Harvest Festival
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.
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- Admiral Biscuit · 7.4k words · 51 3 · 973 views
- Admiral Biscuit · 1.4k words · 54 3 · 1.7k views
- Admiral Biscuit · 3.5k words · 34 2 · 911 views
- Admiral Biscuit · 6.3k words · 43 2 · 1.4k views
- Not a pipe · 3.9k words · 49 1 · 901 views
- Admiral Biscuit · 1.3k words · 46 5 · 1.4k views
- Admiral Biscuit · 3.2k words · 36 3 · 1k views
- Admiral Biscuit · 1.7k words · 30 5 · 1.1k views
Stats
Page generated in 0.156 seconds
Total duration
964 users online
93,288 hits today, 2,364,530 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Silly, Twilight. You can't eat eggplants raw.
That's not proper experimental protocol at all, Twilight!
2698203
In the show, she does seem hit-or-miss on the proper experimental process. Where was the control in Feeling Pinkie Keen? Maybe ponies haven't fully discovered the scientific method yet.
2698214
Yeah, she's more of a science fanfilly than an actual scientist, really.
That's kind of a scary thought, actually, if ponies can have ca.1940s-level technology without even knowing about the scientific method. Imagine what they'd be able to do once they do figure it out!
Breaded and fried, eggplant is delicious.
Hah! This was quite enjoyable, well in character for Twilight and others.
About her scientific skills, I chalk a lot of it up to the show being aimed primarily at children. (And in Feeling Pinkie Keen, the moral was all about Twilight letting her preconceptions and prejudices blind her, and being a bad scientist as a result.)
For something labelled with just the comedy tag, there were very scarce laughs in here. Actually, no laughs, just a few snickers. It's technically a comedy in that it skewers a normal situation in a comical manner, but perhaps adding the [slice of life] tag would be a good idea. It's more slice-of-life than comedy anyway.
Poor Twilight. It is fun tormenting characters, though.
MLP fanfic stories are filled with a boatload of stories with hay fries and very few with eggplant parmesan, which I'm sure civilized ponies would eat if they tried it. There's an Italian restaurant in my town that does the best eggplant lasagna...
“Knowledge is knowing that
a tomatoan eggplant is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that it doesn't belong in a fruit salad.” — Miles Kington (slightly modified)3824823 Noting wrong with that.
Oh Twilight, you never fail to amuse.
Of course her biggest mistake was realizing that an eggplant is both a fruit (in the botanical sense, as in the seed bearing part of a plant) and a vegetable (in the gastronomical sense, as in it doesn't belong in a fruit salad).
Nice story, though.
2763207
I've never met an eggplant dish I liked yet, to be honest.
3811586
I added the slice-of-life tag. You're right, it's appropriate for the story.
3810754
I think [incoming headcanon] that the ponies are in the nebulous era between proper scientific research and an earlier try-it-and-see model.
3811616
At least there weren't any centipedes.
3821159
I've been disappointed with the lack of cuisine in most stories. How hard would it be for an author to get a vegetarian cookbook?
3824823
Dungeons and Dragons stats explained with a tomato (which is how the idea came to me):
3829009
In Onto the Pony Planet, I have a short bit where Twilight is getting frustrated in a kitchen, because the chef is presenting food items by their classification by chef, rather than their biological classification.
3833978
Well, the Seattle's Angel's review gave it a bit of a boost.
3837747
It's not the only food that's classified wrong for cooking purposes. Wikipedia has a long list of things that are called vegetables which really aren't.
3846439
There was actually a court case at some point where someone tried to claim that tomatoes should fall under vegetable regulations (taxes, tariffs, something like that) and the court's ruling basically boiled down to a couple dictionary quotes and "Nice try, smart-ass." (I don't have the cite handy, but it shouldn't be too hard to Google.)
3846472
There's all sorts of weird stuff in case law. The reason that a PT Cruiser can have tinted rear windows from the factory and a Dodge Charger can't goes back to a chicken tariff in the sixties, and nobody's bothered to change the law.
