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

It was too hot in the afternoon, so she had lunch and took a nap.

As the sun set in the west and there was no more scorching sunlight, she seized the time to dig a pond and carry earth.

When it got dark, it was not as hot as before, so she carried buckets of water to water the crops, once every three days.

After finishing the work, Xia Qingyue found some peas and mung beans.

She planted mung beans and soybeans in the soil on a low slope that had been reclaimed at the end of April. The slope was relatively less steep. She planted nine kilograms of mung beans and seven kilograms of soybeans.

It doesn't look like much, but after planting it, it covers a large area.

Peas have to wait until after October to be planted. She kept about four pounds of seeds and soaked the rest in water. She only kept two handfuls of mung beans and soaked the rest.

Soak it until the next day, then grind it with a stone mill to make starch. Mix it with tapioca starch to make vermicelli and dry it in the sun.

Wash your hair, clothes, take a bath, and wipe the straw mat with cold water.

After the high temperature during the day, the straw mat felt hot to the touch at night.

She sat on the bed and continued sewing her shorts vest.

It took me almost two hours to sew. Including the ones I sewed last night, there are two vests and a pair of shorts, and I will sew another pair of shorts tomorrow night.

Late at night, Xia Qingyue was woken up twice by the heat. She was sweating all over. She fanned herself with a palm-leaf fan and missed the air conditioner very much.

When she went to bed at night, she would close the wooden door of the cave and the windows of all the rooms, for fear that snakes, rats, insects or ants would crawl in. If she opened a window to let in some air, it would be cooler.

But she was more afraid of snakes than heat.

At around four or five in the morning, when it was no longer so hot, she fell into a deep sleep.

When Xia Qingyue woke up the next day, after feeding the chickens and ducks, she took some wild grass to feed the rabbits and found that another female rabbit had also given birth to five baby rabbits.

"Wow, you guys are amazing, thank you for your hard work!"

She observed the mother rabbit and found her tired and listless. The baby rabbits were nestled in her arms and were feeding. The rabbits were tiny, and they felt warm and soft when she touched them gently.

Now that she has two pregnant rabbits, she needs to prepare more nutritious meals to nourish their bodies.

The only bad thing was that there was not much soybean flour left. The portion that was usually used to feed the chickens and ducks was saved by her for her mother rabbit, and it was still not enough.

As much as is done is gone.

She went to prepare two nutritious meals for the mother rabbit, feeding them the tenderest and freshest wild grass.

For breakfast, she cooked some dumpling soup for breakfast. She scooped out the portion that Heihei was eating without adding salt, and there were two boiled eggs.

Her portion was topped with freshly grown bok choy and mountain pepper sauce.

I didn’t have any menstrual bleeding yesterday, and the same thing happened last night. I’ll check again later tonight. If there’s no menstrual bleeding, then it’s over.

It's better to end it now, instead of making a sudden comeback and making things messy.

After breakfast, she washed the vest and shorts she had just made so that she could wear them tonight.

Then she started her daily work of digging the pond.

In the afternoon, she woke up from her nap and happily brought up dozens of kilograms of cassava from the cellar.

It took so long to eat the cassava, and there was only this much left, so she peeled it all.

As she peeled the cassava, she said with regret: "We should have brought back some cassava stalks when we dug them, so that we could plant some in the tiankeng."

A stone slab covered with irregular bumps was placed upright in a wooden basin filled with water, with one end in the basin and the other end pressed against the inside of her thigh. The peeled cassava was rubbed against the stone slab again and again, turning into fine pulp in seconds, with juice flowing out.

The weather is nice, it would be a pity not to make dried vermicelli, so I made more at one time so that I can eat it until the end of the year. After it is ready, if you want to eat it, just soak it in water and boil it, or you can stir-fry it.

Vermicelli is mainly made of cassava starch, supplemented by a small amount of pea and mung bean starch.

After scraping dozens of kilograms of cassava, I got a large basin of cassava puree. I filtered it repeatedly with gauze and water, and put it aside to let the powder sink to the bottom.

Next, process the peas and mung beans, which have been soaked the night before and are now softened.

Soak the beans in water in a bowl, put a handful into the groove of the stone mill, and rotate it in circles with your hands.

After a while, the ground bean liquid flows down along the millstone, finally gathers at the outlet, and then flows into the wooden barrel below.

The stone mill was not big, which was just right for her. It took her a while to grind several pounds of beans.

After grinding, filter it with gauze and keep the dregs to feed the mother rabbit. Put the filtered bean liquid aside to settle.

After that, she cooked the mung bean and millet porridge for dinner, let it cool naturally, and had the cold porridge in the evening.

After digging the pond for more than two hours, I was tired and hot.

The tapioca starch water sank and was still a little dirty, so she poured it out, added new water, and continued to let it settle.

In the evening she casually mixed a cucumber, steamed a salted fish, and some dried shrimps.

After a simple meal, a layer of dirty water is filtered out from the soy liquid, and new water is added in to filter it again.

After washing up, she put on a vest and shorts. They were so light that she instantly felt that the long clothes and trousers she had worn before were heavy shackles.

It is a little cool, but not that exaggerated.

She slept in a vest and shorts that night and was not woken by the heat. She slept well until the next morning.

The tapioca starch bean liquid that had been settling overnight was finally free of dirt. The water was poured out, and the starch at the bottom was white. The basin was picked up and put out to dry.

In this way, there will be about ten pounds of tapioca starch, and a little more than two pounds of pea and mung bean starch.

It was dried in the sun for a whole morning, turned over several times in the middle, and after lunch, it was dried and turned into powder, which was very fine and smooth.

Pour tapioca flour and pea and mung bean starch into a wooden basin in a ratio of 8:2 and set aside.

Pour a few bowls of tapioca flour and a bowl of pea and mung bean mixed flour, add some salt, pour water and stir well, pour into the pot and cook on low heat, stirring constantly with chopsticks while cooking. As the temperature rises, the starch liquid in the pot gradually becomes thicker, until it finally becomes a dough-like dough.

This step is to stir out its sticky and viscous properties.

Throw the dough into the bowl of mixed flour, add water in small amounts several times, and decide whether to continue adding water based on the feel of kneading. Just knead them into a slightly soft and smooth state, which is similar to the kneaded dough.

She boiled water in a pot and when it was slightly boiling, she pinched the dough into long pieces and stuffed them into a bamboo tube slightly thicker than her arm.

She had made this bamboo tube in advance, specially for making dried vermicelli. The bamboo tube is about 40 centimeters long, and the bottom is made with dense small round holes using the tip of a sharp dagger.

In addition to the bamboo tube, I also found a bamboo handle that is smaller than the tube so that the whole thing can be pushed in.

The round-hole bamboo tube should be facing the pot with a certain distance. She holds the bamboo handle with her other hand and inserts it into the bamboo tube. She pushes hard against the dough inside and squeezes it hard. The dough squeezes out along the round hole and becomes thin strips of even size.

The moment the thin strips came out, she slowly turned the hand holding the round-hole bamboo tube along the pot to prevent the vermicelli from being cooked together into a lump.

When the vermicelli is boiled in the hot water in the pot, it changes color when exposed to heat, and the color becomes slightly darker and becomes a light gray.

You can't get fat by eating all at once, so she stopped after squeezing two bamboo tubes, scooped the noodles from the pot and put them into three wooden buckets filled with cold water to cool them down, stretched them with her hands, and hung them on a bamboo pole where the sun could shine.

This process repeats over and over again.