Chapter 490: Chapter 30: Sweet Potato Flour
"Feng Xing, get up quickly and come take a look," it was just getting light, and Zhuo Feng’s eyes were still bleary as she went outside to relieve herself. Before long, her soprano voice woke both Xiao Xian and Feng Xing in their room.
Feng Xing put on a vest and pulled on a robe, thinking it couldn’t be another dead rat. When they first moved in, rats would often scurry out, and Feng Xing was always on alert.
Before Xiao Xian even stepped out the door, he heard a buzzing in the air that invigorated the spirit. Outside, groups of wasps were hovering over the sweet potato field, a dark, dense mass of them. If Zhuo Feng hadn’t been through numerous rat scares and hadn’t gotten braver, she would probably be screaming nonstop by now. Women naturally disliked hairy and multi-legged insects.
"It’s wasps, such a large group of them. If they really start to attack, there’ll be no easy way out. Luckily, this swarm seems quite orderly and not inclined to attack people randomly," Feng Xing knew about the farm having a wasp, but didn’t think much of it. Now with a hive arriving and what looked like several hundred wasps, Feng Xing felt a bit jittery at first, but upon closer observation, seeing no sign of an attack, he approached a few steps closer.
"Uncle, no need to worry. Having a swarm of wasps on the farm is a good thing; they help with pollination, and maybe next year we’ll even get some honey," Xiao Xian identified the solitary wasp in an instant. It was unclear whether these wasps were domesticated or wild – wild ones wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but if they belonged to someone, losing such a large group would surely infuriate their owner.
Xiao Xian had already formed a plan in his mind; let the swarm of wasps help with pollination on the farm during the day, and at night transfer them to his space, so as not to interfere with the wasps’ daily work or the effect they have on the sugarcane seedlings in the space.
After observing for a while, Feng Xing, assured that the wasps wouldn’t attack people on the farm, pondered setting up a wasp Hive in the near future. However, constructing a Hive wasn’t a simple task; it required guidance from an experienced beekeeper.
The wasp matter could be set aside for now, but the farm’s sweet potato processing ran into a problem.
Last night, upon Xiao Xian’s suggestion, Zhuo Feng and her husband brought up the matter of making sweet potato flour.
When they asked the nearby flour mill, they were told that they don’t process flour in quantities less than five hundred pounds. That flour mill wasn’t particularly large, but it was the only one in Yanqing, and due to good business, they’ve become somewhat arrogant. Zhuo Feng mentioned wanting to experimentally mill a few dozen pounds of sweet potato flour, but they were dismissed without a second thought, saying that if they were serious about milling, they would be charged the five hundred pound rate, even for just a few dozen pounds.
That wouldn’t do, Zhuo Feng thought, and directly pulled Feng Xing away to leave.
On the drive home, Feng Xing saw his wife’s displeased face. "How about we try the traditional method? When I was a child, there were no flour mills in the village and we made sweet potato flour that way. Or we could go back and ask if we can borrow their machines? We can handle it ourselves."
After living in Yanqing for half a year, Zhuo Feng was thoroughly convinced of the saying ’if you want something done right, do it yourself’, so they turned around and headed back to the flour mill.
The people in the flour mill laughed when they heard the request, amused by this little couple who wanted to make their own sweet potato flour. They had an old mill that was no longer in use and had been lying idle. They allowed Zhuo Feng to leave a deposit of US$100, renting the machine to them at a daily rate of US$100.
Zhuo Feng also borrowed a small tricycle from the flour mill, loaded the machine onto it, and took it back to the farm.
When they returned to the farm, Zhuo Feng was surprised to find that Xiao Xian had already washed all the sweet potatoes that had been piling up in the empty room. Cleaning sweet potatoes is a physically demanding task; washing a hundred pounds of them would take hours and is exhausting. Zhuo Feng worried about the sweet potatoes that had been dug up months ago going moldy or spoiling, but upon inspection, none showed a trace of mold or discolouration; they looked nearly as good as new - the white potatoes were tender and fair, the Purple sweet potatoes petite, and the roasted sweet potatoes perfectly shaped.
Xiao Xian was secretly pleased; having the Water-Spraying White Snake was a boon - a sprinkle with the water from the space could cure any sickness.
To facilitate the experiment, Zhuo Feng and Feng Xing dug up a few dozen pounds of newly grown sweet potatoes, three varieties in total, old and new batches combined into six piles, each weighing around ten pounds.