Eeww... Many will no doubt disagree, but in my own little world eggplant, zucchini, and other summer squash, are just cellulose inflated with water--nature's answer to Styrofoam. They have no use but to take up space.
3872587
I'm with you on that one. My dad always planted zucchini, since it grows no matter what, and pests won't touch it. One year, it cross-pollinated the cucumbers, so they tasted like zucchini, too.
3846439
In my experience eggplant does best when it is in a dish with other things, like a stew. Eggplant tempura is also pretty good.
The scientific method is essentially a refinement of Platonic philosophy, so maybe the ponies haven't had their own version of the ancient gadfly yet.
My personal theory is that Twilight is more of a polymath and bibliophile and less of a rigorous researcher. She is very good at learning things other people have already discovered and less good at finding things out for herself.
4078838
Ya know, I never thought about that, but thinking about it, she gave up on figuring out Pinkie Sense, and the only new thing I can recall she's ever done is finish Starswirl's spell. Many of the other unique spells she's used came from a book: she specifically mentioned this before the pony-to-breezie spell, as well as Rarity's 'glimmerwings' spell.
Also, I'm pretty sure in Celestia Sleeps In, one of the characters (probably Luna) actually referred to Twilight as a 'polymath.'
Very interesting writing style there... short, sharp one-liner paragraphs sandwiched in between to ease out the longer stretches. The characters feel slightly floppy though, like they aren't speaking and moving with enough vigor. I kind of expected a twist where the control eggplants she just left in her garden without any care would end up giving her gigantic prize-winning fruits, hmm.
4278058
I'm glad you noticed that; nobody else seemed to.
That would have been a funny twist....
Are you thinking that I should have used more action tags to go along with the dialogue, or was the dialogue itself flat and uninspired?
4278074
I feel it’s a mixture of both. More action or movement would definitely spice things up, especially during that long stretch of dialogue at the carnival. I think it would be good to actually slow down for a while there and describe something, or have some sort of action sequence that’s substantial enough to balance out the dialogue. That conversation is slightly too lengthy as it is, so it gives me the feel of a “static” scene, or “talking heads” among characters. If a conversation is to be of the standalone type, it either needs to punchy enough such that interrupting it would dramatically break its flow, or short enough such that you would not risk losing the reader. An example for the first type could be a high tension argument, and an example of the second type would be just a short joke cracked between two characters, a bit like what you got there between AJ and RD, before Twilight interrupts.
I find that short stories mostly from the SoL genre need to depend heavily on characterization to drive itself forward, because there isn’t enough space to develop and build up a convoluted, intricate plot, so the emphasis is really placed on the characters themselves. That’s just my opinion though :)
4283018
Alright, that's fair. I can see where I could have put in some worldbuilding--them passing a certain booth, perhaps, or Twilight or AJ actually getting a deep-fried caramel apple. Or even just an incidental meetup with a group of ponies.
That was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed Twilight's characterization. Thumbs up.
Do I see...eggplants?
img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101006194111/mario/de/images/c/c9/WaluigiMP8a.PNG
4765100
I presume that's the anti-Luigi? Has he got a thing for eggplants?
4766712
Waluigi, and yes.
4769953
I feel the urge to write a one-shot crackfic where Waluigi goes to Equestria, mistakes Twilight for an eggplant, and eats her.
4771917
4815461
Nosflutteratu and later the Bats! episode have firmly established that Fluttershy is, indeed, a vampire; therefore, she's the antithesis to garlic.
4815525
Which would make Wario's bite toxic to her.
So, I take ut that without earth pony magic in her, Twilight won't stand a chance in the contest? Fruit or not.
4857213
Nopony can compete with Big Mac's giant cucumber.
4857255
Wish I knew what a cucumber is... hard to get things translated on a phone... Neverless, it sure is not easy to compete.
4857268
pngimg.com/upload/cucumber_PNG2049.png
Besides its normal use sliced in salads and on some sandwiches, it's also what pickles are normally made out of.
