The news that Mr. Shen could sell leaves on credit spread throughout the village. Ice@Fire! Chinese It is said that this time it was Mr. Zhao, the boss of Shen Da. No matter how much the loan is, it will cost one penny per load, and the monthly interest will be one penny. Just like borrowing rice, you can just use the cocoons as price to repay after you spin the cocoons.
"This is simply a good deed!" Duo Duo Niang's man was beaming, as if he had taken advantage of the sky. "Now the price of leaf has soared! In the morning market today, the leaf store in town sold four yuan of silver per load! I heard from the shopkeeper. , it will rise to five yuan in a few days!”
Shen Kaibao felt anxious after hearing this. Five cents of silver a load! This is going to kill him. Even a few days ago, three qian per load was too much for him to bear.
Everyone Shen's conditions can indeed be regarded as doing good deeds. Even if Mr. Cao is willing to borrow now, he still has to pay an interest of two and a half or three cents, and then he can buy leaves according to this market price - he has calculated over and over again, this season of silkworms is like raising silkworms for others.
Everyone Shen only needs one penny per load and only one penny in monthly interest. It is indeed a good deed.
At this moment, he finally put aside all the grudges in his heart, and urged Daqing and Sanqing to make sure they were on good terms and go to Shen's house to borrow money.
A long queue has already formed in front of the Shen family's door - it is said that the leaves are on credit, but the actual leaves are not at the Shen family's door. Mulberry leaves are a very short-lived commodity. It is difficult to preserve the mulberry leaves picked in the morning and sell them the next day, so the leaf trade is all on the same day. There is absolutely no stocking up in advance.
Those who buy cutting leaves trade at Yehang, and then the buyers go to the mulberry garden to pick up the goods. Zhao Yingong also handled the loan of leaves this time in the same way. Shen and his family were just a place to set up a written note. After setting up the written note, they were given a pair of cards and went to the mulberry garden to get the leaves with the right cards.
In ancient society, road conditions were poor and people's range of activities was limited. Therefore, Zhao Yingong's operation must accurately estimate the approximate output of mulberry gardens and the scope of each village that can be radiated. The former is not a big problem. The owners of the mulberry fields probably know how many crops their mulberry fields can harvest during the entire spring silkworm season. The latter requires a fairly accurate estimate. In the Jiangnan water towns, farmers rely on boats to transport agricultural products, go to towns, and enter cities. Spring is the busy time for farming. The strong labor force cannot spend much time on the sailing boats. Therefore, the supply location must be within one day's round trip time by boat from the end user.
This year he does not plan to operate a big situation, it is just a test. On the one hand, he knew very little about the specific situation of the tip leaves, and on the other hand, he did not know how much resistance he would encounter in specific operations. Therefore, whether he asked Shen Dawang and Siniang to return to the village to set up a cooperative or Shaoye, it only operated on a very small scale.
Including Jixian Village where Shen Da is located, he only carried out the work of the United Society in three "central villages". These three villages can roughly cover the surrounding fourteen or five villages that mainly focus on sericulture. A total of more than 600 households. The quantity is not large. The number of cocoons obtained through microlending will also be very limited. But this is just a "boilerplate". He has full confidence that as long as the implementation plan goes smoothly this year, the surrounding sericulture households will see it. In the second year, they will actively participate in "cooperation" matters, and it will naturally fall into place by then.
The sericulture farmers don't know what Mr. Zhao is thinking. At the moment, their only idea is to obtain mulberry leaves as soon as possible - the silkworm babies that have already emerged from sleep are at the critical moment of spinning silk and forming cocoons. If the mulberry leaves are not available at this time, it will take more than a month. All the hard work and expense were in vain.
After Shen Kaibao signed the receipt, he took the pair of cards and immediately set off with Daqing to get the mulberry leaves. That night they returned with the boat loaded with forty loads of leaves.
Before the boat entered the village, Daqing's son was already looking at the village entrance and saw his grandfather and father returning. He ran home without hesitation, shouting "We're back!" as he ran.
It turns out that the silkworms in Shen Kaibao's family have been dead for more than half an hour. This is a matter of life and death. Shen Kaibao, who was on the boat, saw his grandson running away. He knew that the situation was urgent, and he didn't care that he was so hungry that his chest was touching his back. . He quickly stood up and helped Daqing rock the boat desperately. The boat was shaking so hard that it almost touched the water.
The boat darted through the river like an arrow, almost hitting several moored boats, and rushed all the way to the river dock at home. I saw everyone in my family standing at the river dock and looking around. Shen Kaibao became more and more impatient and urged: "Shake it quickly!"
The father and son went out in the morning, rocked the boat for a day, and only ate one meal. Their legs were so tired that their hands were so weak, and their bodies were so weak that they were panicking. However, they knew that this would definitely kill the silkworm babies. If they couldn't get rid of them in time, When the leaves are spread on the ground, all the previous efforts have been wasted and everything is lost.
When the boat arrived at the river pier, Sanqing had already jumped on board before the boat could stop, picked up a basket of mulberry leaves and carried it to the shore. As soon as his feet stepped onto the stone steps, several pairs of hands came to pick him up and carry them together. Send it home. Daqing saw that his son was also inside, and he rushed to help. The small basket was heavy, and he immediately fell over and rolled away. I couldn't help but feel distressed. He quickly picked up a basket of mulberry leaves and went ashore.
