North and South groceries

In June of this year, Luo Yong, who lived in Longxi, heard that in Chang'an City, someone had written a poem for "The Song of Bai Die".

In this way, the propaganda work for this cotton cloth is also in place. It seems that this batch of cotton produced in Changle County this year should be able to sell for a good price.

Right now it is the sixth month of the lunar calendar, and autumn is about to start in Longxi, and the cotton planting process will soon enter a more critical stage - topping.

The so-called topping is to pinch off the sharp points on the branches of cotton plants, in order to remove the dominance of the tops, limit the growth of branches, and transfer more plant nutrients to the buds and bolls as much as possible, so as to achieve high yield. Purpose.

This year is their first year of planting cotton in Changle County. Everyone has no experience. Fortunately, there are some books and materials on agricultural planting in Luoyong Space. There are many books about cotton planting, so he started to learn from the present Sell.

However, many kinds of fertilizers used by people of later generations in the process of planting cotton were not available in the seventh century AD, so they had to use organic fertilizers instead. Organic fertilizers are good, but they are not targeted.

When it was about to start the topping period, Luo Yong went to the cotton field every day. In addition to the large cotton field in the government office, some wealthy households in the countryside also planted a lot. Luo Yong recently They often walk between villages.

"I think the cotton in your family can start to be topped, so let's do it tomorrow." Luo Yong said after visiting a cotton field in a rich family's home that day.

"Why does the Xu family's cotton grow taller than my family's? His family doesn't beat mine?" The heart doesn't grow very long, he still knows this truth.

"The cotton in your family has been watered too much, and it has grown bad." Luo Yong said to him: "The cotton plants in Xu's family are growing well, strong and strong, so we can top them later, and pump them a few more in the next few days. Branches, if there are more branches, there will be more cotton bolls.”

"The cotton plants in your family are too weak and weak. If you try to pull out branches now, they will have fewer flowers and fruits in the future, and they will fall off easily. Although the branches will flourish, the harvest will not be good."

Luo Yong explained in detail, and the rich man felt reasonable after hearing it, but he just thought that the harvest of his cotton field was destined to be less than that of the Xu family, and he felt a little bit unwilling.

I also blame him for being too greedy. In order to make the cotton grow well, people always carry water to water it. Obviously, the officials in the county told them before that this new crop does not like water very much. He is really obsessed. For some reason, I always want to water them, but this time, I watered too much.

In the early morning of the second day, all the long-term and short-term laborers in the rich family went to the field to top the cotton.

This topping is not a heavy job, but it is quite labor-intensive. The rich family has sufficient staff and a large cotton field, and it takes more than a day to finish it. After the cotton planting is popularized in the future, every household Cotton planting, in this season, every household has to go to the field to get topping, which is also quite busy.

After the family started topping, the cotton in other places also entered the topping time, and the rich households who planted cotton immediately became busy, especially the public office and the tenant farmers. They leave early and return late, spending almost all day in the field.

There were also some people who were worried that pinching the core would hurt the crops, but because they had already received subsidies from the county, the so-called short-handedness of taking people, although they still had some doubts in their hearts, they still followed the county's instructions.

There was a rich man who stubbornly talked to Luo Yong, saying that he had planted the crops for decades and had never seen anyone do it.

Luo Yong saw that he was very repulsive to the matter of topping, and knew that many other people also had such thoughts in their hearts, so he said to him: "If you don't want to keep an acre of land this year, you won't be able to harvest it until the harvest is over." When the time comes, we will compare one or two to see whether the cotton field with topping has a better harvest, or the cotton field without topping has a better harvest."

Seeing that Luo Yong had also made a concession, the man agreed to Luo Yong's proposal, although he was still a little reluctant, leaving one acre of cotton field untouched, and the rest would be harvested.

The reason why Luo Yong did this is also to dispel the doubts in the hearts of farmers, so that next year's cotton planting work can be carried out smoothly.

Shortly after the topping, there was another topdressing, and then everyone watched the buds grow one by one on the cotton branches, and the cotton bolls were picked up one by one, and finally a snow-white velvet flower bloomed.

