Chapter 17 Autumn Harvest (Revision)
The land in Changqing Village is divided per capita, and each person in Zhang An’s family has one acre.
This is because there were few people in the village at that time. In other villages with many people, about half an acre per person would be enough.
The rice in the paddy fields has not yet been harvested, but the corn is ripe. This has a lot to do with the sunshine this year.
Zhang An’s family has a total of five acres of mountainous land, but in fact, less than four acres can be planted. The rest are small patches on the rocks. There is no fertility in the land, and there are no crops. No matter how much production is produced, people are still very tired.
But Zhang An’s parents didn’t want to leave them there, so they were still full of seeds.
Last year Zhang An went to school and there were no horses at home. Zhang Jianguo and his wife broke them off basket by basket and picked them back from the mountains.
But this year is different. Not only has Zhang An joined, but he also has horses at home, so the transportation capacity is directly full.
Don’t underestimate the transport capacity of a horse in mountainous areas. If you carry it home manually, one person can carry up to eighty or ninety kilograms at a time, and it will take a lot of time on the road and you have to take frequent breaks.
But horses are different. Although carriages cannot go to the mountain roads, you can use horses to carry them back.
A horse can carry five bags at a time, weighing at least two to three hundred kilograms.
Not to mention the Zhang An family’s horse, it can be dressed casually, even weighing 500 pounds is not a problem.
Breaking corn has never been a big problem, but transportation takes too much time.
After Zhang An got up, Wang Fang had already gotten up early to cook the noodles and fried a duck egg alone.
I packed dozens of bags and put them in baskets, and started to work after breakfast.
There are usually two corn cobs on a corn stalk, which is easy to break.
Zhang Jianguo and Zhang An broke off the corn in the corn bushes. Wang Fang followed behind and chopped off the broken corn stalks.
If it is a village in other places, the corn stalks on the mountain must be collected to feed livestock and fertilize.
But Changqing Village does not use it. Compared with other places, there are so many paddy fields, so there will be a lot of straw.
Compared to corn straw, livestock prefer straw, and the effect of straw retting is much better.
In this way, it took Zhang Jianguo and his wife seven or eight days to collect the corn at home in three days.
Since no one has started to break the corn in the past few days, only Zhang An’s family has carried it home.
So the grain drying field was occupied by Zhang An’s family. By the time others started harvesting, Zhang An’s family had already finished drying the grain.
Corn needs to be peeled before being brought back. Rural people are so busy that they break it back from the mountains during the day and peel the corn at home at night.
The scorching sun in early autumn is so hot, otherwise how could it be called Autumn Tiger.
On the large dam, the corn was exposed to the sun for two days, drying and dehydrating all the corn.
While no one was using the drying ground, a family of three beat corn directly on the drying ground.
Because there is no threshing machine, we can only use manual threshing method - flail.
Two wooden sticks, one long and one short, are connected with a rope. When you want to use it, hold the long end with your hand and wave the short part to exert force.
Corn is a good thing. In the era when there was not enough rice to eat, corn became the staple food.
And where rice is plentiful, corn can not only feed livestock, but can also be sold for money.
Threshed corn cobs can also be used to make fires. In rural areas, everyone has corn cobs at home. These can make fire much faster than dry firewood.
When the corn matter is settled, the rice in the field is mature and it is time to harvest it and take it home.
Different from corn, corn can be harvested slowly in the field, not so urgently, and they are quite durable.
But rice is different. If it’s time to harvest, if you don’t harvest it, it will soon fall to the ground.
And if the weather is bad and it rains heavily, there may be no harvest. When Zhang An's family was harvesting rice, his second uncle's and third uncle's families all came to help.
As the hostess, Wang Fang must cook at home and help in the fields after cooking. There is a lot of food for seven or eight people.
Early in the morning, the second uncle and his father set off with buckets, and the rest followed closely with sickles, water to drink, and bags of grain.
The bucket is a large square wooden basin made of wooden boards. It is specially used for threshing rice. Basically every household has one.
After cutting the rice connecting rod in the field, he picked it up and beat it against the inner wall of the bucket. In this way, the millet was pulled down.
The work goes faster when there are more people. Zhang An’s three acres of paddy field are all next to each other, so there is no need to move to another place after harvesting the field.
By noon, one-third of the harvest has been finished. The sun is too hot now, and it’s time to eat.
Seven or eight people came down and the harvest of three acres of land was completed.
The next step is to dry the millet and help the second uncle and third uncle's family to harvest.
After all, people have come to help, so you have to give it back, so that someone will come to help you next time.
When helping the two families, the whole Zhang An family also went out. This time, because it was the National Day, the two sons of the second uncle's family came back to help, so there were even more people.
In two days, everyone has finished harvesting at home. There is only corn in the field. I can just pick it back slowly at home. It is not in a hurry anyway.
Now Zhang An was assigned a new task. The family's horse was borrowed from his uncle's family, and his parents also went out to help the villagers.
Zhang An himself was left to dry the millet.
Drying millet is no easier than drying corn, because the large groups of sparrows in the sky are the most annoying.
Every time you don't pay attention, they all fly down to eat the millet, which is very annoying.
Even if a dummy is placed, they are not very afraid.
But Zhang An’s family is okay. With the presence of the Three Tigers, Zhang An can be lazy.
Every time the birds came down, the three tigers would pounce on them. As time went by, they seemed to think that Zhang An's house was not easy to deal with, so they went to other people's houses.
So Zhang An also enjoys his leisure time. He only needs to get up and use a rake to dry the rice on the ground every once in a while, so that they can all be exposed to the sun, so that they can be dried more thoroughly.
If you don’t turn it over, the bottom layer will take a long time to dry.
Of course, drying rice is not just that, you also have to pay attention to the weather. The reason why you have to have a special person to watch is also the weather problem.
You must always pay attention to weather changes. As soon as God changes his face, you have to pack up quickly because you are afraid of rain.
If the millet is exposed to rain, it will become moldy and the rice will be unpalatable.
Even the people who collect grain can smell it as soon as they smell it. They don’t want it, even if they don’t feed the animals.
Zhang An is pretty lucky. Every time he packs his bags, the sky starts to change his face.
The sun-dried millet also needs to go through a process where the shriveled millet or empty shells are blown away with a wind bucket.
This can also be done at home. Pour the millet in from the top and catch it with a bag from the bottom. What comes out from the other opening is just empty shells. They are usually used to feed cows and horses, forget about pigs. Damn, I don’t want to eat this stuff.
After everything is done, the warehouse is closed. The Zhang An family’s granary is built in a special room and can hold a lot of grain.
In the countryside, rodent damage has always been the biggest problem when it comes to grain storage. Whether it is raising cats, placing traps, or administering medicine, the ultimate goal is not to let rats burn the grain.
The granary in Zhang An's family has been renovated in the past two years, and it is in good condition. It is sealed everywhere with cement. No matter how powerful the mice are, they can't bite the cement.
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(End of this chapter)