roofing began to disband, and each returned to the tribe to prepare for spring plowing and production.
The remaining projects that are still under construction are also seizing the time to be completed.
As for some buildings that have not started construction or have just completed planning, construction will be stopped directly.
The plan for the year begins with spring.
Whether all tribes can live and work in peace and contentment in the next year, and whether Pakistan can continue to be prosperous and stable, food is the core of stability.
Therefore, after entering late December, all projects in the Royal City were basically suspended.
On both sides of the Gonghuo Basin, starting from the beginning of December, the most lively burning time of the year has gradually entered. In the cold and dry winter, on the withered river beaches, you can see large areas of blazing flames and bees everywhere.
Farmland and deserted beaches burned into a black field.
Men, women, old and young from all tribes went into battle together and began a new round of farmland plowing and land reclamation war.
At present, what hinders spring plowing and production is still farm tools. Of course, what is even more urgent are the large livestock that plow the fields and pull carts.
Although the size of the horse herds of various tribes has been increasing in recent years, and each tribe has been actively hunting wild horses, and there have been some gains, but compared to the growing demand, it is still a drop in the bucket.
There are herds of wild horses in the upper reaches of the Gonghuo Basin and the Jicang River estuary. However, the area is too open to carry out large-scale roundups. Moreover, after several small-scale roundups by hunters frightened the wild horse herds, not only is the vigilance increasing,
The higher you go, the more active areas start to avoid humans, and they disperse before approaching. The method of relying on rounding up wild horses to quickly increase the number of horses is no longer appropriate.
Three years ago, Xu Chen began to advocate that tribes with horses take mares in heat to other tribes for breeding.
In the two years since he moved to Gonghuo Basin, Xu Chen has asked the tribes with horses to put their horses on the river beach to graze together as much as possible, in order to increase the mating opportunities and pregnancy success rates between different horse groups, although the effect is relatively small.
Obviously, but after all, the number is too small, and this natural reproduction rate is far unable to keep up with the needs of development.
The number of horses in the Ba tribe has grown to more than 70 through natural reproduction, but many of them are ponies born in the past three or four years and cannot yet be put into use on a large scale. The number of main adult horses has increased very little.
The same goes for other tribes with horses.
In addition, in recent years, there have been close exchanges between tribes, and several wars have led to considerable horse consumption and losses. More than a dozen of the three groups of wild horses captured at the beginning have been semi-disabled and can only be used for short distances.
Do not do any strenuous or heavy work.
Although wild donkeys can also plow fields and pull carts, and are even more hardworking, the number of wild donkeys is very small. The Ba people have accumulated it for several years, and now they only have five donkeys, and other tribes have almost none.
Originally, cattle should be the best livestock for farming, and some tribes have captured them several times. However, it is difficult to domesticate such large bison successfully. Even if artificial breeding can weaken the wildness, it cannot complete training such as pulling carts and plowing fields. In the end, they can only
When beef cattle are raised and slaughtered for meat.
Therefore, for a long time to come, plowing farmland will mainly rely on manpower, and primitive tools such as wooden hoes and stone hoes will still be the mainstream.
But fortunately, wooden plows, rakes and bronze tools have been continuously promoted and increased in recent years. Although the situation of slash-and-burn farming has not been completely eliminated, under the supervision and arrangement of Xu Chen and a group of witches, farming is still going on relatively smoothly.
Xu Chen did not expect that the farmland would be cultivated as intensively as before the crossing, but at least a certain degree of plowing should be ensured, and grass roots and thorns in the farmland should be removed as much as possible, so that the growth of crops would be stronger than that of weeds.
After all, the conditions and output are there. Extensive planting and thin harvesting will still be the main direction for a long time. Using a larger area of cultivation to fill the shortage of labor tools and population is the best choice.
Anyway, the Gonghuo Basin is nearly a hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, which is enough to reclaim hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and feed tens of thousands of people.
Xu Chen no longer needs to worry about the farming and production of the Ba people.
After the construction of the royal city was suspended, Xu Chen ran near the Cicha tribe's settlement almost every day.
At the beginning of spring, he discovered that the Cicha people personally guided the cultivation of several acres of paddy fields after sowing rice, and even had to lie down with a cold for more than ten days. However, the effort was worth it. The first batch of rice was harvested in the autumn, and the yield was much better than that of wheat and beans.
The yield per mu is about 60 kilograms, which is definitely a pleasant harvest.
Therefore, Xu Chen decided to further expand the rice planting area this year.
However, the conditions for growing rice are more stringent and complex than those of wheat and beans. Sufficient water must be ensured during the growth period, so farmland can only be cultivated in low-lying areas that are easy to irrigate.
In order to cultivate paddy fields, the Cicha tribe, the only people familiar with the growth habits and farming experience of rice, became the main force.
After several investigations, Xu Chen planned nearly 400 acres of paddy fields near the Cicha tribe in the west of the city, using streams and low-lying lakes.
