Chapter 213: Harvest Season on the Highlands

By late August the peanut leaves had turned yellow. The lower leaves began to fall, a sure sign it was time for the harvest.

Even though Xia Qing had a rotary tiller with a harvester attachment in her garage, she still preferred to bring a basket, a washbasin, a big water bucket and her shovel down to the fields to dig up peanuts by hand.

The peanut terrace was up on the highland, and there were only about two hundred plants. Plus, the green-glow peanuts were still aggressive. In this situation, a simple shovel worked better than a machine.

Xia Qing first loosened the soil around a peanut’s roots with her shovel then grabbed the vine and gave it a tug. With a quick shake, the cluster of khaki peanut pods, which had grown for five months, finally emerged from the earth, dangling beneath the plant.

“One, two, three… hmm.” Counting as she went, Xia Qing realized two pods had come loose from their pegs. She dug through the soil to find them then picked up again, “Six, seven, eight… twenty-five!”

One plant had actually grown sixteen mature peanut pods, six lighter-colored tender ones and three tiny undeveloped pods—more than her farming books even claimed possible.

A bumper harvest, truly a bumper harvest!

Xia Qing stripped off the pods, dropping the mature ones in one basket and the tender or tiny ones in another. She set aside the vines and moved on to the next plant.

Once she’d finished the 170 yellowlight peanut plants, Xia Qing turned with her shovel toward the scattered, bug-eating green-glow peanuts growing farther in the field.

All thirty-five of these plants were tough nuts to crack. Xia Qing didn’t fear the leaf-vein spines—but she did worry if she made the vines too mad, they’d launch a wild attack and shred her precious peanuts to pieces.

She’d already asked Luo Pei for advice about harvesting these green-glow peanuts.

If you didn’t need seeds for replanting, you could simply burn the plants and collect the peanuts. But if you needed to save seeds, you had to chop off everything above ground, then dig out the roots quickly and dunk them into high-concentration salt water.

Once the saltwater killed the roots, you picked off the peanut pods and rinsed them clean.

It was time to test strength and speed.

Xia Qing poured most of a basin of purified water into a large washbasin, tossing in a generous handful of coarse salt. She prepared a second basin of clear water just to rinse. Then she tossed a bug to the peanut plant as a distraction.

While the peanut was busy with its snack, Xia Qing swung the knife down in her right hand and, with a sharp crack, chopped off the vine—tougher than most tree branches.

The chopped upper stem and leaves quickly lost their life, drooping and dropping the bug. Right as the root unleashed its power and thick, root-like leaf spines pushed out from the cut, Xia Qing used her big shovel to pry the root free, then used custom long-handled tongs to grab the root, shook off the dirt and tossed it straight into the salty basin.

At first, aggressive leaf-vein spines beat against the iron basin with loud metallic clangs. But after a dozen seconds or so, they went still.

Xia Qing quickly plucked off the peanut pods, tossed them into a bucket of clean water to rinse off the salt, then put them in her basket.

Only then did she dig up the pods that had fallen into the soil. With the dangerous root system and vines dealt with, there was no threat left as she searched the dirt for peanuts.

After harvesting the first green-glow plant, Xia Qing counted up—twenty-six pods, all plump and full. Bug-fed peanuts really lived up to their name.

Sharing her excitement, Xia Qing told her companions, “Look at that—these things are huge!”

Boss Sheep and the Sick Wolf had no interest in the peanuts Xia Qing was holding. Their eyes were glued on the peanut roots soaking in the basin.

Xia Qing fished the dead peanut root out of the saltwater, sealed it in a vacuum bag to keep it from hitting dirt and coming back to life, then began on the next plant.

With all thirty-five green-glow plants harvested, she’d collected 875 pods in total. Most pods held two kernels, a few had three or just one. Altogether, Xia Qing counted 1,650 green-glow peanuts.

She planned to try a few herself, just for the taste, and save the rest for seeds. Most of the yellowlight peanuts would become seeds too, with only a fraction set aside to eat.

Of course, that ‘fraction’ meant the basket of slightly tender peanuts.

Xia Qing peeled off her gloves and protective mask, wiped the sweat from her face, and took a long drink of water. There weren’t that many peanuts, but the whole process was still exhausting.

She shelled a tender peanut, tossed the two plump kernels into her mouth and fed the pod to Boss Sheep, then happily messaged Zhang San:

Third Brother, my peanuts are in! The skins are black, but the flavor’s decent. Want me to send you some yellowlight peanuts to boil up?

She told Zhang San because, last month, when he’d done surgery on the wolf with a spinal injury in the middle of the night, Xia Qing had promised that when her peanuts were ready, she’d give him half to fry and eat.

Now that the harvest was in, Xia Qing was set on keeping her word.

While waiting for Zhang San’s reply, Xia Qing habitually opened her tracking app—and was surprised to see the Evolved Squirrel hanging out just fifteen meters away.

Was the little thing here to watch her dig up peanuts?

Catching it from the corner of her eye, she soon spotted the tiny creature hiding in a tree, watching the peanut basket with big shiny black eyes.

Obviously, the Evolved Squirrel recognized these nuts.

A lightbulb went off in Xia Qing’s mind: what if all the mutant peanuts and soybeans in Territory Three were the squirrel’s doing?

Honestly, that seemed pretty likely.

First, the squirrel’s nest was up in a big pine tree in Area Three, which hadn’t been cleared out the previous winter—that’s why it never moved. Second, while Xia Qing didn’t know exactly how big a squirrel’s territory was, the terraces were close to its nest and should’ve belonged to it. Third, squirrels always stash away nuts for winter, burying them in different places so nobody could grab them all at once.

So the peanuts and soybeans on the hillside were probably leftovers from its hoard.

Xia Qing grabbed two peanut pods, stepped outside the greenhouse and set them on a rock, calling to the now-distant Evolved Squirrel, “Give it a try; they’re pretty good. If you like them, I’ll save you a few more.”

Right after setting down the peanuts, Zhang San called. “You mean the peanut skin is black? The outer shell or the thin skin around the kernel?”

Xia Qing replied, “The thin skin wrapped around the kernel.”

Zhang San fell silent for a few seconds. “Before the disaster, you never ate black-skinned peanuts?”

???

Xia Qing was thoroughly confused. “There were already black-skinned peanuts before the disaster?”

She’d been only fifteen when disaster struck, just going to school and after-school classes, never worrying about anything else. She honestly had no idea there were black peanuts.

Zhang San explained, “Black-skinned peanuts are also called selenium-rich peanuts. Our territory has selenium-rich soil, so having those before the disaster isn’t strange. How many did you get?”

Selenium-rich peanuts? Xia Qing’s eyes lit up. “Thirty-five green-glow plants, 170 yellowlight ones. I’m saving the green-glow for seed. Want to take half the yellowlight to try?”

Even though Zhang San was petty, he never took things for free. He wanted the selenium-rich peanuts, but he made an offer instead. “Two hundred green-glow, four hundred yellowlight. I’ll trade five jin of green-glow wheat seed for them.”