Flowers in full bloom

Chapter 657: Flower Bud Demoted

And because buckwheat is a coarse grain, it makes you feel full after eating it. Although it is less than one pound a day, but for the time being, there is still free two meals a day from the court, so I will definitely be able to survive until the next buckwheat harvest.

The captives in Qianhu Village had hope in their hearts. What Hua Lei didn't know was that she was just sticking to her bottom line and making these captives grateful to her.

After collecting all the tax grain, more than half a month had passed. The diligent captives had already plowed some of the fields, but it was not yet Mid-Autumn Festival.

Thus, a new season of buckwheat planting began again. If we sow another crop of buckwheat now, we will have another crop of buckwheat to harvest before the frost. Although the captives were a new batch, they were still full of energy and confidence.

After planting buckwheat as quickly as possible, they started planting windbreaks following the flower buds. At this time, all the hillsides with short daylight in the shade had been cleared and leveled.

Fangfeng is a deep-rooted plant with a taproot that can be one and a half to two feet long, so the land needs to be deeply plowed. At the same time, it is also a perennial medicinal herb, so before planting, it is also necessary to sprinkle sufficient base fertilizer on the field to ensure the growth of Fangfeng.

Fortunately, the manure piled up in the first half of the year has been fully fermented, so we started to fertilize the land. Then we made a flat bed half a meter wide and a furrow about half a foot deep.

Soak the seeds in warm water for a day, then dig furrows and sow them in the prepared bed with a row spacing of about one foot. The furrow should be as deep as a finger joint.

Sow the seeds evenly into the furrow, cover with soil and compact it slightly. Because it is autumn, the temperature difference between morning and evening is large, so you need to cover the grass at night to keep warm. Water appropriately during this period to keep the soil moist.

When the seedlings emerge in the second year, when they are half a finger tall, thin them out at a certain distance, and then transplant them after more than half a month.

After the medicinal seedlings enter a stable growth period, multiple weeding and pest control will be required to ensure that the windbreak seedlings have sufficient nutrition and grow healthily.

In addition, every summer, topdressing should be done on the windbreaks. Compost should be dug into trenches and applied between the rows of seedlings. The management of windbreaks is the same as that of honeysuckle. There are also professionals from the Imperial Hospital to guide the management.

This time, it took more than three months of hard work before the captives in Qianhu Village finished planting all the windbreak seeds.

However, there are still some public barren mountains that are still barren due to seeds and seasons. We can only wait until next year to reclaim them. By then, we will decide what to plant based on the actual situation.

After all the windbreaks in Qianhu Village were planted, Li Yuanpan arranged for professional personnel who were proficient in planting medicinal herbs to enter each Qianhu Village. On the one hand, they provided guidance, and on the other hand, they provided supervision. Hualei no longer had to worry about the rest.

However, Hualei still proposed to educate the captives. Hualei suggested that the students of the Imperial College and the officials of various departments should be educated.

It would be best to provide enlightenment education to the captives in Qianhu Village every night or in other free time, and explain the various rules and regulations of the Great Sheng Dynasty.

In addition, some simple literacy, rudimentary arithmetic, and the cultivation, management, and preparation of medicinal materials were also taught to them one by one by the relevant personnel.

So that these captives from Qianhu Village can slowly integrate into the Great Sheng Dynasty and become the people of the Great Sheng Dynasty. Although the progress of learning is slow for the time being, everything is moving in a good direction.

In addition, the imperial court issued new decrees, introducing many preferential policies in order to ensure that the captives could truly settle down and to increase the population of the Great Sheng Dynasty more quickly.

One of the most important ones is to encourage widows and unmarried women in Mobei to remarry among the captives.

Once married, the widow's former husband's family and the older woman's family can be exempted from half of the tax grain for the year. Young married couples can receive six kilograms of mixed noodles at the time of marriage, and can also be exempted from half of the tax grain for the year.

Once a child is born, regardless of gender, as long as the child survives to over one year old, half of the tax for that year will be exempted.

When Hua Lei received this order from Minister Zhang, she was really embarrassed. She said that she couldn't do it. Before she traveled through time, she was still an older single young person and had no idea about falling in love or getting married.

Moreover, the decrees issued by the court now are completely contrary to the customs of the previous Great Sheng Dynasty.

In the past, people generally believed that women should remain faithful to their husbands and remain chaste even after their husbands died. Remarrying was considered unfaithful and promiscuous, and would easily lead to criticism from others. Therefore, widows were not encouraged to remarry.

Even if she remarries, she has to meet many strange conditions. The first one is that after her husband's death, the wife must mourn for her husband for three years. During this three-year mourning period, the wife cannot remarry.

After the three-year mourning period, if a widow wants to remarry, she must first obtain the consent of her husband's family, and the elders of her husband's family must serve as the presiding officer of the wedding.

Hualei found this point incredible. However, in the Great Sheng Dynasty, this was the rule, which had been followed for many years, and no one thought it was wrong.

In addition, when a widow remarried, she could only take away her dowry, and any children she gave birth to must remain in her husband’s home. She could not take any of them with her. Such rules and regulations, especially the second one, almost eliminated the possibility for a widow to remarry.

Therefore, in Mobei, even widows in their twenties or thirties, and even those who have not given birth yet, will stay in their husband's family, work like slaves, endure humiliation and bear heavy burdens, and very few of them remarry.

However, in order to increase the population and settle the captives, the court now introduced an intermarriage policy that was completely opposite to the previous customs.

Hualei said that although it is a good thing, it is really difficult to make it happen. This custom that has been passed down for thousands of years cannot be changed just because you want to.

Hua Lei was very sad that she, a fifth-rank doctor in the Ministry of Revenue, would be demoted to a matchmaker for the captives because of an imperial decree.

But what can I do? I am just an employee. I can only do what my boss says. I can only do what my boss tells me to do.

Don't know how to do it? You can learn. You will learn it as you learn. There is a first time for everything. These are the words of Minister Zhang.

So, while she was busy leading Qianhu Village to plant medicinal herbs, Hualei also began to play the role of a matchmaker. First, she compiled a list of widowed and unmarried women based on the household registration information from the county government.

Then they would go door-to-door to persuade them to get married. In Mobei, there were many widows because of the conflicts of varying sizes in the past few years.