15 Summer, Year 3

The Greenhouse

I wake up, as I always do nowadays, about five minutes before my alarm goes off at 6 am and spend those five minutes dozing blissfully. Alarm goes off, I get up, grab a simple t-shirt, overalls and socks, and go to the kitchen. Bowl, spoon, milk, muesli. I used to have corn flakes in the morning, but that stuff didn't even keep me going for an hour. I grab a gallon jug of iced tea from the fridge – a few bags of regular black tea with some mint leaves and a quarter of melon cut into pieces, with four tablespoons of sugar. I pour out a mug, put the jug back, and go outside.

The sun's technically been above the horizon for maybe ten minutes by this time, but it hasn't risen above the trees yet, and I stand on my porch breathing in the cool sea breeze because I know it's not going to last long. One of the roosters starts crowing. The other answers.

I finish my tea and go grab feed from the silo. Robin has installed an automatic feed system into both the barn and the chicken coop basically because they came with the standard upgrade in her mind, but I've turned them both off. First off, I prefer to have control over how much and what my animals eat – the automatic system doesn't select for things like extra calcium, vitamins or anything like that, it just pipes whatever is in the silo into the feeding troughs indiscriminately. Secondly, it's become a habit, and it's not something I mind doing – it's almost meditative. I already automated watering my crops with a sprinkler system, mainly because drip irrigation wastes less water. I should still do something myself.

However, while I'm on my way to the silo, which sits right in between the barn and chicken coop next to my house, inside the fencing that keeps the animals away from my crops, something glints right into my eyes. Somewhat disoriented, I look up – there's never been anything anywhere in the vicinity that would glint like that before the sun is even up. What I find is something that looks like a big glass pane.

I hurry around the barn, dropping the empty feed bucket which is immediately rushed by the chickens. Then I just stand and stare.

There has always been a slab of concrete just sitting in the ground here. The mayor has told me it used to be a greenhouse. I've asked Robin if she could remove it but she said that would be very difficult because it's armed concrete, full of iron rebar. She wasn't capable of lifting it on her own, or even with my help. The river made it very difficult to get a crane or anything like that close enough. It also wasn't possible to break the thing into pieces because of the rebar. So I've basically left it where it was and found out with time that the goats liked to play on it.

Now, the concrete has just disappeared, and a brilliant structure of glass panes and steel sits in its place as if it was always there. Golden patches of sunlight fall onto the ground around it, reflected from where the rising sun meets its smooth surfaces. Awestruck, I bumble my way inside.

The air is still cool but humid to breathe. A border of about a yard's width, made of large square clinker bricks, runs along the inside of the walls. The rest of the interior of the greenhouse consists of a pale, yellowish dirt. I pick up a handful of it – it's packed in pretty tight – and rub it between my fingers. Coarse and damp. I dig down right next to the edge of the border and find the edge of a sheet of... something. It feels like thick plastic, but it looks woven, with tiny holes in it. Looks like this would allow drainage. But why have the sheet at all? To prevent plants from burrowing too deep? To make sure I don't try planting trees inside? I'll have to figure out how deep the thing runs. Most trees need only four or five feet down. It would be awesome to be able to plant fruit trees in here and have them go on bearing fruit all year*.(*In real life, most of the Stardew Valley fruit trees would need bees, butterflies, or some other kind of insect to pollinate them in order to bear fruit. Putting a beehive inside might sound like a solution for this, but bees need way more pollen and honey to survive than even a standard Stardew greenhouse full of trees could provide, and the greenhouse would need to be closed in winter to keep the heat in for the plants, so a bee colony would starve in winter. So I'm just not going to mention any of this and follow the game. It's junimo magic what pollinates these plants.)

At the back a steel box protrudes from the ground; I take the top off and find that this is a kind of well, full of what looks like groundwater seeping up through a grille in the bottom which is in direct contact with the soil. I imagine the lid would be useful to prevent mosquitoes and other insects from breeding inside. This thing would make watering easy.

