My domineering ex-husband is living off his wife in ancient times.

Chapter 137 Collecting Live Pigs

Cheng Ruoan didn't care about anything else and ran back to the courtyard to start harvesting wheat.

Because the courtyard land is only so big, there are only twenty plots in total, and Cheng Ruoan used one of them to plant bamboo.

The nineteen plots of land occupy only 29 square meters in the courtyard, but behind the villa, there are more than four acres of land all planted with wheat.

Cheng Ruoan quickly finished harvesting the wheat and piled it in the courtyard. While wiping her sweat and drinking water, she wondered how the wheat in the replicated wheat fields outside was harvested.

Are they just harvested and placed on the ridge of the field out of thin air?

Just thinking about this fantastical scene made Cheng Ruoan want to laugh.

"It would be great if we could install a camera." Cheng Ruoan closed her thermos and gathered the wheat in the yard.

We walked to the back of the villa to see the wheat field that had already been harvested.

The wheat was indeed neatly piled on the edge of the field. She tried to move it with her mind, but it was the same. Once she left the villa area, she couldn't control anything in the space with her mind.

They need to be manually moved to the villa's yard before they can be peeled and dried.

Cheng Ruoan pushed the cart alone, making several trips, and soon all the wheat from the fields outside was moved into the villa's yard.

She weighed all the wheat in the yard, and found that she had harvested about 8 jin (4 catties) of wheat.

So the amount of meat moved in from outside the yard was about 800 jin (400 catties).

To be honest, the ancient wheat varieties were far less productive than the improved varieties of later generations.

When Si Shaoheng ruined a batch of wheat, Cheng Ruoan handled the replanting process with great care.

She took the seeds out of the space again, put them outside to dry for two days, then soaked them in lime water before sowing them.

After planting, although the time flow was increased, Cheng Ruoan did not miss a single watering or fertilizing session when it was time to water or fertilize.

Although Cheng Ruoan hadn't run into Si Shaoheng these past two days, she would occasionally sneak in to water the plants.

The advantage of this courtyard land is that it won't attract pests or grow weeds.

In addition, the soil was Northeast black soil that she had bought online before, which is very fertile.

Despite such favorable growing conditions, the grain seeds that Si Shaoheng bought only produced such a small amount, which is truly disappointing.

Right now, the only way to increase the yield of the land in this space is to improve the seeds.

It is unrealistic to expect to increase production by developing more land plots.

If the white mist in the space continues to recede, Cheng Ruoan guesses that there will be extra land appearing, but that land will be unrelated to the courtyard land.

Cheng Ruoan specifically looked at the user manual for the courtyard land in the e-housekeeper. The courtyard land only has twenty plots and cannot be expanded.

Of these twenty plots, only the 4.5 mu (approximately 0.67 hectares) behind the courtyard corresponds to one of them.

Cheng Ruoan looked at the eight hundred catties of wheat and felt a little troubled.

Because the villa doesn't have modern processing machinery to handle these 800 jin of wheat!

Cheng Ruoan could only mentally move the wheat to a separate room and adjust the flow of time in the room to almost zero to prevent it from spoiling.

Then she started planting a second batch of wheat in the yard plot.

While planting, he also thought that the food produced in his own space could not be processed by himself and Si Shaoheng alone, so he had to find someone to help him process it.

But if she harvests 800 or 900 catties at a time, that's fine. If she plants and harvests every day, she can make more than 20,000 catties a month, which is 240 shi!

Whose land can yield 240 bushels of wheat a month?

“Not stockpiling grain is not an option, but not processing it into finished products that can be used directly as staple food is also not an option…” Cheng Ruoan began to worry.

After planting another round of wheat, Cheng Ruoan left a message for Si Shaoheng on her notebook in the living room, asking him to think of a solution.

During this time, Cheng Ruoan would occasionally go in to water and fertilize the plants, but she never encountered Si Shaoheng, and no new messages appeared in the notebook.

