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

Wood ash water has an insect repellent effect.

In the vegetable garden, the vines of cucumbers, cowpeas, grapes, pumpkins and gourds have grown a lot. The vines of the first three climb up the trellis, while Xia Qingyue did not build a trellis for the last two, so they just climbed on the ground.

Seeing that the climbing plants such as cowpea, cucumber and pumpkin were growing better and better, she topped and pruned them one by one. If she ignored them, they would grow too wildly and affect the yield.

The peppers and eggplants had grown to the height of her knees and were about to bloom. After a while, she wouldn’t be able to eat all of them.

The peanuts have grown taller and are green. It will take another month for them to bloom. As for harvesting, it will be in August or September. You need to keep fertilizing them during this period.

You need to leave more chili peppers to dry and make dried chili peppers, and also soak some fresh chili peppers in a jar to make sour chili peppers.

The ginger seedlings planted later are as long as her palm. When there are ginger seeds, they can be used for cooking and soaked into sour ginger, and the rest can be kept as old ginger.

The meat fried with sour peppers and sour ginger is delicious.

Part of the land that was originally used to grow sweet potatoes is now planted with mung beans and soybeans, and the rest is still planted with sweet potatoes, which are growing well and are lush and green.

The yam vine seedlings were brought back and planted in sandy soil and they survived. The leaves were originally a little yellow, but she applied fertilizer twice and they turned green.

There were more than two acres of vegetable fields, plus the sandy soil on the slope, and a lot of crops were planted in them. It took her more than half an hour to water them.

In a few days, I will have to apply some dry chicken and duck manure as fertilizer, and at the same time cultivate some sandy soil and plant some green vegetables and cabbage.

The rice seedlings in the paddy fields are growing rapidly.

The sun shines on the rice seedlings that are like a green ocean, and the fields are sparkling, like a natural painting, so beautiful.

What Xia Qingyue fears most is that the rice seedlings will be infested with insects. Fortunately, no insects have been found so far.

In fact, she was not good at growing crops. Some of it was learned from her grandmother, and some of it was learned by herself. She didn't do well at the beginning, but got better after gaining experience.

After finishing the planting, she went back and drank a cup of sweet honey water. She poured another cup into the bamboo tube so that she could drink it when she was tired and thirsty.

The bamboo tube used as a water cup was made by Xia Dasong from thick bamboo. It was polished inside and out and was smooth. It also came with a lid, a round cover that was slightly larger than the bamboo tube. It just fit on top but could not be tightened.

Overall, it is very useful.

As the sun rose high in the sky, she wore a straw hat and started digging with a hoe.

After digging for a few minutes, my body began to heat up, and after more than ten minutes, I started to sweat.

Gradually, my hands became sore and weak.

After digging for half an hour, she felt tired, so she stopped to sit down and rest and drink some water.

After drinking a few sips of water and covering the bamboo cup with the lid, she noticed circles of dry white skin on several places on her palms.

That was a blister caused by digging the soil some time ago. She was afraid of the pain, so she didn't pop it on purpose. After a few days, it deflated on its own.

When the old blisters disappear, new ones will appear, and when they accumulate, thick calluses will form.

The original owner had been working since he was young, and had several calluses on his palms and fingers.

Her fingers are slender, as white as scallions, with almost no fine lines.

Much more beautiful than her hands in her previous life.

"Such beautiful hands will be ruined if you don't take good care of them. I guess I have to go to the mountains to find some flowers to make face cream."

She believes that loving beauty does not conflict with working.

As long as it does not interfere with your work, you can take care of your skin on a daily basis, especially your hands, which do the most work and are the ones that age and wrinkle the fastest. If left unattended, they will eventually become ugly and rough.

As a woman, you should be nicer to yourself.

After digging for a whole morning, a lot of soil was piled in the pit. We will carry it up tomorrow.

She had to kill ducks at noon today, so she stopped working before noon.

It is easy to pluck the duck after soaking it in hot water.

Duck feathers are good things. If you keep them and don't throw them away, they will be of great use. Not only can they be used to make fertilizer, but after processing they become duck down, which can be used to make winter clothes, pants, and bedding.

All the feathers that could be plucked were plucked, but there were still some fine black hairs on the duck's body. Xia Qingyue couldn't stand it, so she found some dry straw, lit it, and used it to remove the fine hairs.

Chop the duck into even pieces, soak it in clean water to wash away the blood, grab two handfuls and put them in the pot to boil for Heihei to eat, and put the rest into a vegetable colander to drain and set aside.

She then prepared the ingredients, ginger and garlic being essential, and grabbed a bowl of pickled bamboo shoots from the jar.

The sour bamboo shoots were in pieces, and she couldn't help but tore off a piece and ate it.

It's very sour and crispy, and tastes good.

"It seems that my dream of making snail noodles is just around the corner!"

