Harvest Festival
Admiral Biscuit
It was an annual tradition in Ponyville, one of many which Twilight had never witnessed before. Oh, sure, the history books had held charming anecdotes about them, but she’d believed that Equestrian civilization had moved on from those simpler times.
Then she went to Ponyville.
For a unicorn accustomed to the hustle and bustle of Canterlot life, the slow pace of Ponyville had been a shock. Things got done when they got done, and that was that. Ponies in the market might spend more time chatting than actually buying—while it was true her father gossiped when he shopped, he did both simultaneously, unlike the Ponyvillians. And, of course, everything in the town—from the school’s schedule to the town planning meetings—revolved around the crops.
She hadn’t been prepared for that.
Nevertheless, the different festivals which were celebrated in Ponyville with great enthusiasm gave her an almost anthropological insight into the difference between Earth pony culture and Unicorn culture. She’d made a foal of herself during her first Winter Wrap-up, but this time she resolved that she’d get it right. She’d read all the right books, and she’d been patient. She’d even tried to get advice from Granny Smith who was—in her opinion—an underutilized resource in Ponyville. True, the matriarch had laughed her off the farm, but still, she’d tried.
She was going to grow eggplants.
Scratch that. Twilight was going to grow record-breaking eggplants. She had every intention of winning an award at the harvest festival. As much of the library was concerned with books about crops, it didn’t take her too long to find guides to home gardening. Admittedly, it was something that earth ponies did without much trouble or training, yet there was always room for improvement: there were innovations in fertilization and irrigation; there were even . . . less-scientific methods, such as serenading the plants.
She would utilize them all.
Twilight marked out her garden space, tested the soil and made adjustments. She’d initially intended to grow tomatoes, but the long list of pests worried her. She knew she couldn’t compete with any earth pony who had a crop as a cutie mark, so carrots were out. Grains were mostly boring—she would feel no satisfaction in growing a bigger ear of corn than somepony else. She finally settled on eggplant. It seemed an un-appreciated crop, although her research had indicated that it was a relative of the tomato. She couldn’t recall if she’d ever eaten one, but that hardly mattered. It seemed noble in its shape, a slender body with a leafy crown, so it probably tasted good, too. A week’s perusal of seed catalogues had persuaded her to grow the so-called Rosa Bianca variety, which was a pleasing shade of lavender.
Not unlike herself.
One of the spare rooms in the library was quickly commandeered as “Eggplant Central.” The seeds finally arrived, and Twilight wasted no time in sorting them neatly on her table, placing each seed into a location on the matrix which indicated what kind of treatment it was to receive. After all, there was no reason to treat this with any less precision than any other scientific experiment. That the packet had been sold by weight rather than seed quantity had caused her no end of frustration, since she was thus unable to pre-determine the most efficient method of planting, but she felt she had neatly avoided the problem by coming up with a dozen different matrices, given the probable quantity of seeds in any given packet. She had also examined other things that were arranged in a matrix, and realized that Bingo had a free space in the center, which worked well for her purposes. She would plant the extra eggplants in a small corner of the garden, where they would receive no care at all.
They would be the control.
Twilight unconsciously kept the biggest seeds for the tests which seemed the most promising: she wrongly assumed that a bigger seed would yield a bigger plant. Humming happily away under the oil lamp’s flickering glow, she transferred the seeds from matrix nine to the array of germinating trays she’d ordered. Each pod was filled with precisely the same amount of soil, and she’d even built a small automatic watering device. Small flags with the seed number went into each pod after the seed, and she dutifully wrote down the time of planting in her notebook.
Then she waited.
Three hours later, there was no sign of sprouting. She laughed at her foalishness, and went off to bed, only getting up twice during the night to check on her seeds, which still hadn’t sprouted. The book said it takes a week, she reminded herself. She wondered how farmers handled the stress of not knowing. In a few days, the strong stallions would be dragging plows through fields, with mares and foals following along behind, scattering seeds into the fresh-tilled earth. Did they wait up all night, worrying about whether the seeds would germinate or not?
They sprouted while Twilight was at Sweet Apple Acres.
Twilight came home after an exhausting day, dragging off her mud-covered boots and saddlebags. While helping with the lambing had seemed like an interesting prospect, it had instead been tedious and vaguely disturbing, putting Twilight off the notion of foals of her own. She debated whether or not she should take Rarity up on her offer for a long soak at the spa, but when she checked on her eggplants, she discovered that all but two had tiny sprouts above the dirt, and the exhaustion fell away as she began measuring and recording data. Early indications were that seed size had little to do with sprout growth.
These were very preliminary results.
The rest of the spring and summer passed by in a blur. Twilight had one bad week, when she found small green caterpillars on her eggplants. One of her books had said that sometimes, a certain wasp would cocoon the pest and lay its parasitic eggs in them—which was, itself, a slightly disturbing insight into nature—and she didn’t know if she should wait for the wasps to show up, or get rid of the caterpillars right away. Finally, she adjusted her experiment, removing them from half the infested plants, while leaving the others to fend for themselves.
Finally, the big day arrived.