Shen Kaibao urged: "Hurry! Hurry!" Regardless of his old age and frailty, he also helped move the mulberry leaves.
Those fat and white "silkworm babies" have been hungry for a long time. They all pointed out their little mouths and swayed left and right. Shen Kaibao looked sad. As soon as the leaves were spread, the silkworm room was filled with rustling noises, and it was hard to hear what people were saying. After a while, those "groups" all turned white again. So I spread a thick layer of leaves.
People are so busy just "hanging ye" that they can't breathe. But this is the final hurdle. With enough mulberry leaves, as long as it lasts two more days, the spring silkworms can go up the mountain. People squeezed out the remaining energy and worked hard.
Dudoniang didn’t know how busy her family was now, but when her man came to buy leaves a few days ago, he said that the silkworm flowers were very good and always looked like 70 to 80%. This made her feel a little relieved. She has been doing this for more than a month. If you go out during the "busy month", you can get more than one tael of silver. If the silkworm flowers are good, the family will have hope this year.
Between four and five sleeps, it is the most difficult time to raise silkworms, and everyone Shen's silkworm raising work is also extremely stressful. The Shen family has a lot of silkworm foil, and they put leaves on it every day. The workload of clearing silkworm silt is very heavy. The silkworm ladies work day and night, and can only sleep for one or two hours a day. They usually take naps against the wall in the nearby lower room. , get up again after a while and go to the leaves for inspection.
Wang Siniang and Li Zheng patrolled day and night, especially Wang Siniang, who was even more energetic. Because she knows that this time the master asked her to raise silkworms in the village is an "important matter". If she can handle it well, it goes without saying that she will be the "in charge" of the villa in the future. If she fails, she can only be the "head" Yes.
Seeing that the silkworms had entered the fifth age and began to eat less mulberry, both Wang Siniang and Li Zheng knew that they were about to start forming cocoons. The traditional clustering method often uses increasing temperature to cluster silkworms to form cocoons. However, due to the different maturation timings of silkworms, urging clustering together will often cause some silkworms to be overripe and some to be immature. If the cocoons are put on too early, there will be more silkworms that will not form cocoons, less silk, and the color of the cocoons is unclean; if they are put on too late, they will crawl around on the cocoons and lose two pieces of silk, and they will be eager to form cocoons after being put on the cocoons, and there will be too many bad cocoons.
Therefore, the batch clustering method is used here, which has a larger workload but a higher cocoon collection rate. Li Zheng first taught the silkworm ladies how to distinguish between ripening silkworms and suitable ripening silkworms. Regular inspections are carried out every day, and the ripe silkworms are transferred from the large silkworm foil to the small silkworm foil, and then moved into a special clustering room, and clustered at a density of 500 silkworms per square meter.
This is the first time Duo Duo Niang has seen such a clustering method. No shed or straw clusters are used. Square grids are made with thick paper, and one by one they are hung directly on the cooked silkworms. This is Utilize the habit of letting mature silkworms crawl upwards, allowing them to automatically climb up clusters and form cocoons.
In the upper room, there are still earth dragon fires and water basins, as well as strange glass pipes and glass bubbles. Bamboo blinds are hung on the windows here, making the light coming in soft and dark - bright light is the most avoidable when cocooning.
In the early stages of clustering, mature silkworms have to excrete feces and urine before spinning silk and cocoons, so the humidity in the cluster room is very high. Monitor the humidity. Once the humidity is higher than 75%, the doors and windows must be opened for ventilation and moisture removal. The room temperature is preferably 25°C. If it is lower than 22°C, it must be heated. Too high or too low temperature, too high or too low humidity, all have an impact on the cocooning rate and cocoon quality, so very precise control is required.
According to the method taught by Li Zheng, Duo Duo Niang and other silkworm raising ladies pick out ripe silkworms and send them to the clusters every day. The silkworm foils that are clustered every day are marked. At the same time, they also have to clear away the dead silkworms in the clusters and catch the uncocooned swimming silkworms and put them into separate clusters.
It took Li Zheng five or six days after the clustering to start picking cocoons. If harvested too early, the cocoons may be damaged and contaminated before pupation occurs; if harvested too late, the pupae may turn into moths, which may also affect the quality of the cocoons. When picking cocoons, collect them in batches according to the date of clustering. The plucked silkworm cocoons are spread thinly on the silkworm plaque without squeezing each other. The upper and lower cocoons should be placed separately. Those with a relatively solid, white, and even cocoon shape are called upper cocoons; cocoons with dead cages, yellow spots, wood marks, pierced heads, thin skin, deformities, and fly larvae are called lower cocoons. The double palace cocoon is placed separately.
This practice of clustering and harvesting every day makes it difficult for Duoduoniang to estimate the quality of Shen's silkworm flowers. But every time I go to collect silkworm cocoons, most of the white-flowered cocoons in the square clusters are high-quality silkworm cocoons, and it is rare to see dead silkworms without cocoons. This Guangdong species not only has a larger cocoon than the local species, but also has a thick silk layer and a strong cocoon body. The threads are also very clear. Wang Siniang has been raising silkworms for decades and has never seen such good cocoons! Even the best Huzhou silk cocoon she had ever seen couldn't compare.
When taking out the snow-white and strong cocoons from the square clusters, Duoduoniang always feels an inexplicable feeling of joy in her heart - although the cocoons are not hers, the results of more than a month of careful care are still outstanding. It made her feel the joy of the harvest and made her feel happy from the bottom of her heart.
