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

After boiling the river shrimp for about five minutes, move the pot aside and let it cool naturally, allowing the shrimp to absorb the salt in the water.

During this gap, she peeled some konjac and chopped it into grains, and chopped wild grass, with the ratio of the two being one to two, and added a little rice bran, and mixed it with water.

The rabbits’ food is chopped sweet potato grains and wild grass.

The thing that was not lacking at home every day was fish. She put a few chopstick-length fish and two duck eggs in a ceramic pot and boiled them. After they were cooked, she poured them into a black bowl, and the dog ate them with relish.

The shrimps in the pot have been soaked for more than half an hour. Take them out and spread them out on a large round dustpan to dry. With the strong sun recently, they will be dried in two days.

After seven o'clock, she started to make her own breakfast. She removed the heads and shells of the river shrimps, leaving the shrimp meat. She fried the shrimps with lard in the bottom of the pan, added garlic to sauté the fragrance, and then stir-fried the chopped deer ear chives. The vegetables cooked quickly and were ready in just a few strokes.

She also made a dish of spicy fried eggs with dried water celery.

The staple food was millet porridge, which had been cooked early. I scooped out a bowl and it was already warm.

After having a delicious breakfast and cleaning up, the sun was still strong, so Xia Qingyue took out the bedding, pillows and other things and hung them on bamboo poles to dry in the sun.

The weather has been hot recently, with the highest daytime temperature reaching about 32 or 33 degrees. It is hot during the day, so we have to fan ourselves with a cattail leaf fan and hide under a tree to cool off.

She didn't feel hot living in the cave at night, but she was afraid that she would feel hot after a while.

The soil that was dug out yesterday had not been moved yet, so she moved it first and then continued to dig the pond.

It was almost noon when I dug. I quickly prepared lunch and fried two quick dishes.

After eating, she put on a straw hat and took a machete, went to the bamboo forest and cut some bamboos, brought them back and used them to weave bamboo rafts for drying things, vegetable baskets, and fish cages.

She wanted to make a few more fish cages and take them to the upper reaches of the stream to catch river shrimps, so that she wouldn't have to wait there and catch them with a vegetable dustpan.

If you make two more fish cages, you can put the cages into the stream first while doing other things, and then put them away when you are ready to go home.

The bamboo leaves were removed from the chopped bamboo, leaving only the bamboo poles, which were carried back in several batches.

Then, she carried a basket on her back and went to the konjac field to dig konjac. When the basket was full, she would carry two baskets back home. She would make several trips in the afternoon.

At around five o'clock, she went to the stream to catch river shrimps and rushed back to the tiankeng when it got dark.

This was her daily routine for the next few days.

After a few busy days, by the beginning of May, all the konjac had been dug up and more than a thousand kilograms were harvested. Most of them were placed in the cellar, and a small part was planted in the sandy soil on the slope. There was still plenty of space on the slope anyway, so planting it would not take up space.

The cellar is located northwest of the kitchen, which is on the side of the room where Xia Dasong and Zhu Erniang used to live. It is relatively cool there.

In order to store food for the winter, Xia Dasong specially dug a large cellar, which was six or seven meters deep and about ten square meters in area. It was previously used to store sweet potatoes and taro.

Normally, people go in and out of the cellar by a wooden ladder, which is leaning against the earth wall beside the cellar entrance and can be seen when the round wooden door covering the cellar is opened.

More than two thousand kilograms of konjac were piled up in the cellar, occupying a corner.

Looking at the rest of the empty space, Xia Qingyue felt the urge to fill it up. She wanted to find more foods like cassava and yam that could be used as staple foods and could be stored for a long time.

"Once this is filled up, I can stop going out every day and lie down for a while."

“Can this day be realized before war breaks out and villagers flock to the mountains?”

These days she went out to dig konjac and found that there were fewer wild vegetables on the mountain. Although there were not so many wild vegetables everywhere before, different wild vegetables could be seen every few distances. But now, she has to walk for a long time to see a little wild vegetable.

Moreover, there are many more traces of human activities on the mountain.

Xia Qingyue was melancholy for a while, then climbed up the wooden ladder and closed the wooden door.

Recently she found a lot of river shrimps, cooked them and then dried them in the sun. The dried shrimps weighed about twenty pounds.

Before I knew it, the pond had been dug for more than half a month. The original width of ten meters and depth of more than one meter had been widened by five meters, but the depth remained unchanged.

It seems that we have been digging for so long, but the efficiency is not high. We haven’t even dug one third of it. We have to keep working hard!

The peppers and eggplants in the vegetable garden have grown.

The green pepper exudes a unique peppery aroma. It is small and wrinkled.

The purple eggplant was half the length of her palm and was plump.

Cucumbers, cowpeas, pumpkins and gourds are all in bloom. The vegetable garden is filled with fragrance and industrious bees are buzzing around, busy collecting nectar.

Some of the cucumber and cowpea flowers have fallen and produced small fruits.

Xia Qingyue was looking forward to them growing out quickly. Cucumbers in summer are the most delicious, refreshing and tasty. Pickled young cowpeas are also a speciality.

After digging konjac, she stayed in the tiankeng for three days and did not go out.

Although she said she was taking a break, she was not idle at all. She used broken bamboo strips to weave bamboo rafts, dustpans, and fish cages. Her hands were covered with blisters and had many tiny scratches. She had no idea how many times she bled.

The process is arduous, but the results are gratifying.

She made four bamboo rafts and three fish baskets.

Apart from eating, sleeping, morning exercises and night exercises, I spend almost all my time knitting.

Having made a new fish cage, she couldn’t wait to take it to the stream to try it out.

The new fish cage was made based on the old one, and is the same size and style.

Considering that there might be more people on the mountain, she stopped digging the pond in the morning. After breakfast, she went out early to look for mountain products. Her main task was to find yam, cassava and medicinal herbs.

She planted a lot of vegetables in the field, enough for her to eat, and she can harvest rice in a few months.

It was dangerous as there were too many people outside, so she stayed in the tiankeng and did not go out, digging ponds, planting and breeding, working from sunrise to sunset. What a wonderful life.

On the way upstream of the stream, she was looking for medicinal herbs as she walked, and in a relatively moist area she found a plant that had just sprouted out. It was only half a finger long, with red buds and curled leaves that looked like ears.

People who can accept this plant love to eat it, but those who cannot accept it feel uncomfortable just looking at it.

It is the well-known and controversial Houttuynia cordata.

Houttuynia cordata, also known as fish mint, has a fishy smell and can be eaten as a wild vegetable or used as medicine.

Xia Qingyue couldn't accept Houttuynia cordata. She felt nauseous when she smelled it. She had encountered it many times in the mountains before and only dug some and dried it for medicinal use.

Houttuynia cordata is effective for treating symptoms of colds, upper respiratory tract infections, lung infections, and damp-heat in the spleen and stomach. It has high medicinal value and has the effects of clearing away heat and detoxifying, and having antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effects.

However, Houttuynia cordata should never be used together with Hawthorn.

It's something you can't miss when you see it. Xia Qingyue used a shovel to dig up a few handfuls and put them in the backpack. The newly sprouted ones were very tender and plump, with white and red roots.

This time, she walked along the woods on the other side of the stream upstream, a place she had never been to before.

After walking for a while, she found many things she was looking for in the surrounding grass, including selfheal, perilla, and four yams.