Cheng Ruoan was somewhat suspicious of what Si Shaoheng was busy with at the county school, and why he hadn't come into the space.

Isn't a study room supposed to be the best "study cheating device"?

But I only thought about it for a moment, since I was always busy with things at home.

With the help of Shiro and Lin, all the stored lard was turned into cloud-shaped ointment throughout the day.

Cheng Ruoan took out a small amount from it, intending to keep it in her spatial storage for future gifting.

The total number of cans that cooled down was 1,800, which were in the production workshop in the backyard.

During dinner that evening, she asked Shaoyang again about continuing to buy lard the next day.

“The lard in the surrounding villages and towns has all been sold out. If you need more, I’ll have to go to the next county to buy it.” Shao Yang said, glancing at Cheng Ruotong.

Cheng Ruotong chimed in, "When your brother-in-law and I went to the next county to collect milk, we came across a village with quite a few live pigs."

Because there were no butchers in that village and no sales channels, many pigs were kept alive and grew quite old.

"If you only ask for pork fat, they might not sell it. Would they take the whole pig?"

This question left Cheng Ruoan speechless, and she even stopped eating.

“Actually, it’s not impossible to extract lard from whole pigs, although it’s a bit more troublesome than rendering lard directly from pork fat…” Cheng Ruoan said while thinking.

In ancient times, pig farming techniques were rudimentary, and domestic pigs were often not as plump and strong as wild boars.

Cheng Ruoan turned to Shao Yang: "If it's a live pig, brother-in-law, do you think you can get a wild boar?"

Shaoyang: "I don't recommend using wild boar to render oil. Wild boar is several times more expensive than the pigs raised by villagers."

"Uh," Cheng Ruoan choked, "I had forgotten about that."

Throughout history, the wealthier people have always been, the more they have enjoyed eating wild game.

Moreover, for some reason, the technique of castrating pigs in the fictional dynasty of Da Xia was never very advanced, and the smell of domestic pigs was not much different from that of wild boars.

Wealthy families would naturally prefer wild boar meat over domestic pork.

Castration is a minor surgical procedure performed on pigs.

The practice of castrating pigs originally began in the Shang Dynasty, spread during the Western Han Dynasty, and became quite sophisticated by the Tang and Song Dynasties.

The timeline in which the Great Xia Dynasty exists begins after the Sui Dynasty, as is the original historical branch.

Originally, the Sui Dynasty was followed by the Tang Dynasty, but in the timeline of the Great Xia Dynasty, after the Sui Dynasty, there was a dynasty called Qian, which did not have the Tang Dynasty, nor the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.

We went directly from Guizhou to Daxia.

She and Si Shaoheng deduced that the Great Xia they were in was probably around the same time period as the Southern Song Dynasty in history.

But for some reason, the Xia dynasty lacked many things that the Song dynasty should have.

After thinking it over, Cheng Ruoan decided that she might need to look in the study in the space for books such as "Pig Raising Guide" and "Postpartum Care of Sows".

After all, no matter how you buy pork fat or whole pigs from outside, the cost is still lower than opening your own pig farm.

Given Zhao Dongjia and Guo Furen's ability to sell products, Cheng Ruoan felt that opening a pig farm to directly supply lard would be perfectly feasible.

But for now, we still need to go and collect the pigs from that village in the next county.

Cheng Ruoan, being overconfident, made some arrangements: "Tomorrow, I'll trouble you, brother-in-law, to go to that village to collect the pigs. Fourth brother, you can go along and lend a hand. Fourth sister-in-law, you can stay here and wait for news."

After saying that, he turned to look at Cheng Ruotong and said, "Big sister, once the pigs are brought back, I'll teach you another dish. Lean meat doesn't render much oil, so why not make it into a snack to enrich the variety of your pastry shop?"

Cheng Ruotong was overjoyed and readily agreed.

“Then I’ll go with your brother-in-law to help you collect the pigs tomorrow, since I don’t need to ship any goods tomorrow.”