Also, in America at least, it's sometimes used to refer to a penis (which is the joke).
4857300
There was a joke? Hm... not that funny. And thanks for the information.
4857334
It was meant to be a subtle nod to the headcanon that Big Mac is well-endowed.
4857352
I need to figure out how to get something like Google Translate to work well on my phone... I have no clue what well-endowed means.
4857376
Has a bigger than average penis.
4857395
...how did I not put that togheter...
A bit rough for Twilight, you'd think some pony would praise her for trying her best even if she didn't win, only Rainbow seemed to have her corner at all. Applejack seemed down right Tribalist.
5141076
They were all too busy laughing at the idea of a unicorn growing crops.
I'm sure AJ would be appropriately sympathetic. She'd know right from the get-go that Twilight won't win.
I must confess I didn't get these bits.
I actually have a book on the history of plumbing. it's genuinely facinating.
Quite a shock, I don't usually find any proofreading errors in your stuff.
Here's me thinking you were an intellectual, and all this time it turns out you're a man of the people.
Faved and thumbed.
Loved Twilight.
The fave, however is for capturing AJs voice and affect.
6646785
myfreebingocards.com/numbers/1-75/link_img.png
At the time this was written, it was assumed that Rarity's dad was an earth pony, which would make her half earth pony, and thus (presumably) make her more adept at growing things. We now know that he isn't, but then again, now he's named Hondo Flanks, too.
I've always assumed that what sets earth ponies apart from unicorns and pegasi (and why they can fit in as equals even though they can't cast magic and can't fly) is that they're very good at growing things, building things, and overall strength and endurance. Rarity has the latter two traits in canon, so it made sense to me that she's biologically a half-breed.
It is. I read all sorts of stuff like that. Not so much on plumbing (although perhaps I should), but lots of other subjects.
I've got a few very good pre-readers/editors, who generally only miss stuff if I add it in at the last minute. This story was published long before they came onboard.
Wait until you get to Celestia Sleeps in with a Vengeance.
Thank you!
Botanically speaking, a fruit is a seed-bearing structure that develops from the ovary of a flowering plant, whereas vegetables are all other plant parts, such as roots, leaves and stems. By those standards, seedy outgrowths such as apples, squash and, yes, tomatoes are all fruits, while roots such as beets, potatoes and turnips, leaves such as spinach, kale and lettuce, and stems such as celery and broccoli are all vegetables.
The outlook is quite different in culinary terms, however. A lot of foods that are (botanically speaking) fruits, but which are savory rather than sweet, are typically considered vegetables by chefs. This includes such botanical fruits as eggplants, bell peppers and tomatoes.
The fruit vs. vegetable debate can sometimes reach such a fever pitch that the law must step in. In the 1893 United States Supreme Court case Nix. v. Hedden, the court rule unanimously that an imported tomato should be taxed as a vegetable, rather than as a (less taxed) fruit. The court acknowledged that a tomato is a botanical fruit, but went with what they called the "ordinary" definitions of fruit and vegetable — the ones used in the kitchen.
I actually raised eggplants one year, out of curiosity. The only interesting thing about them is the thorn-like cap where the stem meets the fruit. It makes the plant look like something from a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
I raised several generations of squash (curcubita pepo) too, and found that the one species includes a huge variety of cultivars. They'll cross-breed with each other, too. I had digital-camo squash before I gave up that game.
8355925
Eggplants are kind of cool, although I don't know many things that can be made from them that I like. Then again, I've never tried a fruit salad with raw eggplant in it, so maybe I shouldn't bash them until I've done that.
When I was younger, my dad learned that zucchini and cucumbers could cross-pollinate. That was a terrible surprise: all our cucumbers tasted like zucchini.
I don't like to eat eggplants, don't like to look at them, they even feel weird. They even have a weird name here, what kind of vegetable is "Aubergine". Not to mention my grocery budget crumbles at the thought of them.
Their use as an emoji is sublime though
8373211
Wrote that about halfway into the story, and now I know they're not a vegetable. Hm.