Up against each of the steel beams that support the glass panes is a handle. I move one and find out it controls a hatch in the roof, meant to help control heat and humidity inside.

I kind of wonder at my own reaction – whatever happened here, it was obviously magic. But then, I've seen the junimos magically fix up two rooms in the community center by now. It's still awe-inspiring, but I no longer worry about being crazy, and that takes a lot of the sting out of it.

Would it be the junimos that did this? Some kind of extra 'thank you' after me finishing those two rooms? Extra motivation to keep going? I finished the crafts room a month ago and I don't think anything of this magnitude just magically appeared – either on the farm or anywhere else in town, for that matter. Would it be something else? That dang wizard, perhaps? He seemed pretty hung up on having me talk to the junimos, if he found out I'm working together with them now, maybe he would've wanted to do something like this...

Well, if it was him I'm sure I'll get a letter about it soon. He doesn't seem the type to let a good deed go unclaimed. I need to look after my animals and growing crops right now. After that I can think about this. I want to use this greenhouse to the best of its capacity, I'm not just going to start planting or sowing willy-nilly.

And then I'll go fish. Yesterday I got the junimos three of the four fish I can get from the lake on a day like this – the sturgeon refused to bite yesterday. Next time I'll bring a few spinners, they love those. But today I'm going to the beach. If I get there early enough, I'll be able to get a tilapia already, and I'll have all day for the other ocean fish – I might even be able to catch a pufferfish if I'm lucky.

Right when I'm about to leave, fishing pole in hand, I hear a voice calling out to me from the other side of the house.

"Evan? Are you here?"

I quickly go outside to find Maru coming over to the house.

"There you are. I thought you'd left."

"I was just about to, actually, you got here right in time. You wanna see the calf, I imagine?"

"Yeah. Babies are always cute."

"Oh, she's the cutest. Actually, if you like, you can help me think of a name for her. Come on, it's right over here."

I open the fence gate for her and show her the new calf, mainly white with only a few dark brown spots strewn over her.

"Awww, she's the cutest thing. Can I pet her?"

"Yeah, that's fine."

Maru strokes the calf's flank first.

"She's so soft! I thought cows had rough fur."

"They do. Just try mom here. She's gonna molt in fall and then she's gonna be rougher. How was your party? Did I miss a lot?"

"The cake," she shrugs happily, "if you're into death by chocolate. Probably would've saved me from an extra pound or two. For the rest, it was a standard party. Music, chips, loud talking."

"Okay."

"My strawberry plants are kinda dying."

"That's pretty normal, it's getting too hot for them."

"There's nothing I can do about that?"

"Shading them with something can help. Misting them with water once or twice a day, too, but be careful they don't stay wet for too long, and don't splash soil onto the leaves. You get fungus. If you still have them in pots, the best thing you can do is put them in a cool room in the house where they get indirect sunlight, like in a northern window. That's where mine are."

"That might be a bit complicated. They're forming stolons, I have one with like three long spurs sticking out and a pot for each of them to let them take root."

"Careful with that," I chuckle, "if you give them a pot for every stolon, you'll have fifty by next year."

"I just wanna see them to their thing. You know, track the formation of roots and leaves and stuff."

"In that case why don't you let one plant keep two stolons, or let two plants each keep one. Then you can track them both, see if there's any difference, and in the end you'll only have two extra plants. If you want to track stolons you can also follow my permaculture patch, by the way, they're doing pretty well there."

"Wait, you do permaculture now?"

"Yeah, I wanted to try it out. Started this spring, there's not much to look at yet."

"Can I see?"

"Sure. It's in the back. Watch your step."

