Chapter 8

My farm sits on a plot of land that is approximately 4,000 pyeong[1]. Of that, about 1,000 pyeong is taken up by the 19th-century-style, green-roofed country house, its garden, and the driveway, all of which my mother painstakingly designed, inspired by her fond memories of Anne of Green Gables[2]. The exterior siding and roofing materials were, of course, made of wood.

This means the exterior often gets damaged and requires frequent repairs. And frequent repairs mean that there is always a ready supply of materials like lumber and bricks in the warehouse.

I have decided to classify the various items affected by this farm’s resource cheat into two main categories.

First, there are the ‘Consumables,’ various items whose quantities are fully restored to their original state when midnight passes. For example, the nearly finished roll of aluminum foil in the kitchen will run out before I can even wrap a single egg, but after midnight, it will be refilled to its original amount. Firewood, gasoline, first-aid supplies, and many other items fall into this category.

Second, there are the ‘Permanents,’ items that are repaired if they are broken or damaged when midnight passes. For instance, if I take the chainsaw out of the warehouse and use it, a new one won’t appear at midnight. However, if the chainsaw gets jammed in a tree and breaks, it will be perfectly restored in the warehouse after midnight. The car, the forklift, various farming equipment, and weapons all belong to this category.

What I was curious about was this: which category did the home repair materials fall into?

The answer is ‘Consumables.’

Even if I take them out of the warehouse and use them, an infinite supply of building materials is available! Cedar planks for the roof, bricks for the walls and chimney, and even the white and green paint to protect the wood, all of it!

“Are there any bricklayers among you?”

“…”

“…”

“I thought not. In that case, you may use the red bricks from here.”

According to Eleanor, the fireplace in their previous settlement was made of wood. Such harsh conditions were now a thing of the past. With the addition of bricks, cedar, and white and green paint to the timber I had cut with my chainsaw… oh…

“The settlement looks wonderfully cheerful!”

“…Indeed.”

The atmosphere had become remarkably… close to that of the Anne of Green Gables anime (the 1979 version).

– Rejoice, Mother. Your dream has been realized here.

In any case, the construction of the settlement is proceeding smoothly.

Did I mention my farm is about 4,000 pyeong? And that my house takes up about 1,000 of that? Another 1,200 pyeong or so is occupied by the walk-in cooler, the equipment warehouse, the small chicken coop, and a slice of a low-lying hill.

So, what’s on the remaining 1,800 pyeong?

What else but a vineyard, consisting of three 500-pyeong smart greenhouses. I must emphasize the ‘smart’ part, or my father’s retirement fund, which was poured into this place, would weep. Two of those greenhouses are used for growing Shine Muscat grapes, and the last one was recently expanded to cultivate a wide variety of new breeds.

Which means…

This year’s grape yield will be determined by two 500-pyeong smart greenhouses.

500 pyeong times two equals 1,000 pyeong.

One. Thousand. Pyeong.

And from this space, approximately 10,000 bunches of grapes are produced.

“That’s everything! Everyone, take a rest!”

“Is-is that all of it?”

“Uwaaaah!”

“We can finally live!”

Thirty people providing free labor! A task that would normally take days was somehow finished in half a day by throwing a lot of manpower at it!

We had successfully harvested 10,000 bunches of grapes!

Good. As for what to do with them… let’s worry about that later. There’s no answer right now. Even if the thirty-three of us here ate one bunch a day, it would take a year and eight months to finish them all. Whether I dry them into raisins or do something else, it’s not something to think about right now.

What I need to think about right now is…

Food for today!

With that thought, I turned my gaze toward the walk-in cooler, where the Shine Muscat grapes were piled up like a mountain. And nearby… I saw sacks of potatoes. Those dozens of potatoes are our future food source.

It can’t be helped. I’m not going to be farming rice here, and the rice in my house is polished white, so planting it would only yield dirt. There are other crops like tomatoes and cabbage in the garden, but they aren’t enough to be a staple.

‘Okay, remember, remember. What did Mr. Choi, the potato farmer next door, say…!’

I took out a notebook and started scribbling down everything I could recall. No matter how trivial a detail seemed, each one was knowledge gained through decades, no, centuries of trial and error. A single mistake could multiply or diminish the future potato yield several times over.

“Chitting in diffused light, then cutting with a disinfected knife, then curing… okay. This isn’t bad.”

