To say my potato planter impressed Emily and Colin would be an understatement. The Spudnik 8312 potato planter was an impressive piece of equipment, in some ways just as cool as my tractor. I let Colin hook up the hydraulic hoses under my supervision, because he just loved hooking up hydraulic hoses?. It would only take us a little over an hour to plant, so Emily paused in her daily duties to watch us.

  The planter drove on six tires, which held a massive hopper that was almost as large as my tractor. The hopper held potatoes that would feed through hoses into one of the twelve arms, and the arms led to planter "cups" that would insert the potatoes into the ground and then cover them back up. Fully loaded, it weighed 80,000 pounds, including 45,000 pounds of potatoes.

  While driving, the outer six arms folded on top of the middle six, three to each side, thanks to hydraulics. Watching those “wings” unfold left Emily’s mouth wide open once again. When all twelve arms were fully extended, the planter was thirty-six feet wide. Since it was still brand new, it was also a bright red color that really popped in the sunlight.

  I pulled into the field and set the planter down. The discs in front of the cups parted the soil, and the hopper's tubes fed the cups, which were filled with a piece of potato. As we rolled forward, the tracks rotated, and the cups placed the potato pieces in the ground at even intervals. After that, more discs on the back side covered the pieces up. At the very back of the machine was a special ridger corrugator that we’d had installed to form the ridged mounds I wanted to properly irrigate the crop.

  Potatoes had a much wider and taller mound than the rest of the crops so that they weren’t too wet for too long. We didn't need fungus growing on our potatoes.

  Once we got started, Emily came and looked at the ground, uncovering one piece of potato so she could see with her own eyes that it really was in the ground.

  After planting, it was still only around one.

  We ate a quick lunch of chicken soup. It wasn’t the tastiest yet, but Emily assured me that with some more cooking, the flavors would be much better this evening.

  I wanted to start cutting logs for my cabin today. I didn’t want to sleep in my tractor forever, even if I wouldn’t suffer too many ill effects from it. The poor seat would wear out pretty fast.

  I just wanted a ten by twelve cabin. I’d make it seven or eight feet tall, and have two windows and a door. Definitely nothing fancy, but hopefully this fall we could figure out something more permanent. Maybe hire a carpenter to do things right.

  My magical saw blade wouldn’t dull at all for an entire year, so we needed to cut as much as we could whenever we had free time.

  I’d never cut lumber from trees before, and neither had Colin or Emily. Luckily, the handy-dandy almanac was there for us.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t give me good news. We were supposed to cut logs and, for that matter, all of our lumber, and then let it dry for months, possibly up to a year. That was something I should have known, but I’d always bought lumber from a lumberyard that had been kiln dried well before it got to me. I’d never gone out and cut down a tree and processed it into usable boards.

  That meant that the cabin we built now was likely to warp and split if we cut down trees to make it. But there was no other choice if I didn’t want to rough it somehow. I had zero intention of making Emily or Colin leave the cabin, and staying in there with them didn’t seem like a viable option.

  People made animal pens from lodgepole pine, which was available in the area.

  Colin said that if we went farther north a few miles, there were plenty of the smaller pine trees, including a stand that had died off after a fast-moving wildfire had moved through it the previous year. He thought that many of the trees were still in good enough shape to make animal enclosures. They should be dry enough they wouldn’t twist.

  I decided that was a better use of our time for the rest of the day. We’d also need some posts for fence posts for our barbed wire to enclose the garden.

  He and I drove the six miles to it, and we found a good couple hundred trees that ranged in height from eight to twelve feet tall that seemed around the correct thickness to make into fenceposts and rails. We stacked them up and wrapped the ends with chains and then used my other two chains to hook to my 3-point hitch and raise the bundles off the ground by a couple of feet.

  I drove veerryy slowly to avoid any disasters with our unstable bundles, and we took three trips to grab as many logs as we could.

  By 6 p.m. we had a small mountain of logs, and I’d burned a fair amount of diesel. I was down to around three hundred gallons now. I decided that that was my fuel expenditure limit for this project.

  Colin and I decided we would build our fence in a zigzag pattern. I’d seen this pattern in use in the mountains in Idaho, but I’d never paid close attention to it. Importantly, this project wouldn’t require the use of any fasteners.

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  After we finished dealing with logs, Emily decided that tonight we would all have fun for dinner.

  Emily handed me a couple of thick blankets, carefully folded up, and asked me to carry the pot of chicken soup carefully down to the river.

  She brought another blanket and set it up on the largest beach area on our land.

  As I’d noticed on my first couple of trips down to the river, it was a beautiful area. We had about 4,000 feet of riverfront on the property. That was a little over three-quarters of a mile. Around half of that was sandy beach, the rest was a pebbly rock. Easy to walk on, but I wouldn’t want to be walking around on it barefoot.

