Let's Make a Home Vegetable Garden

――When I woke up, Myaree was gone.

Since I was a late riser, had Myaree gotten up early and gone home?

When I checked on the Forest Cat, it had eaten about half a can of cat food.

"You did it. Keep getting better like this."

I stroked its back, then disinfected the wound and applied the medicine again. Somehow, it seemed to be working.

I took some bread out of my Item Box and stuffed it into my mouth.

"Well, maybe I'll do some brush cutting after breakfast."

I'd cut down some of the giant trees in the forest and installed solar panels, and now that sunlight was reaching the ground, grass had begun growing in the sunny areas.

It had only been about a month, so where had this grass come from?

The weeds were all soft, so I used a nylon cord cutter on the brush cutter instead of a chip saw. That was more than enough.

If I left it alone, the area would probably become covered in tall grass like the plains outside the forest.

After finishing the grass cutting, I was storing the brush cutter in my Item Box when Myaree came from the depths of the forest with a bow strapped to her back.

In Myaree's hand, she held the head of a bird with shining blue feathers. It was about the size of a pigeon.

"Myaree, didn't you go home?"

"I said yesterday that I'd give you a bird, nya."

"Come to think of it, we did talk about that..."

Myaree had offered a bird in exchange for cat food. I didn't mind giving it to her for free, though.

"Where did you get a bow?"

"I woke up, went home, and brought it back, nya."

"You went all the way home, then came back and went into the depths of the forest?"

"Nya."

Just how much speed and stamina did Myaree have?

Myaree offered to butcher the bird, so I had her show me how.

"Myaree, I've never butchered a bird before, so teach me how."

"Okay, nya."

Myaree showed me how to butcher a bird. As expected, the innards spoiled easily, so it was best to remove them as soon as possible.

She said it was best to chill the meat if possible, but I had my Item Box. I could shove any game inside and it would never rot.

"Next, you pluck the feathers, nya."

Whoa, I couldn't have feathers flying all over the place. I bought a burlap sack from Shangri-La and had Myaree pluck the bird inside it.

"Can I keep this bag? The bird's feathers can be turned in, nya."

"Sure. They're blue and pretty."

Apparently, the Adventurers' Guild also bought materials like these――hmm.

Maybe I should buy a crossbow with a laser sight or red-dot sight and go hunting.

"After that, burn off the remaining feathers over a fire, nya."

"Sure, leave that to me."

I took a cassette-gas burner out of my Item Box, lit it, and singed the surface of the plucked bird.

The smell of scorching protein filled the air, accompanied by a faint crackling sound.

"That's convenient, nya!"

"It uses magic, so it's not for sale, though."

It was awfully convenient being able to pass everything off as magic. Beastfolk didn't understand complicated things very well, so they didn't ask any further questions.

If I showed something like this to a professional mage or the like, they'd realize in an instant that it wasn't magic, and I'd be finished.

"Myaree, did you eat breakfast?"

"No, nya."

"Then let's make yakitori and eat it. Cut it into bite-sized――no, pieces small enough for one bite."

"About this size, nya?"

I left the meat preparation to Myaree and searched Shangri-La for bamboo skewers for yakitori.

Commercial-use teppo skewers, huh? Eight hundred yen for 250. I needed yakitori sauce too――600 yen for a plastic container of it.

I took a cassette stove out of my Item Box, set a grilling grate for yakiniku on top, and immediately tried grilling the skewered bird meat.

"This is how you grill and eat it."

"Nya!"

Since it was a bird, I had to cook it thoroughly. It was a wild bird, too. It would be a problem if it carried some dangerous disease.

Once the meat was cooked through, I coated it with sauce and grilled it again.

"Here, try one."

"Nyaa~!"

Myaree eagerly moved to take a bite, but then she suddenly stopped.

"What's wrong?"

"It smells like that strange sauce I smelled before, nya. And it smells like something else too, nya."

"The smell?"

I picked up one yakitori skewer and gave it a good sniff. What was it? I couldn't really tell.

Could it be the sauce in the bottle? I checked the label and saw that it contained soy sauce.

Ah――Myaree had said soy sauce was no good, so was this the problem? But according to her, it wasn't just the smell of soy sauce.

"What does it smell like?"

"It smells kind of like rotten vegetables, nya."

"Hmm? No way."

I opened the valve on the cassette-gas burner and let Myaree smell a little of the gas.

"That's the smell, nya!"