Thankfully, the precious knowledge bestowed upon me by Mr. Choi, my weekend gardening, and farming YouTube channels was still lodged in my brain.

Wow, Mr. Choi, thank you. Someday, I’ll erect a statue in your honor and name you the ‘Patron Saint of Potatoes’ or something.

Feeling a surge of excitement, I heaved a potato sack weighing dozens of kilograms onto my back and dragged it toward the English colonists’ settlement. Seeing me sweating profusely, Eleanor, who was in the middle of moving timber, was startled and rushed over to share the load.

“My goodness, why are you bringing this over with such difficulty? Are you all right?”

“…I am fine.”

Because of this damned mystique, I can’t even scratch a mosquito bite in front of them. I lightly wiped the sweat from my face and offered Eleanor another mysterious smile of gratitude.

After the two of us struggled our way to the entrance of the colonists’ village, we collapsed, our legs giving out from under us.

“Ugh… w-what is this? It looks like a monster.”

Finally getting a look at the contents, Eleanor wrinkled her nose. ‘A monster? That’s a bit much,’ I thought, but when I looked inside the sack myself… uh… I wrinkled my nose too. A neglected potato with long, overgrown sprouts did bear a striking resemblance to a tentacled monster.

Still, I quickly grabbed a potato with shorter sprouts and held it out to Eleanor. She flinched instinctively but brought her face closer at my gesture.

“Look. It’s a potato.”

“A po…tato?”

Huh? She doesn’t know? It’s been nearly a hundred years since Columbus reached the Americas. How could she not know what a potato is?

“Is it some kind of… dirt clod? Or perhaps animal dung. Is it firewood?”

“…It’s food.”

“…”

No. I will not accept that ‘You… eat… this?’ look on your face.

I forced a shrug and took out a boiled potato I’d cooked earlier from my pocket and took a bite. As I nonchalantly offered her another one, Eleanor, who had been suspicious, took a bite herself, and her expression softened.

“The taste is… quite all right?”

“This is our bread from now on. It will grow better here than wheat.”

“This thing?”

“Yes.”

At my words, Eleanor, now looking surprised, examined the dirt-covered potato with curiosity.

“Then how do you eat the sprouts…”

“Ah, you must not eat those. They are poisonous.”

“…”

“You cannot eat the leaves or the stems either. You can only eat this tuber from the root.”

She looked even more disturbed by that, but it couldn’t be helped. It was better than having a mass poisoning on my hands later because I kept it a secret.

In any case, the long sprouts were unsightly and had to be trimmed, leaving just a small part for farming later. I took a MacGyver knife³ from my pocket and quickly trimmed the overgrown sprouts. Eleanor, watching from the side, began to help.

“How long should the sprouts be?”

“About one centimeter is enough.”

“…Pardon?”

“Uh, ah, I mean… about the width of your thumbnail? Half your thumbnail? Something like that?”

“So, you mean between two lines and one barleycorn, or about half a digit[3]?”

“Ah… pardon?”

“I asked if it should be between two lines and one barleycorn, about half a digit.”

…What kind of alien language is this now?

“How, uh, how many inches is that?”

“Four lines make one barleycorn. And three barleycorns make one inch.”

“I see. Now I understa—”

“And one digit is three-quarters of an inch.”

“…”

“So, between two lines and one barleycorn…”

“Just cut it to about this length.”

“…Yes.”

Soon, the other settlers who had been watching came over one by one to help, and thanks to them, the task of trimming the sprouts finished sooner than expected. This was a step I had to take because the sprouts had grown too long; normally, a process called ‘chitting’ is required, where you expose them to indirect sunlight in a bright, shady place to encourage short, sturdy sprouts.

…Well, it’s not like I knew I’d be transported 400 years into the past and be doing this bullshit.

I suppressed a sigh and called the villagers over.

“All right, everyone, bring the knives you have. There is work to be done first.”

Simply put, potato cultivation is the process of cutting up a sprouted potato, burying the pieces in the ground, and letting the sprouts grow. From that process, the tubers grow, and after about 100 days, you dig them up and eat them.

However, if you just chop up the potato with any old knife, the damaged potato can rot from various germs, so the knife absolutely must be sterilized with bleach water. I had the settlers dip their knives into a 500:1 diluted bleach solution before handing them back. Then, one by one, I began to teach them how to farm potatoes.

