Over the last two weeks, my gardens have grown quite well. I've now traded with most of the villagers for more crops and learned several things.
First, companion planting works for magical plants just as well as it does for their mundane variations. Second, the locals had no idea that magical plants tend to not be invasive and don't need to be potted when their mundane versions do.
Third, the villagers really had no idea they were growing magical plants as normal ones, they just thought they were rarer variants that tested better but were harder to grow. On all of the farms I went to, the one with the fewest amount of magical plants had a quarter of their crops being magical.
I did use a little bit of plant magics to help roots spread and plants grow, allowing me to fully fill in the gardens. That was mostly so I could fill in the garden plots, though. I may have also expanded them so that they're two hundred feet on each side instead of one hundred and fifty. Even then, they're pretty filled with plants.
The size increase was because… I don't know. They just felt too small even if I know most of the villagers have a smaller plot than that if they aren't raising animals beyond just chickens as well.Making sure both garden plots were filled in all the way was just because I didn't like how they looked when not full.
When not factoring in the magic used to let us fill things in, there really has been pretty pleasant growth. These berries definitely hold more mana than the bush this one came from did two weeks ago.
By a lot.
"Do you want one?" I look at Nolan, who's crouching beside me while intently staring at the berries.
There's desire in his mind and it's easy to know what it's directed at, considering his stare. He wasn't here until a few moments ago, so I'm guessing he got bored helping his dad and wanted to help me instead out of the hope for getting to eat berries.
The kid nods in response, and I pluck a berry and give it to him. He quickly chomps on it, satisfaction entering his mind.
"Come on," I say. "Let's pick these. Remember not to squeeze them."
Nolan nods, then starts carefully picking berries with me. We put them into a couple of baskets, and I carry both of them with us back to my house. Just as we reach the edge of the garden, we're joined by Dylan, who's carrying a large basket full of a form of magic sugar beet that has mana storage properties.
It will work for mana potions, though that's not what we're making today.
Dylan's outfit is a little bit different today than it was when we first started setting up the garden. While he still has the same pants he's had since we met, and he's still wearing his rite-of-passage necklace, he's also wearing a spatial pocket bracelet that he's borrowing for the chores and a pair of sturdy brown boots. Nolan has a matching pair of them as well, making him probably the only farmer kid in a hundred miles to have proper boots.
Kids outgrow footwear pretty fast, and most commoners can't afford to keep replacing them. I had an entire boar's hide to do something with and decided to make the kid some boots to match his dad's. He likes them enough that he has to get reminded to take them off when going inside.
Both of them are filling out nicely and look healthy rather than skinny. Nolan is a little on the toned side for a toddler, but not in the muscular form. He just runs around a lot and does his best to help with work, so he's built a little bit of muscle.
Dylan, on the other hand, has some decent definition now. He's not quite up to "I'm a farmer" level yet, but the muscles are pretty visible now and even his abs are showing a little. It's a good look for him and once he finishes rebuilding his meat and muscle, he'll definitely be high in the looks department.
The stamina levels for both father and son have increased a lot, too, and Nolan's become more and more energetic. He's also waking before his father more often than not now, too. Since we ended up not building their home yet, that results in me taking care of the tyke before breakfast.
Not that I'm complaining, Dylan can definitely use the rest and I'm already awake by then.
"I still ain't sure what we're making if it ain't potions," Dylan says, and I stop assessing his recovery progress. "And I ain't ever had beets with berries before, either."
"These aren't normal beets," I tell him. "I was honestly surprised to find them in the area."
"No, I get that," he says. "They're magic ones, right? With mana properties. I'm assuming that, since you wanted me to harvest them while you got berries."
"Well, that, too," I say. "They're a special variety, a sugar beet. They're high in sugar, and normal sugar beets are white rather than reddish-purple. I've usually only seen them in areas where they were cultivated or deliberately brought. It's possible someone a long time ago had them, or nature spirits randomly decided to make them, or they muted on their own from the mana in the soil… anyway, you can use them to make sugar, just like sugarcane. I've got some in the normal garden, too. Ones without magic traits.
"Anyway," I say. "After we extract the-yes?"
Dylan had a confused look on his face, and his mind was pretty full of it, too.
"What's sugarcane?"
"Oh, right," I say. "You don't have that around here. It's what they make sugar from – they refine it similar to how sap gets refined to turn into syrup. I'll be showing you how to do that… with a little magic thrown in to speed the process up."
We take everything into the cabin. The new cabin, not the old one, which has been torn down by this point. My full cabin is fifty feet on each side on the outside, but with a nine-by-nine extension on the front-right for the entrance, a front porch, and a back deck. Upon entering via the deck, we're in the dining room we set up, and I move over into the kitchen beside it.