"What? Your nose is way too good."

I see. Since I was grilling over an open flame, the gas smell had gotten onto the food.

Beastfolk had keen noses and seemed to be sensitive to smells. But this wouldn't do.

――In that case... I searched Shangri-La for a shichirin――and found one.

It was even the square type made for barbecues. This should do――1,000 yen.

I searched for binchotan charcoal for fuel too. There were all kinds, but the value pack was cheap and the reviews weren't very good.

I decided to buy a somewhat expensive one for 1,800 yen per kilogram. But grilling wild-bird yakitori over charcoal was far too luxurious.

If I ate something like this in my original world, I had no idea how much I would be charged. Thrush was apparently delicious, but some birds were protected and forbidden to hunt.

But lighting charcoal in a shichirin would take some time. As I desperately worked to get the charcoal burning, Myaree murmured to me.

"The delicious food from yesterday is fine for me, nya."

Yesterday's delicious food? Cat food? She really threw me off. I was trying to eat delicious yakitori, and she was telling me cat food was fine.

But Myaree was hungry, and I felt sorry for her, so I bought some cat food. But was this really okay...?

I searched for cat food and bought the most expensive one, called Gold Can. What I'd fed Myaree yesterday had been meat, but the contents of this luxury can with a gold band were fish.

I took a dish out of my Item Box, put the cat food on it, and showed it to Myaree.

"Apparently, this is fish."

"Nya!"

Myaree pounced on it and took a bite.

"S-so delicious, nya~!"

Myaree was shouting as if a beam might shoot from her mouth. Was it really that delicious?

While she was doing that, the charcoal finished heating up, so I started grilling the bird. I'd eaten a little bread, but I had room for one or two skewers of yakitori.

Bird fat dripped onto the red-hot charcoal, sending up billowing white smoke. A savory aroma drifted through the air with it.

As expected, grilling it over charcoal made it look delicious. I coated one with sauce, grilled it a little longer, and took a bite.

"Delicious!"

The meat was a little tough, but it had no unpleasant odor at all and was delicious. Unlike broilers, the skin had little fat, but it was still tasty.

"Here, this one's done too. Try it."

Myaree apparently didn't care for the yakitori sauce, so I grilled hers with salt. Myaree took the skewer I offered her, but――

"It's good, but this fish is tastier, nya."

Seriously? It lost to cat food...? This middle-aged guy was crushed.

After Myaree left, I shared about three pieces of yakitori with the Forest Cat.

Well, maybe I'd start preparing the field today.

------◇◇◇------

It was only a small field, roughly 10 m × 10 m, so I thought a hoe would do. I bought one and tried it――but gave up almost immediately.

Since I had modern equipment, there was no reason to overdo it. What was the point of having Shangri-La?

I immediately searched Shangri-La for a tiller. Hmm――for a field this small, an electric one might be fine. An engine-powered model would be a little more troublesome to maintain afterward.

The gasoline had to be drained from the carburetor, or it could clog. Still, if I put it in my Item Box, time didn't seem to pass inside, so it would probably be fine to leave it there exactly as it was after use...

After thinking for a while, I chose an electric model.

"Click!"

Clunk! The electric tiller dropped down. Normally, things were shipped in cardboard boxes or similar packaging, but for some reason, that part was omitted here.

Even with packaging, it would only mean extra work taking the item out, and not having any trash was convenient, but...

I examined the electric tiller that had fallen down. The type commonly called a tiller had extremely thick tires, with a reverse-rotating rotor behind them.

The one I'd bought, however, was a simplified model. Where the tires would have been, it had a forward-rotating rotor.

If I used it as it was, the rotor would merely bump along over the surface of the ground... So how was it supposed to till the field?――

There was a rod attached to the back of the tiller. When I jabbed it into the ground, it acted as a brake, and the rotor dug deeper and deeper into the soil.

At the right point, I pulled the rod out of the ground and moved forward――repeating the process allowed me to till more and more of the field.

I took out the diesel generator, started the engine, and connected the power. All I had to do was hold the tiller's handle, so it was easy. Since it was electric, it was extremely light.

It was surprisingly fun, and I finished tilling the field in about thirty minutes――that was fast!

If I'd done this with a hoe, I'd definitely have had sore muscles the next day. The tilled field was full of the forest's rich leaf mold, so it should be packed with nutrients.

I thought about what to grow while making the raised beds. What should I plant?