“Here, look, quarter the potato with the crown, the part with the most sprouts, at the center. Then bring it to me. But if you have smaller potatoes, you don’t need to cut them into four. For example, this one is about thirty to forty grams… no, wait, how much is this?”

“Did you say thirty drams[4], sir?”

“No. Grams, I mean… wait, how much is a dram? Eleanor? Could you explain?”

“Sixteen drams make one ounce.”

“Ah, I see.”

“But sometimes, one ounce is eight drams. When measuring things like apothecary herbs…”

“…”

“Anyway, it’s sixteen drams to an ounce, and one pound is sixteen ounces or 7,000 grains.”⁵

“…”

I closed my eyes, a familiar sense of shittiness washing over me.

Ah, it’s that thing.

‘How much is one ‘geun’?’ ‘When you’re weighing meat, it’s 600 grams, but sometimes it’s 500 grams. For fruit, it’s 375 grams. For medicinal herbs, it’s forty ‘don’ to one ‘geun’, and one ‘don’ is fifteen grams, so one ‘geun’ of herbs is about… ah, I forgot. For chili powder, the portion size has shrunk recently, so one ‘geun’ can be 540g, and wild ginseng is a precious herb, so one ‘geun’ is 300g…’

It was that same, familiar, shitty feeling.

I gently closed my eyes and thought, Ah, a base-3 system and a base-4 system, it sounds like shit just hearing about it. Do these English people have twelve fingers or something?

I shut my mouth, dreaming of the metric system that would one day arrive like a hero on a white horse to destroy these wretched units.

“Anyway, yes. Cut each piece to be slightly heavier than one ounce.”

“Understood.”

“And bring them to me when you’re done.”

And so, we gathered the potatoes, whose sprouts had been trimmed to a length between ‘two lines and one barleycorn,’ cut into pieces weighing ‘roughly between one ounce and twenty-two drams.’

So, can we plant these cut potatoes now?

No.

There are a few reasons why we cut potatoes into pieces instead of planting them whole. One is to use the seed potatoes more efficiently. If you can plant three or four pieces from a single potato, you get a much better return. Another reason is that shocking the seed potato with stress makes the sprouts grow a little faster.

There are other reasons, but those are the two main ones. In short, cutting up potatoes is much more efficient in terms of time and space.

However, potatoes are vulnerable to pests and diseases. I had already sterilized the knives with bleach water to prevent virus infection, so just planting them in the ground as is? That would just increase the chances of the potatoes rotting. Therefore, they need to undergo a ‘curing’ process for four to five days in a well-ventilated place to allow the cut surfaces to heal on their own, which will prevent disease.

After curing the potatoes in a well-ventilated, shady spot, we build up reasonably high ridges and plant them in the ground.

“How wide should the rows be? How many links or feet…?”

“Make the ridges with ‘this much’ space between them.”

“And how much is that…?”

“About ‘this much’.”

“Then the spacing for planting the potatoes…?”

“Space them out by about ‘that much’.”

Ha, hahaha, you primitive pre-modern people. I have finally reached ‘enlightenment.’ The reason their unit system was so shitty was because you could just say ‘this much, that much, this little bit’ in daily life. I worried for nothing.

It was my fault, a weak man who had lived in a modern world where every single screw was standardized down to the millimeter.

Anyway, autumn potatoes are normally planted shallowly, at about five centimeters, but that’s because of Korea’s uniquely shitty monsoon season. I could ignore that and plant them at a depth of about ten centimeters, like spring potatoes.

Now, all we have to do is wait about 100 days and harvest, and our food worries will be over. Since I’m not selling them anywhere, I can just sprinkle some fertilizer from time to time and let them be.

…So, that’s it.

With food and safety secured, I have no more worries. It’s sad to be suddenly separated from my family and friends and thrown 400 years into the past, but if I can live a happy life here, free from debt…

“Ah, but what are we going to do with all those grapes?”

…Ah.

“…You should not have brought that up.”

“Pardon?”

Tears were suddenly about to well up, so I looked up at the sky for a moment.

The sky… is clear.

My vineyard, into which I poured my entire twenties.

…and the 10,000 bunches of Shine Muscat grapes it produced.

Hah, what am I going to do with all of them?