However, the villagers did not understand this. [No pop-up novel website] In their opinion, it is natural for them to keep their own seeds. There are very few farmers who purchase silkworm seeds from outside.
At this time, another ship brought "cloth" to the Shen family. When unloading the ship, everyone found that there was a lot of cloth. The average family can only keep two or three cards, and even more than five or ten. If the silkworm flowers are good, a piece of silkworm seed cloth will cost almost ten stones of mulberry leaves to support it "up the mountain". This is a big risk for sericulture farmers who have no mulberry land or little mulberry land.
Although the size and shape of the "cloth" that Shen and his family unloaded from the ship were completely different from those used by everyone else, just looking at the quantity, one could tell that there were far more than those from ordinary farmers - there were dozens of pieces of cloth anyway.
The owner of Shen Da is really wealthy! How many mulberry leaves are needed to feed these "babies"? While everyone was speechless, they heard Duo Duoniang say again that these cloths were transported thousands of miles from Guangdong. They were said to be "Guangdong-grown" and were better than the Yuhang and Huzhou ones here. Didn't everyone agree with this? Great believer. Better than the local Yuhang silk, maybe; but better than the Huzhou silk, which is said to be the best in the world, that's a fantasy - who doesn't know that Huzhou's raw silk is the best in the world. The silks and satins used in the palace were all woven from Huzhou silk.
Although Wang Siniang also said that if you want to raise silkworms grown in Guangdong, you can borrow some silkworm seeds from her house and pay them back after harvesting the cocoons. However, most of the sericulture farmers in the village save their own seeds, so naturally they don't agree with this new thing. No one wanted any of Wang Siniang’s Guangdong seeds. After Shen Da heard about it, he felt relieved.
Since there were many women in Duoduo's family, there was no shortage of manpower, so she simply worked as a "busy month" in Wangsi's family, not caring about the wages, and just had enough to eat every day. The privilege of being able to bring back some cold meals when I got home made many people jealous. Daqing's daughter-in-law was even more angry and would scold her father-in-law from time to time.
Duoduoniang seems to be very proud of her job. After returning home every day, she will act as Wang Siniang's mouthpiece and brag about her family's preparations for the silkworm business. Therefore, everyone knows the various tricks of sericulture in Shen's family. For example, it doesn't matter that they recently painted the silkworm room with lime. They also closed the doors and windows tightly and burned the sulfur fumigation room in the silkworm room - it is said that this is called "disinfection".
This is not even a new trick. The latest trick is that the silkworm seeds from Wang Si's family have already begun to green as soon as they arrive, and the greening does not require manual labor, but only firepower.
In the process of raising silkworms, the work of greening is particularly important. The so-called greening involves artificially raising the temperature to allow silkworm eggs to hatch. Under natural conditions, silkworm eggs can hatch on their own after winter, but the temperature and humidity vary under natural conditions. Silkworms have different degrees of temperature sensitivity, uneven hatching, weak constitution, many sick and weak silkworms, few cocoons and poor quality. Therefore, China has long realized that it needs to use artificial heating to uniformly hatch silkworms.
Local silkworm breeding relies entirely on artificial greening. After Grain Rain. The "cloth" where the seeds are left gradually begins to show green color - this is a sign that the silkworm seeds are about to hatch. At this time, the work of promoting youth will begin.
The traditional method of artificial greening relies entirely on "hatching". This is the job of women in the countryside. They put cloth on the body and heat it, relying on the constant temperature of the human body to promote greening.
It is unheard of to use fire to promote greening. Shen Kaibao said privately to Daqing Sanqing: "Fire drives silkworms - not chickens or ducks. I have never heard of it in more than fifty years of life. Silkworms are such a delicate object. Take it. If you roast it with fire, won't it dry out the silkworm seeds alive?"
Even if ant silkworms can be hatched without drying, based on his many years of experience, in years when the rain is particularly sparse and dry before and after Grain Rain, the number of ant silkworms that can be hatched will be much less, and a large amount of "dried bud seeds" will be produced. ―Of course, it won’t work if it’s too humid. The silkworms that emerge will be puffy, poor in physical condition, and the quality of the cocoons will also be poor.
Shen Kaibao once again made a conclusion - he also said something similar when the Shen family borrowed money to buy Shaoye - "Shen and his wife love to toss. This time they will make trouble for themselves again."
"It's his business to do this," Daqing didn't care what happened to the Shen family. "It's just that if I raise five species this time, I'm afraid the eight percent of mulberry leaves at home won't be enough."
The Shen family's mulberry land that has been mortgaged can only produce less than ten stone leaves. A piece of silkworm seed costs about eleven or twelve stones of mulberry leaves. Five seeds will cost at least fifty or sixty mulberry leaves. The gap is too big, which means you will have to buy it from the leaf market when the time comes.
The largest amount of leaves is consumed in raising silkworms after the third sleep. At this time, the price of mulberry leaves skyrockets. A load of leaves can be sold for four or five taels of silver, and the average price is about 3 taels of silver. According to this market price, it would cost twelve taels of silver to open the Bao family on the mulberry leaves.
