Fall is often the busiest time of year with only Spring coming close. The garden needs harvesting and preservation. Seeds need collecting and saving. The Harvest of the fields is in full swing. Like most grains, rice requires much in the way of processing to become edible and it requires more processing to be storeable for the long term. Woe be to those who slack in the process, lest all your work be for not and your food spoils and leads to starvation.

- Kuya Tio on Avoiding Horrible Homestead Happenings, Kuya Tio’s Guide to a Healthy and Happy Homestead.

The remainder of summer seemed to pass in a blur while I was still working my rear end off, practically every day. All the looming deadlines seemed to have been put on hold. I still had the routine of work, tending to the rice paddies for myself, Saito, and the village, as well as Militia training and continuing to try to insulate and clay over the walls of my house. The firewood pile grew, as did my pile of shaft material for arrows, no longer being fed by the Xiao household, I found myself in the town proper more often to pick up the various ingredients that I couldn't yet produce or trade with my neighbors for, which was great because honestly, it meant a lot of time spent with Kaori. We had a lot of fun picnics out by the river, walks along the rice paddies, and, in one scenario, getting caught in a downpour out by the forest shrine. We had been absolutely soaked through and couldn't do anything but laugh.

But summer was clearly coming to an end. The mornings were starting to have a bit of chill, and the leaves were changing from their vibrant green to the yellows, oranges, and reds of their fall colors. Again, the rush with its deadline of winter started pushing me to work harder. The fire pile got even larger, my second rice paddy became deforested, and the garden vegetables were ready to be processed, which brought me to my current scenario.

Yoko poured a mixture of hot water and vinegar into a jar stuffed with chunks of tomatoes while I was busy pulling out the tomatoes from their hot water bath and squeezing them in such a way that they just kind of slid out of the skins. I had no idea that if you cooked tomatoes, the skins would fall off. I had a butt load of tomatoes, and Yoko was taking her time to show me how to can them for the winter. Something I had not really considered beyond just stockpiling some rice, which, of course, was absolutely foolish. It honestly showed just how much of a city person I was. There was no way I could eat all the tomatoes as they were growing now, and that went for the other vegetables. I knew how to ferment cabbage, but a lot of the other stuff was beyond me.

Yoko picked up a jar and inspected it, glaring at the rim like it had done her dirty.

"Something wrong with the jar?" I asked because I had no idea why she was so intent on it.

"Huh? Oh, no. Just wondering how they made them all the same," she said before placing the jar down and starting to slide cut-up tomatoes into it.

"Enchanted casts," I said.

"What?"

"They use a cast or a, uh, like a mold that's enchanted to help it cool down and not stick to the mold. They just dump the molten glass and squish it in there and cut off the leftovers, then it cools."

"Oh, that sounds expensive."

"Well, a little bit, but if the factory is running at full operation, that's what, three 10-hour shifts a day, six days a week, five weeks a month, ten months a year. I'm sure it adds up."

Yoko cocked an eyebrow at me and then said, "And what about these lids? Do they use an enchanted mold for them too?" She asked, sounding kind of skeptical while holding up one of the little flat lids.

“No, they roll out the metal into a giant sheet and then use a large press to cut out the little circles. The leftovers of the sheet go back into the furnace or forge or whatever; it gets recycled into the next sheet. As far as I know.” I pointed to the mechanism that held the lids in place. “That all basically gets extruded through a little hole like noodles via a large machine and then bent in the shape before it is treated to be more solid. I don't think there's any magic involved, but I could be wrong.”

Yoko filled the jar up with the mixture of water and vinegar, placed the metal latching mechanism on, followed by a flat lid waxed around the edges, and it all locked into place. This was set inside of a water bath canner, which essentially was just a pot with water in it set over the Kalan.

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"You know all these things, but not how to can tomatoes?" she said.

"Well, I've never had to can tomatoes."

Yoko shook her head, her beaded earrings swaying back and forth. “You know so much about things that are not important."

I opened my mouth to protest, but paused when I realized she might actually be right. I had no idea how to grow rice or can tomatoes or honestly, a whole lot of different things that I needed to know in order to survive. I knew a lot of terms and a lot of stuff that I never actually touched, such as how the glass jars were all made exactly the same. Shit. She's probably right.

