Farm Girl's Manor
Chapter 980: Autumn Harvest Seeking Medical Help (1)

Chapter 980: Chapter 980: Autumn Harvest Seeking Medical Help (1)

Once the time of the Beginning of Autumn passed, the increasingly cooler August days arrived. However, the noon sun remained fiercely hot, and few people would labor in the fields at this time. Yet, compared to the scorching June and July, Mao Tuan and his heat-fearing companions found their days considerably more bearable.

August was also the harvest season, and the Mo Family’s orchard welcomed a bumper crop. Although the fruit trees had not fully matured, the fruits they bore bent the branches with weight. It was clear without having to pick and weigh each piece that this year’s harvest would exceed the last by more than fivefold.

The quantity of fruit harvested last year was not large, but Mo Yan and Yan Junyu kept a little, and the rest was sent to the Imperial Palace. The quality of those fruits was much higher than the so-called tribute brought from the south, and there wasn’t enough to go around in the palace.

Therefore, with the significant increase in the orchard’s yield this year, Mo Yan did not worry about sales at all. Even if the palace couldn’t "consume" it all, there were many outside the palace who wanted it, and the price would certainly not be low.

With the fruits nearing maturity and ready for picking in not more than ten days, Mo Yan asked Aunt Tong to oversee the arrangement and also sent a message to Yan Junyu in advance to have his people come and take away his share of fruit after ten days. As for her share, it would naturally be hauled away in one go, which would not only not cost her any Silver Coin but also save her a lot of trouble.

The more than a hundred acres of rice in the valley had also turned yellow and would be ready for harvesting in three to five days. As usual, Mo Yan entrusted this task to Old Man Ding, asking him to hire people to help with the harvest, calculating the wages as they had been in previous years.

However, this year’s rice seedlings had barely been planted when they were reserved by the Court, to be used as seeds for continued trial cultivation across Great Chu after the harvest. As for last year’s crop, it had been allocated to various imperial farms by the Court early this year, ready to be harvested these days, and would also be used as seeds for trial cultivation in various places.

As Mo Yan was calculating in her heart how much Silver the orchard and rice paddies would bring in together, Xin Er came in, clicking her abacus and asked, "Sister, don’t you plan to visit the estate the Emperor rewarded you with when you became a County Lord?"

Last year, Mo Yan had acquired the title of Princess Hejia and received a series of rewards, among which was an estate of a thousand acres. This estate, located thirty li to the south of the city, was exceptionally large and consisted entirely of fertile farmland. If one were to pay for it in Silver, it would cost more than 10,000 ounces to acquire.

When the Imperial Edict awarding her was delivered, it stupefied everyone in the Mo Family. They had not even comprehended the string of rewards and the Contract Paper for a thousand-acre estate amongst them was all the more inconspicuous. Once Mo Yan received the Imperial Edict, she offered it up for worship without examining it closely, inadvertently neglecting this estate.

The rewards had been indiscriminately stored in the warehouse by Mo Yan, and she had not bothered to look through them afterward, so she had no idea her family had gained such a large estate.

It was not until this spring, when the estate’s Manager, seeing the new owner had not sent anyone to arrange for the spring planting, went through considerable trouble to find Liu Yang Village. Only after meeting with the Manager did Mo Yan learn that her family possessed a thousand-acre estate and the history behind it.

The previous owner of the estate was an official notorious for his corruption. After he was stripped of his assets two years ago, the estate fell to the Court and was still rented out by the original fifty tenant-farming households on the estate; only now they paid their rents and taxes directly to the Court.

The Manager had been the servant of the corrupt official. Once the estate was transferred to Court ownership, he became an Official Slave and continued to manage the estate. After the estate was bestowed upon Mo Yan, he naturally became a servant of the Mo Family, or more precisely, of Mo Yan.

At that time, Mo Yan had been too busy to manage the estate personally, so she had simply left it in the Manager’s hands. However, upon learning that there were two hundred acres dedicated to rice cultivation, she provided him with high-yield rice seeds and instructed him in the basic planting techniques before sending him back.