Although a proper tribute should be left on the grave of the deceased, the people in Sujia Village were all very poor, so if good things were left on graves as tribute then someone would definitely steal and eat them. Therefore Sujia Village was already used to taking the tribute items home to their families after the memorial ceremonies were finished. They justified this by saying that the ancestors approve of sending good food to go to the young ones in their families.
Su Tang had passed some of her items to Su Yongshun when she went to Su Yongshun’s house just now, and now she gave the rest of them to Madam Luo. She had brought out some of the cakes from her shop, as well as some chicken, some duck, some fish, and so on.
Chicken, duck, and fish were all meat, so Su Tang and her brother couldn’t eat them because they were still in their mourning period. At the same time, they were already spoiled from eating fresh cakes from her shop and weren’t too interested in these cakes that were already cold, so Su Tang didn’t want to bother bringing any of the things back to town and instead passed them off to her relatives in the village.
“Then I’ll thank Aunt Tang and Uncle Nuo on Xiao Rui’s behalf.” Seeing that many of Su Tang’s tribute offerings were meat, Madam Luo didn’t refuse and accepted them with thanks.
Su Tang and Su Nuo gave her a nod and then followed along to the main hall to greet Su Yongqiang. Su Yongqiang’s eldest grandson, Su Rui, who they had just been discussing, was also inside, and he was very excited to see Su Nuo.
Su Tang realized that their next topic was fairly serious, so she had Su Nuo, Su Rui, and the group of other children go out to play so that she could talk with their parents.
When Su Tang asked for Su Yongshun and Madam Qin to come along and see Su Yongqiang with her, they understood it was because Su Tang wanted to improve her own voice in the Su family. After all, the patriarch was the one who was nominally in charge of the whole family, but each member of the family had their own say with varying degrees of importance.
The two naturally followed along happily, but when Su Yongqiang saw that they had all come together he was a little confused. He asked uncertainly, “Brother Yongshun, sister-in-law, you two have also come? Is there something going on?”
At this moment, Madam Miao appeared and served everyone warm water with brown sugar. At the same time, Su Tang replied to Su Yongqiang’s question, “There is something!”
After that, she explained to Su Yongqiang everything she had told to Su Yongshun’s family earlier. After the explanation was finished, she continued on, “What is certain now is that we will need at least hundreds of thousands of these seedlings in a few months, and when we reach the later stage the number needed will only increase.”
When Su Tang had spoken to Su Yongshun before she still didn’t know the specific number of seedlings she would need. However, a few days ago she had received a letter from Luo Xingchen that said that the Luo family had set aside a total of ten plots of land to grow tomatoes and chili peppers on. According to her calculation that a thousand seedlings would be required per mu of land, even the mere ten plots of land the Luo family had set aside would already require more than a million seedlings.
Thus, that was the quantity that Su Tang reported this time. However, that number actually didn’t include the plots of land that Su Tang had yet to buy. According to the amount of money in her hands that was set aside for land, she estimated she would need an additional few hundreds of thousands of seedlings once the land was purchased, and the total number might even be over a million.
When Su Tang finished speaking, not mentioning Su Yongqiang, even Su Yongshun and his wife, who had heard Su Tang explain this matter to them beforehand, all sucked in a breath of cold air, “Sister Tang, how many did you say you needed?”
“Although it sounds like an overwhelming number, raising seedlings is actually not very complicated or difficult. From my estimates, if your whole family works together, I think Brother Shun’s family alone should be able to produce about 30,000 to 50,000 seedlings.”
Because raising seedlings wasn’t as complicated as growing crops, it was relatively unnecessary to use much space or put in much effort, it just required the person growing them to pay a bit of attention.
Su Yongqiang’s voice was trembling. “Five seedlings is a one copper coin, so hundreds of thousands of seedlings…”
“I’m sure that if our Su family can digest this job then there will be at least a hundred taels of silver in it for us.” Su Tang had calculated everything clearly beforehand. Although both she and the Luo family were chipping in to pay for these seedlings, the Luo family was the larger party so they were paying the larger part of the share.
As for Su Tang’s own money, she was planning to use it to fund the seedlings for the land that Luo Xingchen was having her buy. But she had to wait until she had the land in her hands to make any final preparations on that end, mainly because she planned for her seedlings to be more high-end than the seedlings the Luo family would be using.
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tl begging corner:
Thank you