7. Planting the Fall Crops

Synthia was no farmer. Sure, she had livestock - her own lallabaa and fyrefowl that kept her busy, but these days - who didn't? Farm Song was a booming business that saw that nearly every kitsusagi in Silverlight had at least one fyrehen of their own, but did that make every kitsu who owned a livestock beast a farmer? No, certainly not. A barn and a pen didn't make you a farmer, you chose to be one! You could dedicate your time to learning about how to produce the most bountiful crop, or the sparkliest of lallabaa wool, it was the determination and interest in being a farmer that could make you one. (Whether you were a good farmer or not, well, that was it's own debated matter.) 

So, with the knowledge that Synthia, despite having a barn, a pen and a coop and many livestock animals that she tended to on the daily, Synthia would never consider herself a farmer. She preferred the word 'freelancer' because it sounded more unique and independent in nature. As though there were no boundaries when it came to how she could spend her time after feeding and watering her hens and 'baas. Synthia could go to the beach, even though it was so much colder in the autumn than it was in the summer. She could visit the local shops around Silverlight, though there were only a couple of them that were very well established and Synthia would often feel the anxiety of loitering when she had never intended to buy anything upon coming in. Why, she even had the opportunity to think of an idea that no kitsu before her had ever imagined! But that would mean that she'd have to come up with the idea first, which was usually the hard part. 

Was the only thing to be done in Silverlight really to revolve around farming? Well, Synthia supposed she could give it a shot. But not a livestock farmer - that was too close to what she did on a day-to-day. No, she was going to be a crop farmer and to be a crop farmer in autumn, she needed to start putting things in the ground. Taking off towards the more wooded areas of Silverlight, Synthia began her search. She'd heard of others finding wild flower seeds or some such if they just looked on the ground thoroughly enough. Maybe she would get luck with that too! Though really, with her knowledge and experience of crops.... anything that she put in the ground was sure to grow into something useful, eventually, right? Surely it couldn't just be seeds that did wonders to the ground and sprouted in the springtime. 

With this in mind, as she began to pass by a number of various things around the bases of trees and bushes,  Synthia found that she was finding a lot of things that were NOT seeds of any variety, but, it being autumn, she did find a ridiculous amount of leaves. So, after gathering a bundle of leaves, she started to dig holes in the ground and stuff the leaves into those holes before covering them with loose soil again. That counted as planting for fall, surely? She was planting leaves that had FALLen from branches and crop farmers just sprinkled seeds on the ground and then things happened, so as far as she knew, Synthia would see new trees in the forest by winter. Surely plants couldn't take so long to grow up, right?