The previously cultivated vegetable patch was now filled with turtle carcasses.
Jiang Ye spent over two hours collecting the turtle bodies and digging out the turtle eggs from the soil.
The turtle eggs were buried shallowly, in small clutches. They were slightly smaller than chicken eggs, each weighing about 40 grams, with beautiful blue-green shells.
A total of 80 eggs were unearthed from the vegetable patch. Jiang Ye carefully brought them back to the spaceship and stored them on the windowsill.
There were many varieties of seeds. Jiang Ye carefully selected four types to try planting first:
Sweet potato seeds
Potato seeds
Shaddock seeds
Cabbage seeds
The current climate was still suitable for growing crops. Jiang Ye was unsure how the planet's climate would change. If it experienced a rapid and harsh winter like Jiang Ye Star, it was essential to store as much food as possible before winter.
Sweet potatoes were the main source of stored food. They had high yields, and not only could the roots be eaten, but the leaves could also be used to make porridge. Moreover, they could be dried into sweet potato jerky, which preserved well for a long time.
In past famines, many people survived on sweet potato jerky.
Potatoes were also high-yield crops that could be stored in a cellar for a long time.
As for the shaddocks and cabbages, Jiang Ye wanted to supplement Cen Yemeng's intake of vitamins from fruits and vegetables.
The artificial seeds all looked similar. Jiang Ye used a shovel to divide the areas in the vegetable patch.
After working for over an hour, all the selected seeds were sown.
Watering took another two hours.
Cen Yemeng was already cleverly digging a new water collector. The original water collector was only enough for the two of them to drink, and farming required more than ten times the amount of water.
"Master, I've counted. You planted a total of 40 sweet potato seeds, 30 potato seeds, 20 shaddock seeds, and 20 cabbage seeds," the robotic dog reported, wagging its tail.
Jiang Ye remained silent, nodding to acknowledge its work.
Every half hour, Jiang Ye collected fresh water and used plastic bags to irrigate the farmland.
This batch of seeds had clearly undergone genetic modification, as their growth speed was visibly rapid!
An hour after sowing, all the tender sprouts broke through the soil!
Three hours later, the stems and leaves had grown quite tall.
The sweet potato leaves, in particular, were as large as palm-leaf fans, astonishingly so.
Almost every hour, the size of various crops could be seen increasing by a circle, growing like monsters!
Jiang Ye worked from morning till night tending to the crops, carrying a gun to water and fertilize them.
The first type of fertilizer was, of course, human waste. Enduring the smell, he mixed it into the soil, stirred it well, and then watered it to disperse.
The second type of fertilizer was the carcasses of sea turtles and snakes. The meat was chopped and mixed into the soil. After all, they couldn't eat so much meat, and it was better to turn it into fertilizer than let it rot everywhere.
The robotic dog also helped, digging frantically with its paws to open up new vegetable patches and turning the fertilizer and catalysts back and forth.
The reason Jiang Ye carried a gun while farming was mainly to guard against the snakes. When the sea turtles landed, large groups of red-eyed snakes came to eat a wave and then left. Jiang Ye couldn't find where they were nesting, so it was best to be cautious.
Three days passed in the blink of an eye.
It was time to harvest!
Jiang Ye and Cen Yemeng carried sacks to the farmland.
The scene in the farmland would have astonished any ancient farmer!
The cabbages were larger than exercise balls, each with a diameter exceeding one meter, lush and vibrant!
Jiang Ye had to use a hacksaw to cut through the roots of the cabbages.
One cabbage filled a sack completely, enough to last a week!
The shaddock trees were also quite exaggerated. They were only two meters tall, but each small tree bore dozens of fist-sized shaddocks, full of juice.
After harvesting the shaddocks, Jiang Ye plucked off the wilting leaves and threw them on the ground as fertilizer.
Finally, it was time for potatoes and sweet potatoes.
Jiang Ye grabbed the potato stems and pulled.
Thick, rope-like roots extended in all directions, connecting to fist-sized potatoes that slowly emerged from the soft soil.
It was like a chain reaction.
The number of potatoes was astonishing.
The first potato plant yielded over thirty potatoes of various sizes, with a total weight of nearly fifty pounds!
One plant could fill a sack.
The prepared sacks quickly ran out, so Jiang Ye had to send the robotic dog to find more in the garbage mountain.
The yield of sweet potatoes was even more terrifying. The sweet potatoes were packed tightly underground, almost deformed from crowding, and were the size of thermoses.
However, when Jiang Ye broke open the sweet potatoes, the color inside was not the appetizing golden yellow but a pale white.
After all, they had received too little sunlight and likely wouldn't taste particularly good.
Fast-growing things were like this: large in volume, poor in taste.
The harvest lasted the entire morning.
Dozens of sacks of crops were piled like fortifications around the spaceship, forming small mountains.
They would likely last more than half a year.
However, if they were left on the beach like this, they would surely rot quickly.
They needed to find a way to preserve the food!
Jiang Ye first processed the sweet potatoes, making them into dried sweet potatoes.
The process was quite tedious.
First, he cleaned the soil from the sweet potato skins and cut them into small pieces.
This step alone took over three hours. The couple was sweating profusely; there were simply too many sweet potatoes!
Then, they started steaming.
This was the largest kitchen project Jiang Ye had undertaken so far.
The robotic dog found hundreds of metal basins from the garbage heap to serve as steamers.
Jiang Ye and Cen Yemeng dug hundreds of fire pits and placed the hundreds of steamers on top.
Steaming the sweet potatoes took an entire night. Cen Yemeng slept in the spaceship, while Jiang Ye busied himself walking around the beach, keeping the fires burning all night.
The steamed sweet potatoes were spread on plastic sheets and laid out in the sun to dry.
After drying for a whole day, they were cut into thick strips one by one, and then placed back into the steamers to be steamed again at night.
Jiang Ye knew the method of steaming three times and drying three times, but it was too exhausting, and time was pressing, so he only steamed them twice before finishing.
The dried sweet potatoes still amounted to eight large sacks, enough to last for several months.
The next step was to process the potatoes.
Jiang Ye's method was to dig a cellar!
There were no excavating machines, so they had to rely on shovels.
The robotic dog also helped dig, saving Jiang Ye a lot of effort.
As for Cen Yemeng, a pregnant woman couldn't do heavy labor like digging.
Her job was to prepare three meals for Jiang Ye and occasionally bring him a bottle of water.
Jiang Ye was already an expert at digging. His experience mining on Jiang Ye Star had honed his skills with shovels and pickaxes to perfection.
The sandy soil by the sea was not hard, so the cellar was dug out in just one day.
Over a dozen sacks of potatoes were spread out and stored in the cellar.
Jiang Ye and the robotic dog found many black plastic bags in the garbage mountain and covered the potatoes with them to block out light and air, preventing them from sprouting.
The top of the cellar was covered with salvaged sheet metal, and a water diversion channel was dug to prevent rain from flooding it.
As for the cabbages and shaddocks, there were no good ways to preserve them.
They could only be wrapped in clean plastic bags and placed in the repaired mobile spaceship.
The spaceship's air conditioning system was used to cool them, extending their shelf life as much as possible.
This spaceship was very small and could only hold ten sacks of shaddocks and cabbages.
The rest had to be dug into a cellar and eaten as much as possible three meals a day.