Just harvesting a potato took them five days, whereas families with more hands might have finished in just two or three days. With no one to help, the two sisters put in five days of work, but thankfully, all the fruits of their labor were theirs to keep.
Afterward, they troubled the village chief to help them plow the field, offering him ten cents as a reward. Once the field was level, the sisters sowed the wheat seeds that Xiao Yu had bought. In modern times, sowing is done with machines, and before that, there were manual seeders, but they had neither. So, they resorted to the most primitive method: dividing the land into rows, creating little trenches in the soil with their hands, scattering the seeds bit by bit, and then covering them with earth.
No sooner had they planted the wheat than it began to rain, saving them the cost of watering.
