An Insane Way to Use a Greenhouse

[Outside the Tier-Groups: Sun Garden]

"This is what's called a 'greenhouse,' a facility where, by regulating the internal temperature, we can cultivate plants that are too cold to grow here in winter. We'll install facilities with this same function in any village that wants one."

Marie introduced the greenhouse to Okada Tarōzaemon, one of the early settlers.

"Director of Books-sama, so you can grow summer crops in winter, then."

"Of course we can."

"Conversely, could you not warm it but cool it instead, to grow in summer the crops for which summer is too hot?"

"In theory it's possible, but a greenhouse has a tendency to trap heat, so I don't think it's very practical."

Quartz glass transmits near-infrared light but does not let mid- to far-infrared light through.

"… So in practice it comes down to growing in winter the vegetables one wouldn't normally be able to harvest in winter."

"That's the basic use in the otherworld as well. As for what other applications there might be in this region, even if I think about it, my imagination inevitably runs up against limits from unconscious self-restraint, and it all ends up empty theorizing of little use, so I'll leave that to those on the ground."

[Outside the Northeast Gate: Kannon-ji]

"And so it is. The Director of Books is seeking ways to put the greenhouse to use. A run-of-the-mill answer like 'grow summer vegetables in winter' won't satisfy her."

Okada Tarōzaemon gathered the chief peasant leaders in the Kannon Hall and consulted with them over drinks. The word "brainstorming" naturally does not exist here, but what they were doing was much the same.

"How about we throw out the very notion of 'crops'? If we warm it up, won't the chickens grow faster?"

"If we're warming it, why not plant rice in winter? Sow the seed now and we could reap before spring, earlier than the wheat harvest."

"Er, that's not double-cropping, it's… what was it called?"

"Barren-head!"

"Don't call me bald."

"There's a way to harvest even sooner. I've heard that if you cut the rice high up rather than at the base, ratoon shoots sprout. If we reap the still-unripened rice high, about one shaku up, and let the ratoon shoots grow on, we could skip transplanting and harvest rice in the dead of winter."

"New rice in midwinter, eh. So, can a greenhouse even be set down on top of the paddies we've got now?"

Incidentally, Vasanti the Japanese rat snake was thoroughly in high spirits, having dropped all pretense and revealed her true snake form, and was now dunking her head into the liquor.

"The rice not yet reaped, we'll convert to greenhouse use where we can. We won't have an inexhaustible supply of greenhouses, so the ones we manage to ready, we'll transplant rice into. Let's go in that direction."

In the otherworld, too, greenhouse rice cultivation is used only in special cases, such as hurrying along breed improvement or eating new rice at New Year's. In a dungeon there's no fuel cost, but building and warming a greenhouse naturally takes a great deal of dungeon energy.

"One thing I want to make sure of. If we harvest rice two or three times a year, what becomes of the land tax?"

"Regardless of yield, the land tax is fixed at one koku per tan under the fixed-rate method, four to the lord and six to the people, so it'd be strange if it weren't the same whether we do two croppings or three. Besides, the off-season wheat crop was never taxed to begin with, so a second rice crop is the same as wheat."

"The Director of Books herself keeps going on about famine and making us eat daikon, so she's hardly going to hobble our double-cropping."

"Bah, if they start prattling about double land tax, we just stage an uprising and that's that. Ah, Lady Vasanti, one more cup. There you go. Rise up! Rise up! Bottoms up!"

Urging anyone to down their drink in one go is a no-no for any creature other than the boozy likes of a giant serpent, owing to the danger of acute alcohol poisoning.