An orphan girl from a farming family: Everyday farming in the mountains during natural disasters

The pond was located at a high position. The original owner's father, Xia Dasong, cut some thick bamboo, split it in half, and removed the internodes one by one.

A bamboo is limited in length, so we specially found bamboos of suitable size that can be pieced together and connected them together. A vertical line starts from the pond. The fields are distributed on both sides of the canal. Near the canal, the bamboo extends to the left and right, changing from a 1 shape to a V shape. The water from the fork flows to the left and right, and is transported to the two fields and ends in the fields.

A total of sixteen bamboos were spliced ​​together, which is equivalent to a bamboo water pipe with two outlets.

The field and the pond are one low and one high. Xia Dasong found some wood and made it into a Y shape. He then inserted it into the ground according to local conditions to firmly support the bamboo water pipe. In this way, it is both stable and beautiful.

After the rice was harvested last year, the bamboo water pipes were collected and placed on the open space on the side of the cave. Xia Qingyue was short and weak, so she could not carry a whole bunch of pipes for too far. She dragged them one by one with great effort. After she dragged them all out, she put all her strength together and placed them one by one on the Y-shaped wooden frame, connecting them one by one and putting them together.

It's not always flexible and convenient to do this kind of work alone. It took her more than two hours just to put together the scaffolding and she was exhausted and out of breath.

She pieced it together from low to high. There were some places she couldn't reach, so she moved a stool and stood on it to put it together. As the last bamboo was put together, the water in the pond instantly flowed down along the bamboo strips.

Xia Qingyue followed along and found that some joints were leaking. Fortunately, the leak was not big and there was nothing to worry about. The water slowly flowed into the dry fields.

The field is more than two acres in size and the water will take a while to flow. Taking advantage of this gap, Xia Qingyue picked up a hoe and went to open up the vegetable field.

The slope below the sinkhole is overgrown with weeds and trees, and the soil is sandy. She plans to plant some easy-to-grow pumpkins, loofahs, gourds, and grapes.

There are also several varieties of pear, plum, peach and orange trees. They take time to grow, so we certainly won’t be able to eat them in recent years, but the sooner we plant them, the sooner we can eat them.

Remove the weeds with their roots, add the chicken and duck manure collected during this period into the soil, mix them together, turn it over, make a nest, sow the seeds, and water them after planting.

She took a look at the fields. There was little water and it needed to flow for a while longer. She turned to the sweet potato field and dug up all the sweet potatoes. If they were left in the field, they would be infested with insects and would not grow anymore. So she simply dug them all out, picked out some good ones for seeds to germinate and replant, and ate the less good ones.

A small piece of land dug out a basket of sweet potatoes, and as expected, one-third of the sweet potatoes had worm holes.

As it got dark, the water in the field had almost run out. She pushed the bamboo in the pool aside, cutting off the source of the water, and the water in the bamboo pipe ran out.

It’s dark now, so we can only plow the fields tomorrow.

Xia Qingyue fed the chickens and ducks, then started to prepare her dinner. She cooked millet porridge, which contained a lot of lard. She took some out and fried it with wild onions. She simply seasoned it and it tasted delicious.

Lard residue is an oily food and can be kept for a few days if properly stored. She plans to use it to make some dumplings tomorrow.

When the sky was bright, Xia Qingyue carried two loads of cassava back to the tiankeng. When she was walking back for the second time, it was estimated to be around 9:00 p.m., when Chen Yuzhen and her family came together to dig cassava.

Chen Yuzhen saw that some places had been dug recently and guessed, "It should be Qingyue who dug it recently."

Li Weisheng said, "Thanks to sister Qingyue, this cassava is really edible. It tastes almost like sweet potato. Mom, when you met her yesterday, did you tell her that we were also planning to move up the mountain?"

Chen Yuzhen, who was digging cassava with a hoe, didn't even raise her head and said, "I told you."

"In the future we will all live in the mountains and have company." Li Weisheng said with a look of anticipation.

Li Benfu looked at his two sons and said:

"Kang'er, Sheng'er, we will carry these cassavas to the cave later. Today we will move our belongings up there and then bring your grandparents over.

If the situation gets bad later and more people go up the mountain to survive, we can meet Dasong and the others again and see if they are willing to support each other. There is strength in numbers.

It is a good thing that they agree, but if they have their own concerns, we must not get angry and force them. "

"That's right. We have a large family and we don't want to drag them down." Chen Yuzhen said.

Then she stopped swinging the hoe, feeling guilty and blaming herself, "I saw that child yesterday, he had lost a lot of weight, his face was only the size of a palm, Second Mother and her family must have had a hard time in the mountains, and we couldn't help them at all.

Oh, I really regret it. I should have prepared more food for Qingyue to take back."

