One hundred and fifty-seventh chapter credit leaves
The news that Mr. Shen could borrow leaves on credit spread throughout the village. It is said that this time it was Mr. Zhao, Mr. Shen’s boss. No matter how much the loan was, the price would be one penny per load and the monthly interest would be one cent. It was the same as borrowing rice. , after making cocoons, just use the cocoons as price to repay.
"This is simply a good deed!" Duo Duo Niang's man beamed with joy, as if he had taken advantage of the sky. "Now the price of leaf has soared! In the morning market today, the leaf store in town sold four yuan of silver per load! I heard from the shopkeeper. , it will rise to five yuan in a few days!”
Shen Kaibao felt anxious when he heard this. Five coins per load! This would kill him. Even a few days ago, three coins per load was too much for him.
Mr. Shen's conditions can indeed be regarded as doing good deeds. Even if Mr. Cao is willing to borrow now, he will still have to pay two and a half or three cents of interest. If he buys leaves according to this market price - he has calculated again and again, his silkworms this season are equivalent to Raised for someone else.
Everyone Shen only needs one penny per load and only one penny in monthly interest. It is indeed a good deed.
At this moment, he finally put aside all the grudges in his heart, and urged Daqing and Sanqing to make sure they had a good ship and go to the Shen family to borrow leaves.
There was already a long queue in front of Shen's house - they said the leaves were on credit, but the actual leaves were not at the door of Shen's house. Mulberry leaves are a very short-lived commodity, and it is difficult to preserve the mulberry leaves picked in the morning and sell them the next day. , so Ye Xing’s transactions are all transactions on the same day. There is absolutely no stocking up in advance.
Those who buy leaves are all traded at Yehang, and then the buyers go to the mulberry garden to pick up the goods. Zhao Yingong also handles the credit of leaves this time. Shen and his family are just the place to set up the written receipt. After the written note is made, they will be issued. With the right cards in hand, go to the mulberry garden to get the leaves with the right cards.
In ancient society, road conditions were poor and people's range of activities was limited. Therefore, Zhao Yingong's operation must accurately estimate the approximate output of the mulberry garden and the range of villages that can be radiated. The former is not a big problem, and the owners of the mulberry garden probably know it. The latter requires a very precise estimate of how much your own mulberry orchard can be harvested during the entire spring silkworm season. In the water towns of Jiangnan, farmers rely on boats to transport agricultural products to towns and cities. Spring is a busy time for farming, and there is no need for strong labor. Too much time may be spent on the boat. Therefore, the distance from the supply location to the end user must be limited to within one day's round trip time by boat.
This year he does not plan to operate a big situation, it is just a test of the water. On the one hand, he knows very little about the specific situation of the leaves, and on the other hand, he does not know how much resistance he will encounter in the specific operation. Therefore, no matter what the situation is, Shen Dawang and Siniang returned to the village to set up cooperatives or Shaoye. They only operated on a very small scale.
Including Jixian Village where Shen Da is located, he has only carried out Hezhongshe work in three "central villages". These three villages can roughly cover the surrounding fourteen or five villages that mainly focus on sericulture. A total of six More than a hundred households. The number is not large, and the number of cocoons obtained through small loans will be very limited. But this is just a "model". He has full confidence that as long as the implementation plan goes smoothly this year and the surrounding sericulture households see it, the number of cocoons will be very limited. In two years, they will actively participate in "cooperation" matters. By then, things will naturally fall into place.
The sericulture farmers don't know what Mr. Zhao is thinking. Right now, their only idea is to get mulberry leaves as soon as possible - the silkworm babies that have been out of sleep for the fourth time have reached the critical moment of spinning silk and cocoons. If the mulberry leaves are not available at this time, it will take more than a month. All the hard work and expense were wasted.
After Shen Kaibao signed the receipt, he took the right cards and immediately set off with Daqing to get the mulberry leaves. That night they returned in a boat with forty loads of leaves piled on the boat.
Before the boat entered the village, Daqing's son was already looking at the village entrance. Seeing his grandfather and father coming back, he ran home. As he ran, he shouted "We're back!"
It turns out that the silkworms in Shen Kaibao's family have been dead for more than half an hour, which is a matter of life and death. Shen Kaibao, who was on the boat, saw his grandson running away. He knew that the situation was urgent, and he didn't care that he was so hungry that his chest was touching his back. , quickly stood up and helped Daqing rock the boat desperately. The boat was shaking so hard that it almost touched the water.
The boat rushed through the river like an arrow, almost bumping into several moored boats, and rushed all the way to the head of his own river. Seeing his family members standing at the head of the river looking around, Shen Kaibao became more and more impatient, and kept urging : "Shake it quickly!"
The father and son went out in the morning, rocked the boat for a whole day, and only ate one meal. Their legs were so tired that their hands were so weak, and their bodies were so weak that they were panicking. But they knew that this would definitely kill the silkworms, and they couldn't get rid of them in time. If the leaves are spread on it, then all the previous efforts have been wasted and everything is over.
When the boat arrived at the pier, Sanqing had already jumped on board before the boat had stopped, picked up a basket of mulberry leaves and carried it to the shore. As soon as his feet stepped onto the stone steps, several pairs of hands came to pick it up and carry it together. Send it home. Daqing saw that his son was also inside, and he rushed to help. The small basket was heavy, and he suddenly fell down and rolled away. He couldn't help but feel distressed. He quickly picked up a basket of mulberry leaves and went ashore.
Shen Kaibao urged: "Hurry! Hurry!" Regardless of his old age and frailty, he also helped move the mulberry leaves.