First, the usual tomatoes, eggplants, and potatoes, I supposed... Wait, they're all nightshades. I couldn't rotate those crops, and I'd run into continuous-cropping problems.

When you grew the same kinds of plants in a field one after another, various problems arose and they stopped growing properly.

There were plants less prone to continuous-cropping problems, such as plants in the grass family――rice, wheat, corn, and so on.

Strictly speaking, even those apparently suffered from continuous-cropping problems. But there had been fields back home that grew corn year after year from when I was in elementary school... So what was the reality?

Maybe those farmers had some secret technique, but I wasn't a scholar and had no idea what it was.

For now, maybe I'd just plant tomatoes. They were useful in all kinds of cooking.

I searched for tomato seedlings, but apparently they didn't sell any, so I bought seeds instead. I didn't care much about the variety, and Momotaro would do. It was a famous one.

Most of the tomatoes sold at supermarkets and the like were probably this variety. Next...

Black tomatoes were unusual, so I decided to buy a black variety. I'd never grown or eaten them before, so I was looking forward to it.

I bought seed-starting pots, planted the tomato seeds, and laid mulch over the raised beds.

Mulch was a plastic sheet laid over the raised beds to keep weeds from growing and prevent the soil from drying out.

I wasn't sure what its official name was. Since all the farmers called it mulch, mulch was good enough.

Even though I could buy vegetables from Shangri-La, there was no real need to grow them in a garden like this. But a vegetable garden was a must for a slow life.

I couldn't leave that out. It was quite a cheat, though.

If I could use magic, maybe there were convenient spells that made plants bear fruit right away――

But if they grew large and bore fruit immediately, I thought it would take away the fun of cultivating them.

What else should I grow...? Some delicious, freshly picked vegetables, perhaps.

"I know, how about asparagus?"

Even I had never grown asparagus in a home garden. Normally, growing asparagus from seed took about four years before it became large enough.

But freshly picked asparagus was truly delicious. I'd once picked some from a relative's field, and the difference in sweetness was incredible.

Farmers back home grew a lot of asparagus too. Asparagus was called the "pig of the fields" because it devoured fertilizer and grew at an incredible rate.

That was why asparagus kept using up its own nutrients and growing even after it was picked, and it lost all its sweetness if too much time passed after being cut.

Normally, it took at least two or three days for asparagus to go from being harvested in the field to appearing on supermarket shelves in town.

It lost its sweetness during that time, making it extremely difficult to find delicious store-bought asparagus.

I decided to give it a try and searched Shangri-La for asparagus starts.

――There were some. Asparagus starts. There were various varieties, and they were fairly expensive. Well, they took a lot of time and effort to produce.

I bought ten plants for 5,000 yen.

Plop. Only the roots fell down. Hmm? Did I just plant these roots and asparagus would grow from them?

That was probably how it worked. I'd never grown asparagus myself, so there were all sorts of things I didn't know.

For now, I bought a large amount of fertilizer as well, planted the starts in the field, and watered them. The water was river water stored in a plastic tank.

But carrying water from the river to the forest in a plastic tank every time would be a pain. Could I dig a well in the forest?

I didn't need a huge well with a bucket lowered into it. Shangri-La sold hand-operated pitcher pumps, and I already had an electric pump in my Item Box.

I just needed to use a drill or something to make a hole large enough for a hose or pipe. Shangri-La sold plenty of PVC pipe too.

Besides, giant trees grew all over this forest. There had to be a decent amount of water stored underground.

I searched for wells on Shangri-La.

Oh? They sold hole-boring machines too. This one had a two-stroke engine and cost 45,000 yen. But there was no way a drill only about one meter long could reach water.

For a well, I would have to dig roughly five to seven meters.

A one-meter extension rod was available as an option for the hole-boring machine for 4,000 yen, but digging seven meters would mean――28,000 yen?

Even if it failed here, I might be able to use it somewhere else... Still, I was hesitant to buy such a specialized machine.

But a hole-boring machine might also be useful when setting up posts...

I had a power shovel, so I could dig two or three meters with heavy machinery first and make the work easier, but... hmm.

I'd put it on hold for now.

I bought a book on digging wells from Shangri-La so I could learn more about wells.

The book introduced actual well-digging examples from various regions and locales, and it was extremely informative.

What a wonderful resource. I couldn't help feeling awe for the great pioneers who had come before me.

I lay on the bed and ended up reading it all day.

But reading it made me want to try digging one myself.