Both of them were designed to have a lot of space for work, with the dining room being twenty feet by fifteen and the kitchen being twenty on each side. The last ten feet of width for the original size of the cabin is taken up by food storage rooms.
Though that actually extends further back, as I added in some expansions while we were building the cabin. Each expansion allows me to add in up to as much space as the exterior has, and I only added in one at the full size for now. That's given us room for my own room with its attached bathing and toilet rooms and closet, as well as several guest rooms, closets, and a non-personal bathing room along with a non-personal toilet room. I also have an alchemy room, a room for crafting other magic items, and a couple of storage rooms.
Overall, I'm quite happy with the house, and I think Nolan will be sad to leave once we build their cabin. The last two weeks have been mostly focused on us building the gardens. Dylan's also been teaching me a lot about how to take care of the plants. I don't mind the additional help in the gardens, either, as it gives me more time to do other things.
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So I'm not inclined to kick them out into their own home just yet. At least, not until I build some golems to take care of some of the tasks for me.
This isn't taking advantage of them, either, as they get to eat plenty of foods now rather than just potatoes and the occasional fish in return for the help. It's an exchange between us, and one that's fair.
As he likes to do when we come inside after working, Nolan nearly forgets to remove his boots. Once Dylan takes them off, the toddler charges to the living room and jumps onto the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, flopping onto his stomach to face the brick feature.
I didn't really need to include a fireplace and chimney for the home, but did anyway because I do like them. Enchantments ensure their smoke doesn't fill the house, so I don't have to worry about the smell seeping into everything.
Nolan likes to sit in front of it and watch the fire with the spirits, though there's no fire in there right now, just logs.
"Want to help us?" Dylan looks at Nolan. "I think we'll need to scrub the beets clean. Like we do with the potatoes."
Nolan thinks about it for a few moments, then looks at the fireplace, then back at his dad. He then gets up and joins us in the kitchen. He definitely heard that they're sweet, so he's probably hoping he'll get to try a bite of them if he helps us cook.
I pull three bins out of the supplies storage and set them on the ground. Each one is wooden and about two feet in diameter and a foot in depth, metal bands around their outsides keeping them held together. Nolan plops himself down at the center one so that one is in front of him, another to his left, and the last to his right.
As he does that, I conjure water to fill the three with and Dylan sets the basket down along with another, then hands his son the scrubbing brush. Nolan will scrub the beets in one bin, then in another, then in the third. We've determined this is the best way to get him to clean potatoes thoroughly.
As he starts on that, I pull out the rest of the items I'll need to make today's product. Dylan pulls the other two large baskets of beets out of the bracelet he's wearing, setting them down beside his son. I let him borrow a storage bracelet when carrying everything we're harvesting takes more than what we can carry with our hands alone, such as today. It makes things a lot easier if he doesn't need to make several trips or use a wagon.
Once a beet is scrubbed three times, Dylan dries it off and puts it in a basket on the counter. I take them from there and peel them, then cut off their tops. I leave only the blue insides of the beets, which go into a basket, and dump the shavings and tops into another.
Those will either be decomposed into fertilizer or given to one of the villagers to feed to their livestock.
"Alright," Dylan says after dumping the water outside once all of the beets have been cleaned. "What's next?"
"We take these," I indicate the bin of peeled beets. "And shred them. I did make a device for shredding things, you just put them into a chute at the top and push them down while it's on, and it'll shred them. But since there's so much, I'm going to just use magic."
I point at the bin again, and small slashes of air magic rapidly shred the beets.
"And now we cook it," I say. "But not by itself – it'll just burn if we do that."
"So we'll add water," he nods. "Just like when cooking potatoes or carrots in a stew."
"Right," I lift the bin up and dump the beets into a large pot; I'm not sure why I didn't just dump them in there in the first place. "And now for the water…"
I fill the pot with steaming-hot water and turn on the magic stove. There are a few of them in the kitchen, including a four-burner stove on top of an oven. The one I'm using for this is a large one that's lower to the ground, intended for use with a larger pot or cauldron, such as what I'm using now.
"You usually want to do this in a smaller batch," I tell him. "But since I'm using magic… it's not necessary. Bring it to a boil, then let it simmer. It can take an hour or more depending on how you do it. This extracts the sugar from the beets, turning it into sugary water and some mushy beets."
I extend a hand over the pot as Dylan picks up Nolan so the boy can see what's happening. With my magic, I quickly heat the water and have it penetrate the beets. While this isn't instant, I manage to complete the extraction process in about ten minutes.
