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

Earthen bricks and mud pieces cannot be placed randomly, but must be arranged according to a method to form the structure of an updraft kiln to ensure that the fire can burn every brick.

This is what she learned from watching videos posted by a wilderness survival blogger in her previous life.

After everything is arranged, a layer of hay is spread on the bottom floor of the cave, and then a whole large firewood is moved in, and laid layer by layer, until the top layer is the hay sealing layer.

She laid the wood from the inside out, and when she saw the space was getting narrower and narrower, she crawled out of the hole and stood outside adding firewood until it was almost full. Finally, she stuffed a lot of hay into the gaps.

She took a few burning sticks from the stove and stuffed them into the hay in the cave.

The hay was flammable and the fire quickly became intense. She was quick-witted and used a bucket to scoop up the sand that had been prepared near the entrance of the cave to block the entrance. She then dug out the sand after the fire was over.

There is a small hole in the cave for exhausting smoke and exhaust gas, just diagonally below the right side of the cave entrance.

At this time, wisps of black smoke drifted out of the small hole.

It will take a day and a night to finish firing, and the cave will be opened tomorrow morning.

After the first time, she summed up some experience and found that she could make more earthen bricks and mud. One hundred bricks could be put into the cave and there would still be relatively ample space.

It's too wasteful to burn it once.

But we can see tomorrow if the burnt wood can be used as charcoal.

While the cave was being fired, she worked hard to make the mud bricks, intending to make more than 200 bricks at a time.

At around ten o'clock the next morning, Xia Qingyue estimated the time and felt that it was about time, so she took a hoe and dug up the sand filling the hole.

As she dug further, she felt the heat hit her face. Seeing that she had almost dug through, she hit the cave with the hoe. With a splash, sand and soil fell into the cave, and the entrance suddenly became clear.

It was dark inside, she couldn't see clearly, and the heat was overwhelming. She could only continue to make clay models and wait until the temperature dropped before making any further changes.

Today she had an early lunch on purpose. After noon, the temperature had dropped almost completely, so she went into the cave. The interior had become pitch black after being burned for a day and a night, and there was a pungent smell when she breathed it.

Sometimes you can feel black pieces of charcoal under your feet, and there is thick wood ash on the ground.

The stacked earth bricks were still the same as before, without shifting or falling apart. After being fired, the color turned a little red. She picked up a piece and weighed it. It seemed lighter and felt hard.

The bricks were put into backpacks and taken out, stacked in the area where poultry nests were to be built.

She plans to build the poultry nest in the open space next to the poultry pen.

When stacking bricks, check for cracks. Out of a hundred bricks, a few showed signs of cracking, but it did not affect their use.

After making the bricks, they then cleaned out the charcoal and wood ash in the cave.

The large pieces of charcoal were kept, and the small pieces were poured next to the earthen stove in the kitchen.

Pour the wood ash into a wooden barrel filled with farm manure, and then sprinkle some on the crops later.

It was around three in the afternoon when she finished her work. She took a break and continued to make mud molds, and then burn another batch of bricks tomorrow.

By seven in the evening, the clay was gone, so she estimated how much clay would be left for the second and third batches.

It comes to more than two hundred and eighty yuan.

She made herself some dinner first. She was so hungry that her body felt weak and powerless. When she stood up from squatting, she felt a little dizzy and was about to suffer from hypoglycemia.

Before making dinner, she ate some dried pumpkin and wild fruits given by the Li family, which helped her to regain some strength.

For dinner she cooked rice, steamed a plate of dried fish and shrimp, steamed eggs, and a bowl of spicy stir-fried water celery.

It was past eight o'clock when I finished eating. I cleaned up the kitchen, took a hot bath, and went to bed early to rest.

When she woke up before daybreak, she put the clay blocks into the cave, covered them with hay and firewood, and filled the hole to burn them, just like last time.

After finishing her work, she stayed in the tiankeng to rest in the morning and went out to carry back the clay in the afternoon.

Since the rain, the sun was not as scorching as before, but she ran back and forth so many times that her sweat still soaked her clothes.

The dry firewood was also used up.

