Chapter 613: Chapter 28: Surprises One After Another
Xiao Xian chose four plants to grow, and Zhang Yiyi unprecedentedly volunteered to take on the task of sowing.
It was less about Zhang Yiyi wanting to help share the workload, and more about her wanting to try out the mini planting machine.
Among the four plants, three required seed sowing, and one required cuttings.
According to the difficulty of planting, Xiao Xian handed over Tamarisk, Bitter Beans, and Tamarisk to Zhang Yiyi, and kept Sea Buckthorn for himself to plant.
To avoid being noticed by Xu Lan Ya and her group and to prevent any unnecessary interference with the entire project, Xiao Xian chose three locations from the settlements of the sand lizards provided by Yiyi.
One was near Farmer Spring, another behind the center of the strategic house, and one in the eastern part of the desert.
These places all had something in common: they provided plenty of sunlight without being excessively strong. At night, the nearby terrain provided some shelter from the cold.
Following the areas designated by Xiao Xian, Zhang Yiyi remotely operated the mini aircraft. The mini seeder was easy to control in theory, but in practice, it wasn’t that simple.
The remote control was about the size of a soap box, featuring a joystick that could rotate 360 degrees. Despite its simple design, Zhang Yiyi managed to crash the seeder into the dormitory window twice and bury it in the sand once, resulting in three trips back to the strategic material center.
"Three strikes and you’re out, the fourth repair will cost you," after Romeo One left her with these words, Zhang Yiyi felt frustrated and complained that, like most girls in her country, she played with elastic bands, played catch and cook, and even house, but never with remote control airplanes.
For such a trivial matter, it certainly wasn’t worth leaving the campus to find Zeng Xuerou, so after a long consideration, Zhang Yiyi decided to seek advice from Wang Shuai.
After examining for a few minutes, Wang Shuai figured that operating the planter wasn’t much different from driving a car, and managed to get the mini seeder carrying five kilograms of seeds into the air, planting Bitter Beans and Tamarisk seeds with some excitement but without any mishaps.
These two crops didn’t require turning the soil or excessive watering; it was only a matter of waiting for them to sprout.
The remaining dozen Tamarisk cutting sticks were planted tentatively by Zhang Yiyi, who went to check on them every day, only to be disappointed to see the cuttings wilt after a few days.
To prevent Xiao Xian from finding out, Zhang Yiyi secretly spent 200 Heaven-defying Value buying new Tamarisk cuttings from Romeo One.
After three or four rounds of this, Zhang Yiyi began to feel the pinch and thought she just wasn’t meant for planting trees, but then the Tamarisk miraculously came back to life.
"It goes to show that you may not succeed even with great efforts, but sometimes you do without trying." This phrase fit perfectly for the fast-growing desert plant. Though not as aesthetic or elegantly wafting as southern willows, its growth ability was akin to wildfire.
Within only half a month, a pair of dried cutting sticks grew into trees over a meter tall, their roots delving more than a meter deep into the sand.
Xiao Xian was curious about the thriving Tamarisks; he had provided Yiyi with only a dozen cuttings, yet there were over fifty Tamarisks sprouting.
Moreover, Xiao Xian told Yiyi that Tamarisk trees, which took several years to mature outside, could grow into seven or eight-meter high adult trees in just a month on the North Campus, repeatedly trimmed and cut. Simply by trimming the Tamarisk branches and leaves, new seedlings could be produced. This revelation made Zhang Yiyi figuratively spit blood; she had unnecessarily spent over a thousand Heaven-defying Value.
The growth of Bitter Beans and Tamarisk was also going well. The first experimental planting was quite successful, with Tamarisk showing the highest survival rate, followed by Bitter Beans and Tamarisk.
However, the most surprising was the Sea Buckthorn planted by Xiao Xian. Living in the Northern area and used to various hardwood trees, Zhang Yiyi, before coming to the North Campus, had only seen desert plants like Cactus and cattail. She thought all plants surviving in the desert were dull, ugly things without leaves or flowers, until she saw the fruiting and flowering Sea Buckthorn, which completely changed her perspective.
Xiao Xian had a reason for choosing Sea Buckthorn for his personal cultivation. Unlike other desert crops, once Sea Buckthorn matured, it was incredibly vigorous, yet it was very sensitive during its seedling stage.