Changle people also call this kind of flower Baidiehua. As people from Changle County, they know very well that the "Song of Baidie" was written by the county magistrate looking for someone, and it is just a fictional story, so here In Changle County, boys and girls are not as enthusiastic about the story of Baidie City as they are in other places.

But even if they know it is a fictional story, people still yearn for the Baidie City in that story, and the love story that happened in Baidie City, especially when the patches of Baidie flowers when in bloom.

During the cotton harvest season, men, women and children wear bags sewn from old clothes and rags to pick cotton in the field, and the county officials will buy cotton on the ground, cotton with seeds, and it costs two and a half pennies a catty.

Although the cotton is quite light, and the yield of this era's varieties is not high, but the price is very good, two and a half cents a catty, if one mu of land can produce more than a hundred catties, it can be sold for more than two hundred cents, this is a kind of It is difficult for other crops to achieve income levels.

While the officials were buying cotton in the fields, some people drove the ox carts to transport the collected cotton back to the city.

Since they started to repair the cement road here at the end of last winter, they have issued corvee several times in succession. Now, a long section of the main road outside Changle County has been refurbished into a concrete road, and vehicles are driven and transported on this cement road. , it is much smoother and more comfortable than the gravel road, and it also saves animal power.

The cotton collected from the field was finally sent to Luo Erniang's cashmere workshop for processing. In a certain room in this cashmere workshop, the female workers were whirringly turning the cotton gin.

As early as when Luo Yong bought cotton and cotton seeds from those big cannibals, he had already ordered his disciples to start building cotton gins. The first cotton gin was produced as early as the beginning of this spring. It has been built and put into use, but it is not known to outsiders.

This year, Changle County will first rely on the cotton to earn some money. In the coming year, when cotton planting is promoted on a large scale in Longxi, these disciples of Luo Yong can start selling cotton gins.

There is now a machinery workshop in their county, led by Hengzhi, and jointly operated by several other disciples. In addition, they also have a group of skilled artists under their hands.

Among these artists, some were brought from Chang'an City at the beginning, some were recruited from Changle County, and some were even newly cultivated in the past two years. Craftsmanship sometimes requires talent. With those who are talented and willing to work hard, they will teach quickly.

Now in their machinery workshop, they have already stockpiled a lot of cotton gins, several models, large and small, and their prices have been set, and they are waiting to sell them for money next year.

Luo Yong asked them to make as many as possible, and if they didn't have enough money, just tell him, and he came forward to find someone to borrow money.Of course, after these cotton gins were sold, Luo also used a share of the money earned. After all, he provided the drawings and invested a lot of money.

Not only the cashmere workshop, but also Luo Yong's income from the needle workshop, and the needle workshop that they co-founded with Taiyuan Guo this year. Although Luo Yong's disciples came forward, the income from this is actually There is also a copy for Luo.

This time, Luo Yong met many merchants from Hedong in Chang'an City. After their cooperation with the Guo family got on the right track, there will be many needle workshops opened in Hedong Road one after another.

Luo's disciples and the craftsmen under them, the needle-making technology they mastered should be the most sophisticated in this era, and they can also create some needle-making equipment, which can save manpower to a considerable extent , This is something that other people can't learn for a while.

The cotton gin being used in the cashmere workshop this time was invented by an American named Eli Whitney in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Cotton gins were divided into leather roller gins and sawtooth cotton gins in later generations. The one they are using now is the sawtooth cotton gin, because the cotton seeds of grass cotton are extremely difficult to remove, and it is difficult to use ordinary stick pressing methods. The cottonseed is removed, so it must be serrated.

The design of this cotton gin is very ingenious. Just put the cotton into the cotton hopper, shake the handle, and the cotton wool and cottonseed can be separated during the operation of the machine.

I heard that in Dashi Country, the girls peeled the cotton seeds by hand, worked hard for a whole day, and the income was only a handful of cotton.Now these women workers in Lishi County turn the cotton gin and can separate a bucket of cotton wool in a short time.

This is the convenience brought by machinery to production, and then it will gradually change people's lives in this day-to-day production, and eventually change the world.