In hindsight, I didn't need to put the pot on the stove since I used my magic for the heating this time. If I were doing this normally, I would've just used the stove instead.
Next, I remove the liquid from the pot and pour it into another, making sure to only extract the sugar water and none of the impurities. That's followed up by reducing it down into sugar syrup. I move the sugar syrup into shallow pans I've set out and use a mixture of magics to rapidly crystallize it.
Since I also made sure to extract only the sugar water when I pulled it from the pot, there are no impurities in this. When I separate the crystals out of the pans, that leaves me with pans of dark molasses and pots of blue sugar chunks.
The latter of which I proceed to grind into small crystals, that we then pour into glass jars just for them. These jars have a wire rig for their lids to hold them down when closed, a thin layer of a special goo mixture along the rim to ensure it's sealed and airtight when closed.
We had a total of nearly four hundred pounds of sugar beets from the garden – they really grew in. That turned into roughly eighty pounds of sugar, so I'll be good on that for awhile. In fact, I'm going to have quite the excess if this is anything like what will be the yield for the normal garden.
"What are we doing with it now?" Dylan asks.
"Making jam," I answer. "That's why we got the mana berries: we're making mana berry jam."
Disbelief fills his mind.
"Jam?" He asks. "Ain't reagents for mana potions exceptionally difficult to acquire? And you're just gonna make it into jam? I get the feeling that ain't alchemy!"
"It's not," I confirm. "But it's quite delicious and as the garden has proven these past two weeks… we can afford to use them. I already have a hundred gallons of mana potion."
Admittedly, the quality isn't quite up to snuff, but that's just because of how much mana I can hold. Restoring 500 MP per ounce isn't much when I can spend twice that on a spell. But with how much the quality of the plants improved over the last two weeks with the gardening tips that Thomas and Dylan have given me, I'm sure we can bring that up even more.
Possibly even reach 2,000 MP per ounce by winter. The less potion I need to drink to refill, the better. One never knows when they'll need to use and then quickly recover a lot of it. The faster one can recover it in such a situation, the better.
Now that we have the mana sugar prepared, I begin cooking up the mana berry jam. The actual cooking part is done without magic and in several batches. When it comes to canning them… I use magic to make things faster.
Thirteen-ounce glass jars with a two-piece metal lid are used. The flat part that sits on top has the same seal type as the ones we stored the sugar in. For the second piece, it's a ring that screws down onto it to hold the lid in place.
Dylan and Nolan both sample some of it – Nolan more than his father – as we prepare it, and Dylan understands why I want to make this.
"This is pretty amazing," he says as Nolan eats another slice of bread with the jam spread onto it. "And we're making… uh… well, quite a lot. This'll last you awhile. And this is after just two weeks of growing 'em, too. Their proper season ain't even 'till autumn, and that's when we'll be getting more."
"Yeah," I say. "Part of the heavier batch was from me using magic to boost growth. This also let me know we can probably cut down on the sweet mana beets – that's their actual name, 'sweet mana beets' – that are in the garden."
"Ah," he says. "I take it you're planning on selling 'em in town? Thomas and Chief are heading in tomorrow for it so you're right in time."
That's a little bit earlier than normal for their usual monthly trip, but only because of something happening this weekend. They want to make sure they get the trip in before then so that they can pick up some stuff in town before the weekend.
"Actually," I say. "I'm planning on bringing it to the festival. You all sell stuff to tourists there, in addition to the potluck."
Even if someone visiting from out of the area can read, they likely won't try to pull anything after discovering they can purchase mana berry jam here. They'll see that it's from a magus, after all, and nobody really wants to cross a magus. If they do decide to brave it, well, they'll be reminded that Mistlands always have protection.
"Not all of it, of course," I say upon noting Dylan's surprise. "I'm keeping a fair amount for myself, and I'll gift some to Robin and Rose. But we have more than enough that I can sell them at the festival."
The amount I'll earn is nothing compared to what I can earn selling loot from the mines in town, but that doesn't matter. It's a way of participating in the festival with the locals. Participating with my own goods to sell is what matters here.
Dylan will get some of the money from it as well, since he did help with the work. I'm not taking advantage of him, after all.
"Anyway," I say. "That's all the farm work for today, thanks for the help with it. I think it tired Nolan out, too."
"Yeah," Dylan looks at Nolan, who's nodding off a little as he finishes off his piece of bread. "I'll put him down for a nap, then start washing the stuff you're done with."
"Thanks," I say. "Enjoy your nap, Nolan!"
Nolan nods as I consider what other types of jams I can make for the festival.