  The large log that sat between two boulders and straddled the river still left me with one of my only thoughts that this was a coma, and not reality. It sat so perfectly between two boulders on either side of the river that they held the large log tightly in place. The log was large enough to walk across easily and very stable. It made for a convenient way to get across the river without dealing with getting wet.

  The boulders, and probably the log too, had acted a bit like a dam. Sand had pooled up around the obstruction on the north side in a triangular shape. It was widest closest to the boulders. The river flowed from north to south, so that made sense. On most of my stretch of river, the beach was only around six feet wide, but it came out to fifteen feet wide near the boulder and log. It slowly tapered off to its normal width over a hundred feet. This was also the case on the other side of the river.

  This was also the only area where you could easily walk out into the water. The river only looked like it was around six feet deep, but the drop off from the beach was relatively rapid. On this sandbar, it looked like I could walk out into the river for about ten feet before it hit my waist, then it dropped deeper. It was still much too cold to actually test this out, but once it was hot outside it should be a great place to wade out and cool down.

  The obstruction made the river flow a little slower there, but then caused it to speed up on the south side of the tree.

  The smell of the river always reminded me of camping. My ex-wife had hated camping, and if I was being honest, it hadn’t been my favorite thing either… but I did love fishing and hanging out by the river. My family loved to spend time camping in the summer, and early in our marriage my ex and I had gone along with everyone else.

  The water was chilly and moving fast enough that there wasn’t any stagnant water, so it didn’t look like it would have any of that swampy bog smell you could get later in the summer on slow moving bodies of water.

  The huge blackberry patch across the river was in full bloom. Just a huge wall of white.

  There were willows lining the northern third of the river on our side. But the rest of the bank had what Emily told me were sycamore and river birch trees. The enormous tree that had fallen across the river had left a big gap that let sunlight onto the large sandbar Emily laid the blanket on.

  Dinner was a much more delicious chicken soup. Emily had said it would be, and she was proven correct. The flavor had time to really come out after cooking all day. There was some garlic that had been dried last fall, and there was of course kale, as well as a few other greens. Emily mentioned asparagus, carrots, ramps, and chickweed. I wasn’t sure what chickweed or ramps looked like, but Emily said she'd show me after dinner.

  The soup was great, but I couldn’t wait until we had some bread. Emily and Colin definitely both needed some extra carbs. Neither was gaunt exactly, but they both needed to add some fat to themselves. I didn’t think it was just my norm at seeing most people around me on Earth packing extra pounds that gave me that opinion.

  I could stand to lose twenty pounds. Okay, maybe thirty or forty. For the last year, I had been drinking way too much, and not working out at all. I was a stress eater, so that didn’t help me one bit. Even when I was thin, I had a stocky build. I’d weighed two hundred pounds when I graduated high school, and had six-pack abs. My two hundred and thirty pounds now was too much for my frame, for sure.

  After we ate, Colin got out the fishing poles we’d brought along. We found a worm long enough for both of us to have plenty for our hooks.

  Emily grabbed the basket she’d brought to find some young cattail shoots. She said that raw, they had a refreshing flavor. She’d make a salad with them tomorrow.

  Colin got the first bite right around 7 p.m. When he reeled it in, we called it a night. The fish was over two feet long and weighed close to twenty pounds. With the fish being so large, and not having access to refrigeration, we stopped there. Emily would fry up the fish for breakfast, and we could have it for lunch too. That would leave ?chicken soup for dinner again.

  I don’t know when I had a more perfect time in recent years.

  I could get used to this lifestyle. I always liked to say that I could only take things one day at a time, but that was often hard to do with a modern lifestyle on earth.

  Here, it was a lot easier to say it and mean it.

  There was still about an hour of daylight left when we got back, but I decided I wanted to do some more almanac reading so I headed for my tractor.

  ———————————————

  Potatoes are a delicacy only affordable to wealthy members of the Albion Empire.

  They originate in the Androl Mountains of the Farsi-Gavin-Khazad continent to the south of the Western Territories. The Mountain Clan Kingdom dwarves grow them in their mountain fortress cities at high elevations.

  In the lowlands of the Albion Empire, they are prone to rot and heat stress.

  Those who have eaten them say they are best cut into strips and fried in oil and liberally covered in salt.

  They are also enjoyed baked and eaten with steak, or boiled in a hearty stew, although this is a gross waste of an ingredient that should be a central item in a meal.

  Eating them raw is something you must never do, as they are mildly toxic before cooking.

  Do not eat the plants, or the flowering buds either.

  Excerpt from Exotic Dishes of the Southern Hemisphere by His Royal Majesty’s personal chef Ramsay Roberts. Note: This book is not available on the Albion Shop Interface.