In her previous life, she loved eating noodles the most, especially rice noodles with snails, and she liked to add a lot of side dishes to it.

The pickled bamboo shoots are not as smelly as the ones in snail noodles, but the taste is not bad.

Cut the sour bamboo shoots into pieces.

Throw the fat from the duck into the pot to refine the oil, stir-fry the duck when it starts to smoke, and stir-fry until it is dry and charred and has no moisture left. Set the duck aside, add ginger and garlic to the hot oil and sauté until fragrant, then set the duck aside and stir-fry after the aroma comes out.

After frying for a while, add a circle of rice wine on the edge of the pot to stimulate the aroma, add appropriate amount of salt, soy sauce and matsutake mushrooms, pour water to cover the duck meat and start cooking.

After cooking for half an hour, the soup is reduced by one third, so pour in the sour bamboo shoots and continue cooking.

After cooking for more than an hour, the soup in the pot became thick and was ready. She had been smelling the fragrance for so long that she was craving for it.

As usual, the food is not served on a plate but a heat-insulating wooden board is placed on the table, and the pot is brought directly to the table.

The fried duck with sour bamboo shoots looked bland, without the added color of dried chilies and Sichuan peppercorns, but she thought it was well-cooked.

She picked up a piece of duck meat and put it in her mouth. It tasted sour and salty, the meat was firm and soft, the skin was soft and glutinous, and there was no fishy smell at all. It was just as delicious as she imagined!

The sour bamboo shoots are still crispy after being cooked for so long, but not as sour and salty as when they were just taken out of the jar.

The dish is delicious, and the thick soup mixed with rice is also a delicious delicacy.

She ate piece after piece of the duck meat. It was a bit salty after eating too much. She finished the rice and left half of the dish, which she put in the pot to eat in the evening.

After dinner, she poured some small fish and shrimp mixed with chopped wild grass to feed the chickens and ducks, and added some wild grass thorns to the rabbits.

After finishing her work, Xia Qingyue got ready and went out to collect mountain products.

The main tasks in recent days are to find yam and catch river shrimp.

The rice bran was almost gone, so she thought of finding some yam to feed the chickens and ducks as staple food.

She was going to the woods beyond the pine forest upstream of the stream.

On the way there, she found that there were almost no mushrooms to be seen. The weather was hot and there was no rain, so no mushrooms sprouted.

There are many green plants in the forest, and finding mountain products is a test of her eyesight. She usually looks up at the sky after searching for a while. If the trees are too tall to see the sky, she will stop and rub her eyes to take a break.

After searching for a while, her eyes felt sore, so she looked up at the sky. After about five minutes, she lowered her head and continued walking forward, scanning her surroundings.

This glance made her discover something good.

It was a steep hillside, and growing there was a plant with purple and yellow roots, an umbrella-like top, and large green leaves.

"Oh my god, so many konjacs!"

Konjac can be used for its starch, or it can be chopped up and fed to chickens and ducks, but it should not be fed for a long time. Konjac tofu fried with chicken and duck is also extremely delicious.

However, konjac is as poisonous as cassava, so you should be careful when eating it. It needs to go through certain processes to remove the toxicity before it can be eaten.

Xia Qingyue was overjoyed to find so many konjacs. She picked up a shovel and ran over to start digging.

A dug-out konjac is not light in weight, weighing about five or six kilograms.

Xia Qingyue dug excitedly for most of an hour. Her backpack was full and her two vegetable baskets were also full. She hurried to carry the vegetables back to the tiankeng.

The afternoons are long, and as summer approaches, the days are longer and the nights are shorter, and it gets dark later, so we can stay outside for a while longer.

The place where konjac grows is not far from the tiankeng, and she walks fast, so it takes about twenty minutes.

She carried it back and forth three times in more than four hours.

Nearing five o'clock, the afterglow of the setting sun shone on the mountains, covering the rolling and steep mountains with a thin layer of golden gauze, and the grass and trees were dyed a light golden color, which was breathtaking.

She dug half a basket and stopped digging. She picked up the wooden bucket and went to the stream to catch river shrimps.

Put sweet potato grains and earthworms as bait in a vegetable colander and gently place it into the stream. Use a heavy stone to block the bottom to prevent it from floating away.

When the water covers the basket, the river shrimps will smell the bait and swim over to eat it.

She set up three such traps in different locations.

After setting up the last one, she went back to see if there were any river shrimps in the first trap. The creatures in the stream are very responsive and should not be underestimated. They can sense any slight movement nearby.

So she squatted on a stone near the trap and watched quietly.

There was a black shadow floating on the colander under the gurgling stream, and small fish and river shrimps were swimming around, so she decided to wait a little longer.

After waiting for about ten minutes, there were large black shadows in a basket. She stepped one foot on a small stone below, slowly moved forward and stretched out a pair of hands.

Throughout the whole process, she held her breath, concentrated, and moved slowly.