The Cicha tribe was also exempted from the labor of building the royal city, but invested most of their manpower and time in building paddy fields after the autumn harvest.
Now that a few months have passed, the transformation has taken some shape.
Several irrigation ditches were excavated to connect several small lakes in low-lying areas, and then some paddy fields were built around the terrain. The fields were strewn with high and low embankments, which looked completely different from dry land.
The Gonghuo Basin is very large and looks flat, but in fact it is not flat. Instead, it has been formed into an undulating state by millions of years of erosion. Coupled with the division of streams and rivers, the low-lying parts of it begin to flood in summer.
The accumulated water forms large and small ponds and lakes, which become homes for wild birds.
Before crossing, this kind of riverbank terrain is very suitable for large-scale mechanical reclamation operations. It is very easy to transform it into a flat paddy field. You only need to bulldoze it and dig irrigation ditches, and you can build it into hundreds or even thousands of acres.
Large paddy field.
But now, we can only build small paddy fields according to the low and undulating terrain by manually digging with hoe after hoe.
But even so, as long as rice is successfully introduced, this food crop, which has a yield that is at least 50% higher than wheat beans and has a better taste, will gradually become the main crop in the Gonghuo Basin in the future.
Therefore, no matter how difficult it is to build these 400 acres of paddy fields, Xu Chen has no intention of giving up, and will even continue to invest a lot of manpower and material resources.
In order to build and reclaim the 400 acres of paddy fields, Xu Chenguang made hundreds of copper hoes. He also arranged for carpenters to make a large number of wooden shovels and wooden plows, and even specially arranged for the Ba people to bring more than ten horses.
Help with the work.
If it weren't for the serious shortage of rice seeds, Xu Chen would have planned to build more paddy fields.
In the beginning of spring, the Cicha tribe planted about five acres of paddy fields. At the end of July, while Xu Chen was busy designing murals for the palace and temples, he dedicated a day to harvesting rice. After drying, it was weighed and put into the warehouse. A total of 280
Seventeen pounds.
Then Xu Chen quickly asked someone to get some brown rice grown in a stone mortar and cooked a pot of rice.
This kind of rice is very different from the white rice of later generations. The color is messy, ranging from white, yellow, green and red. It looks like a hodgepodge of different varieties of rice. It has the same virtues as primitive corn, with all the bells and whistles and a pure and primitive barbaric atmosphere.
Although this kind of rice is not pretty, it smells sweet, has a soft texture with a slight crispness, is chewy and easy to swallow, and is a hundred times more delicious than the usual multi-grain wheat and bean rice.
There was no need for any dishes at all, so Xu Chen finished four bowls by himself, eating until he collapsed on a wicker chair and burped, unable to stand up.
And the group of witches, big and small, Gu Ju and other personal servants who were eating together still devoured the food like a wolf, eating a large bowl of rice cleanly, and even the last grain of rice in the pottery basin could not be found.
Said, and also collectively started a bowl licking mode that had not been seen in a long time.
This is one of the most delicious grains found so far. It tastes sweeter than pasta.
The advantage of pasta is that it is soft, but the bran is not screened out when eating. Therefore, the taste is not particularly good. It is just better than cooking porridge, but the processing is very time-consuming, and grinding is an extremely arduous task.
For manual work, if you want to feed a tribe or dozens of people in a family, several people will have to work for a whole day.
But not only is the yield of rice higher, shelling in the stone mortar is easier, and the taste is also better.
The only bad thing is that rice cultivation is very troublesome, several times more troublesome than wheat beans.
Not only does it have high demands on farmland, but daily management also requires more energy.
Because aquatic plants grow much faster than dryland weeds, and plowing and maintenance are more troublesome.
Judging from the planting situation this year, planting one acre of rice requires at least three times the manpower and time invested in dry land, especially during the farmland reclamation stage.
Two people can finish an acre of dry land in a day, but building an acre of paddy field requires at least three or four times more people, and it is more tiring.
But even so, after tasting the delicious rice, a group of witches fully supported Xu Chen's plan to expand rice planting.
And a group of Cicha tribe chiefs and leaders who migrated to the vicinity of the royal city were also excited and a little crazy after tasting the rice cooked in clay pots.
In previous years, they collected wild rice. Since they had no cooking tools, they would burn it in a fire, rub the outer shell off with their hands, and then eat it directly. Although the taste was crispy and crispy, it was not as good as after being shredded and shelled in the spring.
The cooked rice is delicious.
Now with pottery, cooking methods, farming technology, and such high yields, the Cicha tribe seemed to have discovered a new world all at once. Men, women, old and young all rolled up their sleeves and began to build like crazy according to Xu Chen's plan.
paddy fields.
Unfortunately, there are too few rice seeds at the moment.
The more than two hundred kilograms harvested were far from enough to plant, and certainly not enough to eat. Xu Chen only ate one meal during the harvest and then never ate again. It wasn't that he didn't want to eat, but he couldn't bear to eat.