Twilight carefully selected the best of her crop—the firmest, largest, lavender-est of the eggplants, trimming them carefully off the vine with a delicate swipe of a knife held in her aura. She’d practiced on a few of the lesser specimens; she intended to eat them for breakfast tomorrow morning. Tonight, she knew she would be full of carnival food. Every year, she was startled to discover how many new food items had been put on sticks and deep-fried. Last year, she’d gotten a deep-fried sugar-dusted ruby for Spike, although that hadn’t been on a stick. She put on her saddlebags, restricting herself to only one notebook, two scrolls, writing implements, and a small treatise on the history of plumbing in Equestrian society—in case she felt the need for a little light reading. But, mainly she was going to have fun.
And win a contest.
She proudly stood by her eggplants, pleasingly arranged on their plinth. There had been one brief misunderstanding when the bored-looking pony overseeing the contest registration had initially directed her to the foal-grown vegetable section, and Twilight could have sworn she heard some snickers when she proudly revealed that she—a unicorn—had in fact raised these beauties from tiny little seeds all on her own, but she didn’t let it get to her. She looked around to see what kind of crops her competition had grown, and came to a startling conclusion.
She was all alone.
Blushing, Twilight belatedly realized that she was supposed to leave her eggplants behind, and go enjoy the festival. She quickly found Applejack and Rainbow Dash, who were arguing louder than the carnival barker was pitching the fire-juggling show.
“Ah ain’t scared ta enter, it’s jest that it’d be unfair ta everypony else.”
“Sure.” Twilight could almost hear Rainbow’s eye-roll. “I could grow, like, bigger apples than you.”
“Ya cain’t plant a apple tree in a cloud, RD.”
“Well, fine.” She let out an annoyed huff. “I’ll grow cloudberries.”
“Them don’t grow on clouds, neither!” AJ stomped her hoof. “Why don’t ya stick ta what y’all are good at? Movin’ about clouds an sleepin’?”
Twilight interrupted them before the argument could turn violent. “Hi, girls, how’s it going?”
“RD here thinks she can grow better apples ‘n me, even though we both know she cain’t.” Ignoring the sputtering pegasus, she continued. “Ya enjoyin’ yer second harvest festival?”
“Yup! I even entered eggplants in the vegetable contest. Although they might technically be fruit. Let’s see, tomatoes are fruit, and they’re both in the same family, so does that mean that all their—“
“Ya entered an ag contest?”
“Eggplants for the egghead. Way to go, Twilight. That’s just . . . oh, man. I can’t wait to tell the girls.” Rainbow rocketed off towards the center of the carnival.
“Well . . . yes. Why not? I did pretty well in the Running of the Leaves, didn’t I?”
Applejack nodded slightly.
“And so I took the scientific approach here, too. I set up a matrix of seed trays, and I—“
“Twilight, Ah hate ta be the one ta break it ta ya, but ya ain’t gonna win. Not against us earth ponies. Even Rarity’d have a better chance, ‘cause Magnum’s an earth pony. Ya just don’t got the . . . natural inclination fer it. The ol’ earth pony magic.”
“But I did everything the book said,” Twilight protested.
“An’ Ah could read a spellbook an’ follow along exactly, an’ nothing’d happen, ‘cause Ah don’t got a horn,” she said, tapping her forehead lightly before pulling her hat back down. “Yer proud of them eggplants ya grew, but there’s gonna be other ponies that’ve got cucumbers the size a watermelons an’ watermelons the size a . . . um, bigger watermelons. Shoot, I ain’t good with superlatives. Ya just wait an see fer yourself.”
“That’s not really a superlative,” Twilight automatically corrected. “It’s more of a—“
“Never ya mind. Come on over ta the food carts. Ah heard a rumor that one a them’s deep-fryin’ caramel apples. That’s the food, not the stallion, ‘n case ya didn’t guess.” Seeing the reluctant look on Twilight’s face, she persisted. “Dontcha be frettin’ over yer eggplants. ‘S bad luck, an’ they won’t be judging ‘em ‘til later anyhow.”
“You remember how well I did in the running of the leaves,” Twilight reminded her. “So don’t be assuming I won’t win just because I’m—“ She sighed. “—an egghead.”
“Time’ll tell, won’t it? Come on, let’s get us some a them caramel apples.”
She didn’t win.
Not a single ribbon. Her eggplants sat forlorn on their plinth, rejected by everypony. Twilight looked at the other winning vegetables; wondering if she should have protested more loudly that eggplant were probably fruit—but the stern heavyset mare who had been the judge had the kind of face—and well-muscled body—that nopony would argue with. Mournfully, she picked up her noble eggplants and levitated them back towards her treehouse, quietly lamenting her loss. When she got home, she was going to look up the classification of eggplants.
They were fruit.
Feeling some slight consolation that she had, indeed, been correct, Twilight decided that she’d lost the contest because the judges had made a mistake. While it was true her eggplants couldn’t compete against Big Mac’s gigantic cucumber, or even Golden Harvest’s marvelous carrots, if they had only been properly classified, they’d have easily beaten Cherry Berry’s small drupes or Ambrosia’s mulberries. Twilight decided she’d prove—at least, to her own satisfaction—that her eggplants were worthy of a prize. Humming softly, she sliced them up and tossed them in a bowl with strawberries, grapes, kiwis, and bananas, mixing it carefully. Salivating with anticipation, she speared a forkful and levitated it to her mouth.
It tasted terrible.
