Chapter 18 More animals and making food

Of course, the milk was beyond delicious. Not only did we find magified cows, but their bonus was tied to their milk production, both more delicious and higher quality, at a reduced amount produced. It just meant that the six or so gallons we could have gotten ended up being four and a half, but the cost it could be sold was more than ten gallons of common milk. That price increased by double if its quality went to uncommon.

They were the first I felt worth feeding the magified clover as I was letting it build up in the field between the forest and crop plots. It was rapidly expanding, and there were about two and a half fields of clover grown right now. It was hard to keep adventurers from trampling them, and some deer had been testing their own skittishness by walking out of the forest to eat at the clover patch.

The chickens, ducks, and geese weren’t worth feeding the magified clover. The few times I did cut a bucketful and add it to their field, they mostly ignored it, focusing on the more colorful food they could eat, pecking rocks over the amazing animal feed. If their eggs had improved in quality, I couldn’t tell. As the cows loved grazing in the clover patches, I decided to fence them around the bulk of it while replanting clover all the way around the town in smaller batches so it could spread. I would need to turn the goat milk into cheese or butter from now on, as the normal cow milk was so delicious that no one would buy it anymore.

The cows were the first game-changer for the village. Well, I guess my moving to the village and growing fresh crops was the first, but the cows were the first I could notice the difference from. In just days, the happiness of everyone (who was too happy for me) had improved by a significant amount. It wasn’t just me who was craving eggs and milk, and if I was being treated well before now, I was almost a small celebrity.

Every new plant or animal I got was another thing they could rely on. It was another thing to add variety to what they ate. From what I knew, the meals before I came to town were mostly meat harvested from the dungeon monsters and slightly old bread. Maybe more shelf-stable foodstuffs like jerky, jam, or cheese if they wanted to pay a premium for it.

Now they could buy much cheaper fruits and vegetables from the merchant, and it made everyone in the entire town happier. It drove me now. Every bit of the progress I made with my farming was visible to the people, and I wanted to see how far I could push that. Could I increase the size of the village to that of a town? Would people move here just to get a hold of my products? How many women could I convince that I was worth betting on as a life partner?

That was why I was still searching for the highest quality fertilizer I could get. Even if the chances of getting the money I put into the plants were low, it was still worth it. Just to have that chance of reaching into the epic range for certain plants, it was worth it. I had no plans to sell them, but I needed to find a high-level chef. The possibility of having meals prepared that permanently boost stats will only go up if I start helping anyone with the chef class from now on.

…Which was nice to know because Cherry had a chef adjacent class. That was why she constantly made house visits. How did I not know about this until I started to search for my future projects? Making the strawberry jam every day was growing my chef profession slowly, but I may just stop that and have Cherry do it for me from now on.

A week went by, and I got my dog, fertilizer, and a bunch of farm cats. All of us named a handful of the cats, but we couldn’t decide on the dog's name. Tems wanted to call him Tems Dog, Silk wanted to call him Mr. Fartalot, and I wanted to call him Duke. We settled on Tems Duke Fartalot. That was his full name, I settled on calling him Duke in informal settings and Fartalot when he did something bad.

If I really needed to get his attention, I’d say his full name, and he’d come running so he wouldn’t get in that much trouble. He was the only animal that didn’t seem to immediately listen to Silk. It could be her cat nature, but I wasn’t sure. The cats were Tems Cat, Tems Other Cat, Queeny, Princess, Misses Poopsy, and Baron Von Poopenmayer.

The fertilizer cost more than all the animals put together, costing an entire gold for a single bag, which could cover maybe a tenth of a field. It was lucky that I only planned on using the fertilizer on the wicker golems to maximize their bonus. My mouth was already watering thinking about the potential epic magified strawberries. Even trying the epic mushrooms or moss, if they grew, was something I wanted to do.

Cherry even had a recipe involving strawberries, which had the chance of giving a permanent boost. It wasn’t my job to get her other recipes… But I still began looking for epic mushroom and moss recipes just in case. Both could also be made into potions, and finding potions that required the epic ingredients that also provided a permanent boost might be something I did after everyone in the family got the food boost first.

I patiently waited, just taking care of the farm and harvesting when necessary. I was waiting for the return on investment from the first set of bundles I made, and after testing, it seemed that no matter who dried the products, as long as Olivia milled them down into powder, she gained her increased quality chance. The dramatic shift in ingredient quality was even more noticeable than with the base products.

The difference between a common tomato and an uncommon wasn’t much, just slightly more tomatoey… If that was a word, with rare being even more tomatoey. The difference between common and uncommon tomato powder was that even a small sprinkle of the rare tomato powder she made was enough to flavor any soup it was added to.

The difference was cumulative. If the difference between common to uncommon was double the flavor of a fruit. The difference for each quality improvement for finished products would be four times that amount. Considering that my chef was so low that most of the products I made degraded back down into common or uncommon, I never noticed the gigantic difference in the taste from strawberries to strawberry jelly.

Cherry was probably making rare or even epic jam and enjoying it all to herself while we were eating the common version! Now I was wondering what legendary jelly would taste like. My brain couldn’t even fathom the difference. If it multiplied every tier, it would be sixteen times tastier than common jelly and thirty-two times tastier than a common strawberry.

The first problem with giving away the spice assortments showed itself. The initial cost of giving away the sample bundles wouldn’t be recouped until they used them all the way up and needed to buy the actual full-sized bundles. That would still take up to a month, and at the price… I wasn’t sure that many would buy them. It was a risk to give away the samples but if I didn’t, then no one except those with more money than they knew what to do with would buy the product and it would get shipped away from the village and I’d have to wait even longer with me losing more money on the merchants selling the product elsewhere.