Those fat and white "silkworm babies" have been hungry for a long time. They all pointed out their little mouths and swayed left and right. Shen Kaibao looked sad. The leaves were spread on them, and immediately the silkworm room was filled with the sound of rustling. , people could not hear clearly what they were saying. After a while, all the "tuanping" became white again. So another thick layer of leaves was spread on them.
People are too busy just to "go up the leaves". But this is the last difficulty. With enough mulberry leaves, as long as they survive for two more days, the spring silkworms can go up the mountain. People squeeze out the remaining energy Work hard.
Dudoniang didn't know how busy her family was now, but when her man came to buy leaves a few days ago, he said that the silkworm flowers were very good and always looked like seventy or eighty percent, so she breathed a sigh of relief. She has been on her own for more than a month. If you go out during the "busy month", you can get more than one tael of silver, and if the silkworm flowers are good, your family will have hope this year.
Between four and five sleeps, silkworm rearing is the most strenuous time, and Shen's family's silkworm raising work is also extremely stressful. Shen's family has a lot of silkworm foils, and leaves are put up every day, and the workload of clearing silkworm silt is very heavy. Silkworm raising lady They worked day and night, and could only sleep for one or two hours a day. They would take a nap against the wall in a nearby lower room, and then get up later to go up and inspect the leaves.
Wang Siniang and Li Zheng patrolled day and night, especially Wang Siniang, who was even more energetic. Because she knew that this time the master asked her to go to the village to raise silkworms, which was an "important matter". If she could handle it well,
, Needless to say, he will be the one "in charge" of the villa in the future. If things go wrong, he will have no choice but to be the "leader".
Seeing that the silkworms had entered the fifth age and began to eat less mulberry, Wang Siniang and Li Zheng both knew that they were about to start to form cocoons. The traditional clustering method usually uses raising the temperature to make the silkworms cluster to form cocoons, but as the silkworms mature,
The timing is different. Urging the clusters together will often cause some silkworms to be over mature and some to be immature. If the silkworms are clustered too early, there will be more silkworms that will not form cocoons, less silk, and the color of the cocoons will be unclean; if they are clustered too late,
, crawling randomly on the cluster, losing two pieces of silk, eager to form cocoons after getting on the cluster, too many bad cocoons.
Therefore, the batch clustering method is used here, which requires a larger workload but a higher cocoon recovery rate. Li Zheng first taught the silkworm ladies how to distinguish between mature silkworms and suitable mature silkworms. Regular inspections are made every day to remove suitable mature silkworms from
Transfer the large silkworm foil to the small silkworm foil, then move it into a special clustering room, and cluster the silkworms at a density of 500 silkworms per square meter.
This is the first time Duo Duo Niang has seen such a clustering method. No shed or straw clusters are used. Square grids are made with thick paper, and one by one they are hung directly on the cooked silkworms. This is
This method uses the habit of letting mature silkworms crawl upward to allow them to automatically climb up clusters and form cocoons.
In the upper cluster room, there are still earth dragon fires and water basins, as well as strange glass tubes and glass bubbles. Bamboo blinds are hung on the windows here, making the light coming in soft and dark - the most avoidable thing when cocooning.
Light.
In the early stages of clustering, mature silkworms have to excrete feces and urine before spinning silk and cocoons, so the humidity in the cluster room is very high. Monitor the humidity. Once the humidity is higher than 75%, the doors and windows must be opened for ventilation and moisture removal. The room temperature is preferably 25°C, such as
If the temperature is lower than 22C, the temperature must be heated. Too high or too low temperature, too high or too low humidity, all have an impact on the cocooning rate and cocoon quality, so very precise control is required.
According to the method taught by Li Zheng, Duo Duo Niang and other silkworm raising ladies pick out ripe silkworms and send them to the clusters every day. The silkworm foils that are clustered every day are marked. At the same time, they also have to remove the dead silkworms from the clusters and catch the unfinished silkworms.
The cocoons of swimming silkworms are clustered separately.
Five or six days after the clustering, Li Zheng gave the notice to start picking the cocoons. If it is picked too early, it will easily damage and contaminate the cocoons before they pupate; if it is picked too late, the pupae will turn into moths and the quality of the cocoons will also be affected. When picking cocoons, press the date of clustering.
Collect in batches. The collected cocoons are spread thinly on the silkworm plaque without squeezing each other. The upper cocoon and the lower cocoon should be placed separately. The cocoon shell is relatively solid, white and evenly shaped as the upper cocoon; dead cages, yellow spots
, Chai Yin, pierced head, thin skin, deformity, fly maggots and other secondary cocoons are the lower cocoons. Double uterine cocoons are placed separately.
This practice of gathering clusters every day and harvesting every day makes it difficult for Duoduoniang to estimate the quality of Shen's silkworm flowers. But every time she collects silkworm cocoons, most of the white cocoons in the square clusters are high-quality silkworm cocoons.
And it is rare to see dead silkworms without cocoons. Not only is the cocoon of this Guangdong species larger than that of the local species, but the silk layer is thicker and the cocoon body is strong. The silk threads are also very clear. Wang Siniang has raised silkworms for decades and has never seen this before.
Such a wonderful cocoon! Even the best Huzhou silk cocoon she has ever seen cannot compare to it.
When taking out the snow-white and strong cocoons from the square clusters, Duoduo Niang always feels an inexplicable feeling of joy in her heart - although the cocoons are not hers, the results of more than a month of careful care are still outstanding. It made her feel the joy of the harvest and made her feel happy from the bottom of her heart. (To be continued, please search Piao Tian Literature, the novel is better and updated faster!