For the next three days, she went out every day to carry clay and find whole large pieces of firewood. She was extremely tired, but every time she saw the more than 300 fired bricks, she felt she had enough energy to continue working.

Ten days later.

Xia Qingyue, who was busy around the clock, finally fired more than 1,300 earthen bricks.

By the way, we also harvested several hundred kilograms of charcoal. When it snows and gets cold in the winter, we can burn some to keep the poultry warm. The prerequisite is to ensure air circulation to avoid carbon fire poisoning.

After we finished burning the bricks, it was already mid-October, and the temperature in the morning and evening dropped significantly.

Xia Qingyue inexplicably felt a sense of urgency because the poultry house had not yet been built and the storage of winter supplies had not yet begun.

What she worries most is that heavy snow in winter will freeze and block the cave entrance, making it impossible to go out. To be on the safe side, she has to stock up enough supplies for at least four months for herself and the poultry.

First, she went to the vegetable garden and picked off all the old pumpkins, put them in the cellar, and harvested a total of 135 pumpkins, weighing about 1,000 kilograms.

After harvesting pumpkins, we continue to dig ginger.

The ginger was planted in the sandy soil on a slope. She didn't take good care of it during the previous drought, and it was half-sunburned to death. Later, when there was water, she watered it normally and applied fertilizer several times.

It turns out that the hard work paid off. The ginger pieces dug out had full flesh and almost no worm holes. The ones with worm holes were picked out and used for cooking in the near future.

She originally planted about 12 kilograms of ginger, and now she has harvested 150 kilograms.

What a great harvest!

The pumpkin and ginger fields were cleared, she turned the soil, sprinkled some wood ash and the dry manure that had accumulated recently, and fertilized it for a few days. Then she would plant some cabbage and radishes.

During the more than half month that she was busy making earthen bricks, she had been eating and using the supplies she had previously stockpiled. She took advantage of the time to take inventory of how much food and supplies she had so that she could make preparations for later.

Cured food, pork and horse meat, these two are more difficult to clean, and I usually eat less of them, about 100 kilograms of them.

We had eaten all the dried meat, about ten pounds of dried fish, and dried shrimp.

In terms of dried vegetables, there were more than 30 kilograms of mixed mushrooms, more than 20 kilograms of bamboo shoots, and I didn’t eat much bamboo fungus, so there were still more than 4 kilograms.

Ten pounds of fungus, about six pounds each of dried eggplant, dried gourd, and dried loofah, nine pounds of dried cucumbers, and fifteen pounds of dried cowpeas.

I made a lot of pickled mustard greens, about twenty pounds of them.

There is no more dried bracken.

Dried water celery is delicious, quick to fry, and very convenient. I ate a lot of it, only five pounds.

There are three or four pounds of dry vermicelli.

Vegetables cannot be grown in the fields in winter, so she cannot live without green vegetables for every meal, and this amount of dry vegetables is a bit limited.

There is a jar for pickled vegetables, a jar for pickled bamboo shoots, and two jars for kimchi.

"Yes, we need to burn a few more jars to make dried vegetables and pickled vegetables!"

At this moment, she was only worried that she had no paper and pen. It is said that a good memory is not as good as a bad pen. She might remember it now, but forget it in a few days when there are too many things to do.

Afraid that I would forget, I immediately started making a jar out of clay.

Before she started, she thought, wouldn’t it be easy to just mold the jar into shape and then put it into the cave to burn?

However, when she tried to pinch it, she found how difficult it was. It was either too thick or too thin, or the shape was ugly.

She was very patient. At first she thought she was a novice and just needed to practice more. But after two days, she still saw no results and gave up.

It would be better to use this time elsewhere. Making clay objects is a technical job and it cannot be done well in a short period of time.

She remembered that the Li family had quite a few jars, or there should be some in the cave.

After thinking it over, she fried some matsutake mushrooms, ground them into powder, and made matsutake delicacy, keeping the extra portion for herself.

For a smaller portion, put it in a small jar, add a little fine salt and mix well.

She brought a small jar of fresh matsutake mushrooms to the Lee family shelter.

Unexpectedly, just as she was crossing the stream, she unexpectedly ran into the Li family.