I lead her across my fruit tree island – I planted one sapling of each tree about a week ago – to a piece of 'mainland' at the west side of the farm where I've randomly cast a bunch of seeds from different crops to see how they would play together. I've laid out some planks for paths too, just to make sure I'd still have access after a year. By now, I have cherry tomatoes leaning on small lavender and blueberry sprigs, raspberry and beans starting to climb amaranth and artichoke stalks that will bloom later in the year and sunflower that's opening its big yellow flowers right now. There's foxtail millet and white goosefoot starting to grow seed in dozens of small bunches, and pumpkin, yellow squash and melons creeping in between, the latter two resting immature fruit on the ground.

"I come check on this every now and then, but I mostly leave it alone. I've been thinking I might just let everything go to seed, let the plants figure out who's staying and who's not, but it might get a bit crowded with the millet."

"Sorry, millet is...?"

I grab an ear of the growing millet.

"Thing is, it's an annual, and birds really love this one, so it might not be that bad."

"I guess you'll have to see next year. And you're going to let the birds eat this?"

"I might harvest some," I shrug. "It's fun to have different flours to mix and match for bread, but I'm not looking to sell this stuff. I'm thinking, if I can produce most of my own food off this patch, then I can sell what I grow on the large island integrally. And millet has no gluten, so it's hard to make a bread with only millet flour – you always have to mix it in with other grains."

"Or you can make a gruel. When I was a kid my dad would bring this seven-grain mix from the city, like oatmeal flakes but a bunch of different flakes, to boil in milk. I love that stuff, and whenever anyone in the house is sick mom will make that for them, because it's very easy on an upset stomach."

"What, just grains in milk?"

"Like oatmeal, I told you. You can add cinnamon or banana or raisins, sugar or honey, whatever you like. Though when you have an upset stomach, better drop the cinnamon."

"Do you know what grains are in that?"

"I don't think I know seven grains, for starters. It will have had wheat and oat, for sure, and maybe millet too, and... what else do you have, rye?"

"You get barley. Buckwheat. Corn and rice are technically also grains."

"I'm sure it'll be on the box."

Maru starts walking back across the planks that form the bridge to the fruit tree island.

"Oh, did you know the quarry bridge just randomly got repaired?"

"The what?"

"The quarry bridge. That big bridge on the other side of the lake from our house that leads to the old quarry. Have you never seen that?"

"Oh, that." I've spotted it while fishing. "So what happened? Did your mom do it, or did Lewis pay someone else to come in?"

"No one knows. Lewis says he has nothing to do with it. One day mom went for a walk, she does that nearly every afternoon, and came back looking like she'd seen a ghost saying the bridge was back. And not just repaired, but literally like new. As if someone got rid of all the old rotting wood and remade the whole thing exactly the way it was before. She says it's a miracle."

"When did that happen?"

"About a month ago." We're walking through the animal pen again, back toward the house. "Before the flower dance, actually. The weekend before."

"Huh. That's... weird," I muse, trying not to glance at the greenhouse. I find it strange that Maru hasn't mentioned it, but maybe she's too caught up in her thoughts and the conversation to notice.

"It's really useful, though, having access to the quarry again. It's completely full of rocks by now because nobody has been able to get to it for years."

"So... This quarry is a place where rocks roll down from the mountain? Or something? Sounds kinda dangerous."

"No, no, they come from inside the mountain. There's this really interesting process going on in the soil layers there that pushes up rocks from deep below ground. They just kind of go round, I think, almost like convection. My dad won't let me go there because it's dangerous. You get sinkholes and stuff."

"Right."

"People used to get ore and gems and stuff from there. But I don't know how they got to the rocks... Some of them are pretty big, not exactly a kind of thing you lasso."

"No. But it does sound interesting to figure out how that works, maybe I'll ask your dad sometime. Well, it's a pleasure to have you over, but I was hoping to do some fishing today. I'm gonna leave for the beach." It's too late for tilapia already, but I don't really have anything else to do.

"Can I watch?"

"You wanna watch me fish?"

"Yeah. Sounds cool."

"You're aware that when I catch a fish, I have to bash its head in on a rock?"

"O...kay." That sounds slightly less enthusiastic. "Better than letting them suffocate, really."

"Well, if you want to see, sure."