A New Life In The Beast World-Chapter 106: What Plants To Grow?

After reading for a bit more, Serena opened her notebook and began making some notes on her ideas for farming. She still needed some help with choosing the right plants, but writing it out helped her better organize her thoughts.

The plan for growing crops was to split it as follows - 60% on grains, 20% on legumes, 10% on grapes and the last 10% on vegetables & roots. Additionally, people could have their own private gardens to grow whatever they wanted.

However, her main concern was growing the right amount of food to both feed the city populace throughout the year as well as have enough to also exchange with the Horse Clan for precious resources like salt, crystals and so on. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

That way they could rely less on the Forest City and develop the village into a great trading city.

For grains, she planned to do a mixture of wheat, barley and millet, depending on what worked the best. Grapes were necessary to make wine and thereafter vinegar which would help preserve any vegetables and roots they grew.

On the vegetable side, she wanted to get more information based on seasonal plants the rabbit beastmen enjoyed. But for now she had things like brown roots, orange roots, squashes and leafy greens noted down.

Finally, there was legumes. They seemed to be plants like chickpeas, lentils, peas as well as other beans. They could store well too for long periods of time and many were a great source of nutrients, specifically in protein and fiber.

A combination of legumes and grains could be used to create food reserves for the city thus reducing famine during times of bad harvests or natural disasters. Hence why she was eager to look into them too.

Perhaps the rabbit beastmen even knew where some of them grew.

Aside from those plants, she did look into growing fruit to make things like jam for the cold season when fresh fruit was limited, however, she did come into a problem with that one.

Fruits from shrubs and plants were simple to grow, however, there were many fruits that grew on trees. And while she could plant orchard rows between plots of farmland to split them up, it took at least seven years for most fruit trees to bear fruit.

Well that was for any young trees that they planted. The older trees could probably begin producing fruit right away, but that was if they were able to transplant them.

Otherwise, they’d just stick to foraging for fruit and making it into jam for times when there was less fruit available.

She also wanted to look into growing cotton at a larger scale to go with her plans to make cloth, but that was on hold for now. She had yet to look into making cloth, so wasn’t going to make a decision to add cotton into the mix.

Just for now.

Other than that, she also wanted to chat to Healer Kai about medicinal herbs. She knew he might not want to give her all his knowledge on that one, however, she believed it was best he had some kind of medicinal garden.

That way they could have large quantities of medicinal herbs on hand without Healer Kai and Davis needing to forage for them all. After all, a huge growth in population would mean a greater need for medical help.

Besides, it would be good to have lots of medical herbs on hand in case of sickness outbreaks. She might even create a quarantine area to reduce the spread of any illnesses within the city.

Liz suddenly slithered over to her and watched as she was making notes on important plants she’d need to look into. The system watched her a little before it spoke.

"Are you working on that development project of yours again?" Liz asked, making Serena look up from her notebook. "Why didn’t you wake me? I could’ve given you some good advice."

"Could you not tell that I was here?" Serena raised an eyebrow.

Liz shook its head. "No. I really was sleeping. This system doesn’t run twenty-four seven you know. It needs to be charged like one of your androids."

Serena pursed her lips at those words, but decided not to ask further questions. She was busy working out which plants would be useful for the city and didn’t want to be distracted from it.

"Alright, well since you’re awake now, why don’t you give me some advice on what plants to use." Serena finally said. "I’m busy trying to work out which plants we should grow on a large scale. Right now, I have grains, legumes, grapes as well as vegetables and roots down. Cotton and fruit are also noted. Anything else I should add?"

"Well if you want bees for honey, you might want to look more into flowers or fruit." Liz suggested. "The nectar they collect from certain plants can sometimes affect the taste. Plus you can make use of flowers or fruits afterwards."

"I suppose so..." Serena mused. "But I’ll first have to get the bees here and that’s a problem for another day."

Honey and beeswax would be useful with one being used to preserve fruit while the other could be used to seal things or even make candles as she learnt while reading the farming guide.

Which could be great for lighting up the night. Sure, she had a bit of night vision because she was a beastwoman now, but even that was limited. Having light would be good, night vision or not.

"Alright then what about olives?" Liz pointed out. "You can probably find some along the forest edges or in clearings. Oh and if you pressed them into oil, it can be quite useful."

"What does this pressing entail and how is it useful?" Serena asked with narrowed eyes.

Because sometimes this system had a way of giving her a little useful information and then hitting her with a money block. Which was annoying to no end.

"Well it’ll be a similar process to you using your grinder to make flour." Liz said, shifting into a raccoon. It then used its paws to flip to a page in Serena’s farming guide, finally stopping to point at a blueprint design. "See this thing here. You use it to extract the oil from the olives."

"Alright and what are the benefits in doing all this?" Serena asked because this was no doubt going to be a difficult task.

Liz glanced up at her and answered, "Well, you can use the oil mainly for cooking. But it has other uses like preserving food in it or even for soap making."