At that time, she was afraid that Xia Qingyue would go far away, so she only had time to take a few items of food.

Li Weisheng said loudly: "Next time we meet, we will prepare more for Sister Qingyue and the others. Mother, I will go to the forest to hunt more prey and bring it back!"

Standing above and blocked by dense trees, Xia Qingyue lowered her eyes to look at the cloth bag in her hand, which contained dried rabbit, dried chicken and sweet potatoes.

She pursed her lips, and recalled the scenes of the Li family and the original owner's family getting along in the past.

In the original owner's memory, the Li family was simple, sincere, upright and kind, and they were treated as family members.

Her heart began to pound in her chest and her eyes felt inexplicably sore. Xia Qingyue felt the strange changes in her body and thought to herself: "Xia Qingyue" (the original owner), do you want to accept these things?

A tear fell from the corner of her eye. Xia Qingyue tightly grasped the bag in her hand, stopped listening, and walked away carrying the cassava on her back.

Having borrowed the original owner's body, she decided to respect the other person's wishes.

As she walked further away, the strange feelings she had just had disappeared completely, as if everything was just an illusion.

On the way back, she picked some green shepherd's purse.

The cassava they carried back weighed more than 200 kilograms and were spread out on a cool open space.

She steamed a dried chicken and a dried rabbit given by the Li family, a few sweet potatoes, a piece of pickled bacon, and a bowl of chicken and duck eggs, and took them to the earthen grave of Xia Dasong and his wife to kowtow and pay homage.

Kneeling on the ground, she stared at the fragrant offerings. Later, every once in a while, she would use the things given by the Li family to worship them.

The offerings can be eaten after the worship. Now that food is scarce, we must cherish it even more. She peeled the chicken and duck eggs and gave them to Heihei to eat.

The air-dried chicken was steamed, the rabbit was stewed with fresh bamboo shoots, and the bacon would be prepared tomorrow. These dishes would be enough for her to have three meals.

I wanted to plow the fields in the afternoon, but it suddenly started to rain heavily and my plan had to be shelved.

The rain didn't stop until late at night.

Early in the morning.

Xia Qingyue took out the coarse white flour, which was flour. It was not fine enough like sand, so she used a stone mortar to grind it in small amounts several times until it became fine.

It’s not that there is no fine noodles, but they are expensive, so coarse noodles are more cost-effective.

Add water and a small amount of salt to the ground flour and knead it until it is smooth, then set it aside. At this time, she prepares the stuffing. She squeezes out the water from the blanched shepherd's purse and cuts it into fine pieces. She also pats the lard residue into granules, as they will not taste good if they are too finely divided.

She planned to make two kinds of fillings, shepherd's purse and lard, and wild onion and bacon.

After the filling was prepared, she took a clean wooden stick from the utility room and rolled out the dough.

Rolling noodles seems simple, but it is actually difficult to do. When she was a child, she followed her grandmother to learn how to do it for a long time.

The dumpling wrappers she rolled out were of moderate thickness and the right size. She rolled them all out in one go and sat by the stove to make dumplings. She didn't make them too complicated. She just put the fillings in, folded the wrappers together, and then held the dumplings with both hands and pinched them hard.

As long as it looks acceptable and doesn't reveal the truth, it's good.

She made two baskets of dumplings, cooked them for lunch, and had one basket left for dinner.

The cooked dumplings rolled and floated up. Through the crystal-clear skin, she could see that some of the dumplings had a little red and green inside. These were filled with wild onion fillings, which were easy to identify. She scooped a bowl of them and poured them into the black bowl.

The dumplings were still steaming hot, and Heihei couldn't wait to eat them, enjoying their delicious taste.

As far as I can remember, there was no such food as dumplings in Dayuan, and the only food they had was simple noodles.

She finally got to eat the dumplings she had been craving for, and the taste did not disappoint her. The dumpling skin was chewy, the shepherd's purse oil residue filling was tender and fragrant, and the wild onion and bacon were delicious.

It was so delicious that she ate two whole bowls and her belly was slightly full.

She ate too much and felt sleepy, so she went to take a nap.

After waking up, Xia Qingyue felt full of energy and had endless strength. She went to the utility room to find a tool for manual plowing. It was made of wood and a blade. It was driven by hand by holding the wood, and the blade below was pushed into the soil to break up the soil and plow grooves in the soil.

In her previous life, when she was a child, she plowed the fields with the help of oxen, but the tools were different, so this time she had to do the work.

She rolled up her trouser legs and took off her shoes, her feet felt slightly warm when they entered the water. After a whole morning in the field basking in the sun, she held the plowing tools, adjusted her posture and moved forward. At first, her limbs were not coordinated and she plowed crookedly, but gradually, she figured out the tricks and became more and more proficient.

It took Xia Qingyue almost three days to plow two acres of paddy field.