“Well, I think you’ve got this now.” She said, drying off her hands and giving me a smile before heading home.

I did have it. It really wasn’t that hard.

The harvest season was a bit longer drawn out than I would have expected. We got together as a village in the same way we had done for planting. However, it was considerably easier as all the fields had been drained and the ground was dry. With serrated sickles in hand, we hand-cut and laid all the paddies far quicker than it had taken to plant them. Some people would come behind us, gather all the sheaths of rice together, and bind them into large bundles which would be carried off and stacked upside down in little rice towers where they would spend the next month drying. From there, the fields were seeded with winter rye grain, and that apparently marked the easy part of the harvest.

Once done in the village, the process was repeated for both the Xiao household and my own. My little pile of rice created a considerably smaller tower than even Saito's. But this tower was mine and after a whole summer soaking in water, some of those tree stumps fell to the ax quite well. I'd have far more space for planting next year. And that's without including the now cleared out upper paddy.

The actual harvest procedures didn't really start until the leaves started changing colors and the air became cool. Once again, we assembled as a village, and the rice bundles were brought down from their towers and placed in piles where we started somewhat of a friendly competition.

There were multiple ways to remove the rice kernels from the sheaths or thresh them. The most basic way was to lay them out over a mat and beat them. That was, of course, the low-tech way. The village essentially had large combs, and when the sheath was run through, it would strip the grains off and leave them in a pile. We worked in 15-minute intervals, seeing which person of the three combs could strip the most rice in the allotted time. It was kind of boring and monotonous, as well as physically taxing, and making the procedure a game really helped. There was a lot of cheering for the winners, and whoever won this little competition got to sit out on the next step as his or her rice grains were then brought to the hauling machine.

The hauling machine was essentially a couple of barrels built in such a way that the top spun and of course, that top spun by manpower.As I had lost the threshing competition, I was stuck spinning the hauler. It was some type of grinding mechanism that I didn't quite understand, but un-hulled rice went in the top, and hulled rice and chaff came out the bottom.

Once that was completed, the rice was then scooped up and put into a winnowing machine which, again, had to be spun by manpower. This essentially was a big fan. Rice was dropped in through the top. The big fan was spun, and the chaff blew out. The rice which pulled at the bottom and was now hulled and chaff-less, and was then brought to polishing. Polishing was again another mechanism. This one more boring than threshing without the competition going on. Essentially, the rice sat in a bucket, and a foot pump, seesaw type thing, pressed a squared off log into the bucket to polish the rice. This had to be done quite a lot and pretty much took forever.

Once the whole process was complete, I got a small break, and then it was back to separating the grains from the sheaths. Once again. It took an entire week, but it left us with a considerable amount of sacks of rice. The whole thing piled up in the village storage shed to be counted and gone through and eventually sent off to wherever the hell it went. That was essentially our taxes, and while people felt pretty good about the haul this year, it only meant that they were hoping they didn't have to pay as much.

Once the village farm work was done, it was off to the Xiao household and then to do my own. Saito didn't have the big comb thing. So, we were stuck threshing by beating the grains. This was a job performed in turn by myself, Wei Lin, and Saito, with the little boy Ren, taking up a couple of turns with the big stick. That was kind of adorable. Saito did have one of the barrel huller-type things though, which I guess made sense on account of Saito made barrels. Polishing was done much the same as it was in the village, except we had to assemble the machine. Once we finished with Saito's grain, I then got to move over to my grain, which I did completely by myself.

In the end, I managed to fill almost three full sacks of rice from my field. All in all, it wasn't a terrible haul. When you consider the fact that I got some from that upper field of Saito's, things were looking pretty good. Almost three sacks from my field was not quite enough to feed a single person for a year, but Saito’s upper field, which was originally going to be barren, produced nine full sacks. Half of that was mine to keep, which totaled up to about seven and a half sacks of finished, polished white rice. Pretty much exactly enough to feed two people for about a year. Every year would get better as my quarter Rai got closer to max capacity. I could also seed it with a winter grain and maybe get some wheat out of it, though Saito and Kuya Tio’s Guide argued against the idea for a few years. All in all. I think I made it. Only thing left to do is enjoy the Harvest Festival.