Challenge #04941-M192: Slow, Slow Progress

A person who studies plants, but is not a druid, just a normal human, works with her elven husband to develop Harukh'ai crop plants that grow more quickly, grow larger, and are more nutritious. Others may sneer, but they truly believe the way to world peace, is by making sure no one goes hungry. -- BKF

[AN: Possibly in relation to Had a Bad Day ]

Hard-root in its natural form is a slow-growing tuber that, like most things that grow in the Harukh'ai steppes, is hardy and tough as rocks. It takes quite a lot of work to actually kill the plant that grows it, as the Elves once driven out of the plainlands testified in their records.

It was also very slow to grow and necessitated the nomadic lifestyle of the Harukh'ai tribes.

A mature hard-root tuber is roughly the size of a firkin[1] and weighs close to seven hundred pounds. It is not merely physically dense, but nutritionally dense as well. No wonder that the Haruk'ai are muscular.

It's their staple food. It can be pounded into flour, fashioned into pastry, bread, or chopped and added into a stew. If the tribe was in a hurry, a whole tuber could be roasted inside a coating of clay or salt in the evening campfire, then divided amongst the party. There were many ways to eat it, and some advance scouts chewed on chips of it to prevent dehydration on their travels.

They are understandably upset when they learn that their most versatile vegetable has been treated like a weed, or worse - art supplies. Waste is a sin to any Harukh, especially waste of food. Learning that someone turned an entire meal for your tribe into a set of decorative tableware is guaranteed to cause rage.

It's worse if they turned it into a statue. Or a clock.

Needless to say, the Hardroot has been the reason why Harukh'ai culture was the way it was. The plant shaped the people and their way of life for thousands of years. It sparked many territorial wars because farmers saw vast expanses of land and thought growing their crops on it was a brilliant idea. They had no thought of disturbing the natural biosphere because it was in their way.

And then, so were the Harukh'ai.

After centuries of bloody battles, and more than a few trade agreements, smarter minds thought of a different approach. Make the Hardroot better.

The only vague insult was that the people undergoing such a mission were not Harukh'ai themselves. Darzes Boldrumeth and hir Elven husband Vanan had been studying the plant for two decades, and were working on a more domesticated variant.

Something that grew to maturity quicker, but retained all its nutritious qualities. Breeding the right variant was the tricky part. Which was, as Darzes frequently put it, a bugger.

Those that grew quickly were often soft, and frequently as nutritious as a snowflake. Even coaxed into growing, they would be lackluster at best and inedible at worst.

One brute-force attempt with pure Druidic magic - a result of Vanan's frustration - got the ripened Hardroot correct, but the cost was a vast impoverishment of the soil. So much so that it was almost barren for three years.

In brief... Hardroot and the nature of the steppes were the ultimate smarty-pants.

The breakthrough came twenty-nine years after their first experiments. What if they combined the sedentry farming methods with an accelerated Hardroot plant. Enriched soil would enrich the Hardroot, and not become barren during such.

Success!

Now all they needed to do was breed the tuber so that it would grow much quicker than the original.

Vanan would spend more than Darzes' lifetime in the effort, but at least it was a start.

[1] 17" (~50cm) diameter, and 23.75" (~60cm) long. Yes, I did go on a wiki-walk to look that up. And I did math on the rest using the mean density of oak. Which is roughly 317 kilograms.

[Photo by feey on Unsplash]

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