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

After breakfast, she chopped some pumpkin and gourd vines, mixed them with peanut residue, and carried the bucket into the poultry pen to feed the chickens and ducks.

Rabbits eat leaves that are tenderer and have no peanut residue.

After the soybeans, mung beans and peanuts were harvested, the land was empty. She took a hoe, put on a straw hat, and went to turn the soil in the field. After turning it over, she threw some dry manure to fertilize the soil.

Let’s wait and see if the weather improves. If it rains, we can plant cabbage, radish, spinach and more vegetables.

It's time to start preparing things for the winter. It's cold then and we can't grow fresh green leafy vegetables for her to eat, as well as for the chickens, ducks and rabbits.

She was planning to grow more cabbage, which she could store in the cellar and also make some into sauerkraut.

After turning the soil for two days, she also dug out the dried and dead weeds on the slope and threw them aside.

This busy work lasted for several days.

After the soybeans were dried, she prepared more than 20 kilograms of them and fried them. After they were cooked, she put them in a large stone mortar, tied a large stone to a thick wooden stick, and used the stone to beat them into powder.

The pounded soybean powder can be mixed with grass and fed to rabbits in the future.

After fertilizing the empty vegetable field, she sowed mustard seeds and planted more vegetables, which could later be dried into salted or dried vegetables for eating in the winter.

The mustard cabbage that was originally planted has grown to the length of chopsticks and is lush and green.

What made Xia Qingyue happiest was that the rice ears in the fields had turned yellow, and the grains hanging on them had also turned yellower. Some had more grains, some had less, and due to the weather, some were empty husks.

She was already very satisfied that the rice could produce grains, which was better than having them all dried up and died in the sun.

This is all thanks to the well. If water had not been dug out in time, all the rice planted this year would have been wasted.

It will take some time for the rice to turn completely yellow. While waiting for it to mature, she makes a large bamboo rack for packaging medicinal materials, and a few more bamboo rafts for drying things.

It’s no wonder that after making several bamboo racks, I have accumulated experience, and now I can make them with ease.

It took Xia Qingyue ten days to make a bamboo rack for medicinal herbs and placed it next to the bamboo rack for seeds.

There were a lot of medicinal herbs, and she specially wove small bamboo boxes of the same size using bamboo strips for each.

If you have resilient grass or willow branches, you can also weave it.

Write the names of the medicinal herbs on the bamboo baskets and place them one by one in the compartments of the bamboo rack.

The medicines in each compartment are classified into different categories, some for stopping bleeding and treating injuries, some for reducing colds and fevers, and some for reducing inflammation and pain.

When installed in this way, it is clear at a glance and convenient to take out later.

After the bamboo rack was finished, she took the opportunity to clean the utility room and put away the things that were not needed temporarily.

The rice was about to be harvested, so she found the wooden husk for husking the rice.

This old item was made by Xia Dasong a few years ago. She checked it and found that all the parts were good except that it was a little dirty.

After the millet is husked, it needs to be pounded with a pestle and stone to remove the rice skin before it can be eaten.

Fortunately, we had both tools, so we carried it out, rinsed it with water, and dried it in the sun.

After a few days, the millet turned completely yellow.

Xia Qingyue was smiling happily as she harvested the crops. She wore a straw hat, long trousers and a long coat, and went to the fields with a sickle to cut rice.

During the first half hour of mowing, she felt full of energy and enthusiasm.

After that, I was sweating all over, especially my head because of the straw hat. Because it was not breathable, my scalp became numb and itchy due to the heat.

Wearing a straw hat was of no help. My face was sunburned red and my hands were pricked by the rice seedlings.

She said with a bitter face while cutting: "Sure enough, every grain of food comes from hard work. Only if you treat it seriously, it will reward you well."

The sun is strong during the day, so she usually harvests rice early in the morning or late in the evening, for three or four hours a day, and threshes the millet after harvesting the rice.

After three days of harvesting, all the millet in the two acres of land was harvested and threshed.

The total weight of the millet with shells was close to 600 kilograms, and together with the straw, they were all spread out on the ground at the bottom of the tiankeng to dry in the sun.

After being exposed to the scorching sun for several days and turning the millet over diligently every day, the dried millet is a golden yellow.

Next comes shelling and pounding the rice.

The millet is poured into the wooden huller, and the hands hold the handle and spin it in circles. As the wooden huller turns, the rice husks fly out, and the rice falls out of the opening into the basket underneath.

Because the brown rice she had bought when she went down the mountain was all gone, she husked half of the millet, dried the remaining half, packed it in bags and stored it for later.

She was busy all day and finally removed all the shells. The rice was black at this time and some of the shells had not been cleaned yet. She cleaned them manually, and if they were still not clean, she put them into a sack and beat them.

The next day, she was busy pounding rice. She poured the rice into a special pounding machine. She stood on a high place and pressed a wooden board with her feet. At the other end of the board was a thick wooden awl that could be used to beat the rice.

This job can be done faster with the collaboration of multiple people; it's a bit difficult for her to do it alone.

It took her two days to pound about 200 kilograms of rice by herself, stopping and resting.

The impurities separated from the pounded rice are called rice bran. Since there is no windmill to sift it, she can only pour the rice into a winnowing basket and shake it manually to sift out the impurities and pebbles.

All the rice husks and rice bran were collected and dried, adding up to dozens of kilograms, so we don’t have to worry about feeding the chickens and ducks for a while.

After she cleaned the rice thoroughly and poured it into the rice jar, although she was physically and mentally exhausted, the sight of so much food, which she had grown with her own hard work, filled her heart with satisfaction and joy.

She picked up a handful of rice and examined it carefully. Most of the rice was a little broken and incomplete.

Due to limited conditions, the rice is not as white, complete and tangible as in the previous life.

"It's fine as long as it doesn't affect my eating. I'll cook some dry rice for lunch today!"

She happily scooped more than a bowl of rice into the pot and cooked it. When it boiled, the rice soup was milky white and the rice aroma was fragrant.

She hadn't had rice soup for a long time, so she took the lid and covered the pot, leaving a small gap. She lifted the pot with one hand and tilted it downwards. The rice soup flowed out of the gap and into the large bowl below.

I got a bowl and a half of rice soup.

After receiving the rice soup, bring the rice to the back stove and simmer it on low heat for a while until it is cooked.

There is a large iron pot on the front stove ready for cooking.

Good rice goes well with good dishes. She wants to make a dish she has missed for a long time - cold-cooked rabbit cubes.

Kill five fat rabbits, remove the fur from all of them, and except for one that is boiled in black water, chop the rest into even-sized dices, add shredded ginger, scallion roots, appropriate amount of salt, pine mushrooms, and fresh rice wine, mix well, and set aside to marinate.

At this time she prepares the ingredients, including dried red peppers. Some are fragrant, some are spicy, and the combination together is fragrant and spicy.

Boil water in a pot, add the chili segments and cook until they swell, then remove them. This step is to remove impurities from the chili, and the cooked chili will not become mushy easily and the color will also look good.

Pour peanut oil into an iron pan, mix with a little lard, add ginger cubes and whole onions, remove from the pan after the aroma comes out, add the rabbit meat into the pan and stir fry, then add a handful of dried Sichuan peppercorns.

Stir-fry over medium heat for about three minutes. When the oil is clear and no water is present, pour in the boiled chili segments, stir-fry until the water is dry, then add a little chili powder, brown sugar and salt, and it's done.

With every breath, the air was filled with the spicy and fragrant smell. Heihei kept sneezing, but she smiled happily and kept smelling the fragrance.

It smells so good, so good!