The Second Winter and the Seeds of Change
September arrived. I paired up the oxen and, having sold the pigs we’d shared during the summer, fitted the wooden blades of our lightweight Roman-style plows with steel edges and wooden beams. It was crude compared to a 21st-century tractor, but it was enough to turn the earth and create furrows and ridges, however shallow.
The field, where we’d buried the bean stalks and radish sprouts as green manure last spring—along with the wild radishes that had rotted away into nothing but roots—oozed a dark, vibrant vitality unlike any other farmland in the area.
"Boss, I’ve never seen soil so full of life and health in my entire life..."
Quixote of La Mancha was the most diligent man among the poor. He always followed me, actively learning how to handle the oxen, and I appointed him as the work foreman, instructing him to plow one side of the area where we had used vetch beans as green manure.
"But Boss, we have such a good plow—why aren't you plowing deeper? God only grants a harvest to the diligent and honest farmer."
I didn't know how to answer him. Honestly, I didn't know if we should be plowing deep or shallow either. I told the other poor laborers to use the traditional wooden plows hitched to donkeys for the conventional cross-plowing.
"Let's do this. To survive, we need to plow as much land as possible, so I’ll plow shallow and cover as much ground as I can. You take that side, Quixote, and plow as deep as you’d like."
"Understood, Boss!"
As I was plowing, the clerk who had been recording my activities came over and asked, "Why are you farming in such different ways? I let it slide for the past year, thinking that burying beans in the ground was just some Herrera-style farming method, but this I truly cannot understand."
"Clerk, to be honest, I don't really know either, so I’m trying everything. I’m dividing it up: where I plow shallow, where we use the old-fashioned cross-plowing with donkeys and wooden plows, and where that man is plowing deep. We’re going to experiment and see what works."
I spoke honestly, and the clerk pondered my words before nodding.
It is, in fact, difficult for a mere ten men to cultivate 30 fanegas with only four oxen and two donkeys. I spent the sowing season faithfully, sending the Tercio brothers—with whom I’d become quite close—on errands to buy bread or wine from nearby villages or Valladolid. The neighboring villages kept pestering us, asking why we weren't coming to work this year, but I had them convey my apologies, saying I was too busy.
The next task was sowing the seeds. And here, I finally understood why medieval people just scattered seeds and fed them to the birds.
"Ugh, I am dying for a seed drill."
I was cursing up a storm as I sowed wheat grains in rows along the furrows. The men from the other fields, who had finished sowing by scattering, were helping me with this back-breaking labor in the shallow furrows I’d made, but it was truly not work for a human being.
"Clerk, once I see this harvest, I am definitely going to build a seed drill first."
"What is that?"
"Something that does this insane, back-breaking labor for me."
We tried our best to sow seeds in the 5cm-deep gaps made by the donkey-led Roman plow, with someone following behind to cover and press them down. Eventually, realizing we wouldn't finish in time without a drill, we just scattered the wheat in the remaining areas. We rode horses around the perimeter of the farmland and even mobilized the Tercio brothers to keep birds, rats, and rabbits from eating the seeds.
Sowing was finished, but perhaps because the mulching made the area look like a luxury apartment complex to small animals, it was swarming with rats and rabbits. I had the poor laborers who used to be poachers set up tons of makeshift traps around the fields.
"We can't eat pork this year, but we're eating plenty of rabbit."
We ate the rabbits that were caught almost every day, two or three at a time, and threw the rats to the pigs. Unlike 21st-century pigs, the spirited 17th-century pigs didn't just eat plants or insects; they hunted small animals and chewed through everything from bone fragments to carcasses, showing exactly why pigs were considered unclean by Jews and Muslims.
When the wheat sprouts came up, instead of potassium fertilizer, I put the wood ash we’d collected into baskets and sprinkled it evenly over the wheat fields. After the farming season ended, I checked the quince trees I’d grown from cuttings that spring: 12 out of 20 had survived. Eight followed Herrera’s method, and four were my own attempt using 21st-century knowledge without specialized chemicals.
"This is truly mysterious. Is there really something to the waxing and waning of the moon???"
I was baffled by the results, wondering how it even worked, but I kept them alive through the winter by lightly trampling the weeds. The fields where we sowed in rows, where we scattered seeds, where we plowed deep or shallow, where we cross-plowed, and where we meticulously removed weeds versus where we let them grow—our second winter in this chaotic mess was moving toward spring.
I dug up the 12 one-year-old saplings with a shovel and planted them about 4 meters apart in a sunny spot I’d prepared. People might ask why a man who would be leaving in five years would bother planting fruit trees, but isn't that the life of a farmer—to plant an apple tree even if the world ends tomorrow?