Twelve taels of silver is the annual expense of a middle-class family in the city. It is an extremely considerable amount for a family like Shen Kaibao. But if the silkworm flowers were still good in those days, one piece of cloth could harvest one stone cocoon, and the silk would be about ten kilograms, and five pieces of cloth would be fifty kilograms. In an ordinary year, one could earn thirty or forty taels of silver. Excluding taxes, debt principal and interest, and various expenses, we can still save about ten taels of silver. The income is several times that of simply farming.
"You must buy mulberry leaves..." Shen Kaibao said.
It was as if he hadn't said anything because Daqing asked where the money came from. The remaining money at home can't buy many mulberry leaves
"If it doesn't work, I can only borrow it from Mr. Cao." Shen Kaibao said helplessly what he didn't want to say.
"Master Cao may not be willing to-"
"Why are you saying these discouraging words?" Shen Kaibao finally got angry, "When the time comes, go and ask for help. The folks in the countryside will always be considerate of us farmers..." In fact, he himself was not very sure that Mr. Cao would borrow this opportunity. For the money, his land has long been mortgaged to Mr. Cao. Although there is income from harvesting silkworm cocoons, it is hard to say whether he will be willing to do so. Although the time to raise silkworms is not long, it is the same as farming. It is not unusual for a natural disaster to result in no harvest.
Daqing didn't argue anymore, but there was a disapproving expression on his face.
Shen Kaibao's family just passed by day by day amid doubts about the future. Fortunately, spring was busy with farming, and everyone was too busy to move around and had no time to think too much. Seeing that after the Grain Rain, the silkworms in each family began to turn green, and the women in each family began to urge them to turn green.
At this time of year, every household is closed to the public. No neighbors, relatives or friends come to visit. Even the menacing officials in the county government are missing. At night, a married woman will never sleep with her husband. Not only do they stay in different beds at this time, but the husband and wife sleep in separate rooms during the entire sericulture period - it is said that silkworms love cleanliness most, and there will be conflicts between husband and wife.
Duoduoniang was still busy at Wang Siniang's house, and Wang Siniang also wanted to win her over, so she asked her to move into her home to help, and promised her one tael of silver for a month of work. It just means that the silkworm babies cannot go home before they are in the cluster. Dudoniang happily agreed: she has two unmarried sisters-in-law in her family, and her eldest daughter is also in her teens and can help. There are many people in the family. Not least her.
Wang Si's family's sericulture was really an eye-opener for her: she had helped her family raise sericulture since she was a child, and it has been almost thirty years now, and she has never seen such a thing!
The room used to promote greening is large and bright, and the walls and ceiling are painted white. When accelerating greening, the requirements for light are very high. The light and dark must be orderly, that is, it cannot be always on or on all the time, otherwise the silkworm seeds will not hatch uniformly. So the windows are wide open. Convenient to let in enough light. At night, there are straw curtains to avoid being disturbed by natural light. There is a fire dragon on the wall of the incubation room - she only found out about this after asking Siniang Wang. During the incubation period, someone would light a fire outside the house regularly every day to gradually increase the room temperature.
Although there is a fire dragon, the house is not dry at all: a shallow copper basin is placed on the fire dragon mountain, and wet cloths are hung along the wall. One of Tadonna's main chores is to refill the copper basin with water and re-soak the dry wet cloth.
Hanging on the wall of the room is a glass object that is slightly longer than chopsticks. It has many horizontal lines carved on it, and there is a symbol every few lines. There is another red line in the glass tube. This red line is really strange. Sometimes it is long and sometimes short. In addition to this thing, there was another glassware, inlaid on a wooden board, also hung on the wall. There was also a ball of cotton-like stuff inside, and there was also a thread that moved by itself, pointing up and down at some of them. Symbols I don’t understand.
In Wang Siniang's house, there is a maid who will come to see these things every one or two hours, write something on the note, and then she will ask Duo Duo Niang to add water, soak the cloth or add firewood, and sometimes she will do the opposite: Remove the basin and remove the fire. Take the trouble.
Every morning, this maid would come to Jiqing City, carefully take away a few silkworm eggs, put them on paper, and take them to a small room in the backyard. An hour later, Dodoniang was busy doing this set of work according to her instructions. In the afternoon, she had to open the window for ventilation as instructed.
It's so mysterious. Tatana never knew what happened. In fact, the Jixian Village Sericulture Cooperative adopts the smooth-temperature method.
This maid is actually a student from Hangzhou Station who was trained by Li Yao'er, named Li Zheng. She comes to pick up the silkworm seeds at eight o'clock every morning. After shelling, she uses a microscope to observe the development of the embryos in the eggs. to adjust daily temperature and humidity.
Compared with silkworm farmers who allow silkworms to turn green on their own and then use artificial incubation, this greening method not only speeds up greening, but also enables neat hatching, a high hatching rate, and good physique and strong resistance of ant silkworms. Therefore, before the silkworm eggs in the whole village turned green, the silkworm eggs of Wang Si's mother's family had been moved from the greening room to the silkworm raising room, waiting for the final hatching.
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