By April, the state of the wheat fields was clear. The best ones were those plowed shallow, sown in rows in the furrows, and managed with minimal weeding. The other fields, where we’d just scattered seeds, were a disaster, fighting against weeds that went wild because the soil was so fertile.
The lupine bean colonies that had been scattered like islands last year had created lush thickets in the middle of the desolate grassland, like oases. Because of this, we kept receiving complaints from neighboring villages: "Are you going to take responsibility if our livestock dies because of this? Manage your poisonous weeds!"
"Actually, we are a special royal farm conducting experimental farming. Please don't tell anyone; it's a secret."
When I told the village chiefs this quietly, they backed off, perhaps acknowledging the royal authority, but we still did some light mowing to keep the lupine beans from spreading outside the royal farmland.
In the middle of winter, several of the poor laborers complained of collective stomach aches. I made them drink boiled water and realized I had to build an outhouse to deal with the diarrhea. Fortunately, they recovered before long, but I gathered the people who were relieving themselves indiscriminately and established a set of minimum rules. The Tercio brothers grumbled, but when I insisted, they agreed to follow my lead.
"From now on, you must not throw human or animal waste on the streets! If you need to go, I’ve built a toilet over there, so use that."
"Boss, what do we do when it piles up?"
I answered Quixote firmly: "We’re going to make compost."
"With human waste? That’s disgusting..."
The perception that human waste was dirtier than animal waste was common sense in this era, and they were horrified, but I remained firm.
"That’s why we’re going to rot it thoroughly with animal waste to make it clean."
During the off-season, I used the money I earned from hauling logistics with the oxen to buy large jars, wooden ladles, shovels, and slaked lime. The resulting compost pit was about 4m by 4m, with a floor made of clay and slaked lime that was slightly tilted to one side. I dug a pit, whitewashed it, buried the jars, and filled the gaps with straw to ensure that even if leachate leaked, it wouldn't go directly into the ground.
We stacked it in layers: half a span of esparto grass, half a span of waste, and then another layer of grass. We repeated this until the pile reached about chest height—roughly 150cm. With four oxen, two donkeys, one mare, and ten people, it piled up in no time. Thanks to that, I spent the entire off-season acting as a truck driver for others to build the second and third compost pits.
In 1623, while I was busy building compost pits, creating nurseries, growing quince branches into saplings, and farming, political strife continued in Madrid.
"You coward! Are you afraid of war, Count-Duke?"
The Count of Benavente, leader of the aristocratic faction, shouted at Olivares, the head of the Council of State, who had now become a Count-Duke.
"This is His Majesty's will! Do you dare think that of His Majesty?"
Olivares was genuinely aggrieved. The five-year extension of the tacit truce was clearly the will of Philip IV, and Olivares was merely the executor.
However, Olivares was also more satisfied with the current peace than with war. By postponing the war, he could push the banner of purging corruption more firmly. The 44 million ducats embezzled by the Duke of Lerma's faction amounted to four times Spain's national budget of 10 million ducats at the time. He was able to recover nearly half of it for the state treasury. In particular, the return of state-owned land and forests, combined with the cash received from the Low Countries for the truce extension, meant that the empire's financial lifeline, which had been mortgaged to Genoese bankers, was slowly returning to Spanish hands.
"Ha! Who doesn't know that the Count-Duke is managing His Majesty's intentions one by one? Isn't that right?!"
"Hahaha, indeed. I clearly heard His Majesty say, back when he was a prince, that he would restore the glory of Catholicism!"
"Resign! Resign!"
Fucking bastards. Olivares knew why those nobles were acting like that. If war broke out again, they would have to borrow money or sell land using state-owned land and forests as collateral, and their intention to reclaim the lost land was obvious.
'Looking at this, that coachman's words are right. The only ones in this Spain who think of the country are me and a few others.'
If Juan had heard that, he would have waved his hands, saying, "Ugh, you stubborn Count," but Olivares once again firmly believed that he alone was the embodiment of goodness and justice.
Olivares, who reviewed documents for 12 hours a day, saw a document already stamped with the King's seal. It was a report sent by the clerk he had sent to monitor that rude coachman.
It reported that he had planted beans the first year but buried them without harvesting, that when a dispute arose with the Mesta shepherds, he had used royal authority to push them away, and that he was now doing strange things while cultivating wheat fields in various ways.
"Sigh... was he a con artist..."
Deep in his heart, Olivares had hoped that what that braggart coachman said was sincere. But the image of the coachman stumbling around, saying he would try anything, was so vivid that a sense of fatigue washed over him.
It was a summer day in late July when Olivares heard the coachman's story again.
He is an elder of the Grandes (high nobility) faction who survived from the time of the Duke of Lerma.
As a member of the Council of State, he played a role in putting the brakes on Olivares' radical reforms by representing the traditional aristocratic position.