"I never expected the pumpkins I planted this time to grow so big. You have no idea how surprised I was when I looked through the pumpkin leaves and saw such a big pumpkin."
This time, Chen Suwen secretly planted the pumpkins in the backyard, a place rarely visited by people, because the Zhou family didn't raise chickens, ducks, or pigs, so they didn't need to go to the backyard every day.
The plants in the back don't need to be watered every day, so Xu Huixue and the others rarely go to the backyard.
This gave Chen Suwen an opportunity. She selected several well-grown melon vines and encouraged them to produce larger pumpkins and winter melons.
There were only seven large pumpkins and three large winter melons in total. Chen Suwen gave Zhou Cunming two large pumpkins and one large winter melon, and kept the rest for herself.
"This is the first time I've ever seen such a big pumpkin. Usually, the pumpkins we grow ourselves are only about ten pounds big."
She was very surprised to see a pumpkin that weighed nearly 50 pounds, as it was definitely not 20 pounds at most.
But after the initial surprise comes the joy. Pumpkin can be eaten as a vegetable or as a staple food. Whether it's pumpkin porridge or pumpkin steamed buns, it can fill you up.
City dwellers are good, but their food rations are basically fixed, and once they're gone, that's it.
It's very difficult for her too.
"We have to keep the pumpkin seeds. What if we can grow a pumpkin this big in the future?" Xu Huixue instructed Zhou Cunming and Li Yulan to keep the seeds.
It doesn't matter if the Li family doesn't have a place to plant, they have relatives there, they can let their relatives plant it.
When our relatives have finished harvesting, we might get several more pumpkins and winter melons this big.
Besides the exceptionally large pumpkins and winter melons, Zhou Cunming and his group also took some vegetables with them when they left, mostly grown in the Zhou family's own vegetable garden.
The mustard greens, romaine lettuce, bitter lettuce, and other vegetables that were already too old were all picked, along with bok choy, green beans, eggplants, loofahs, and other similar plants.
Chen Suwen wanted to reorganize the vegetable garden, so she harvested all the harvestable vegetables. She ate what she could, gave what she could give away, and used the rest to pickle or dry.
Zhou Cunming and his wife, carrying their child and bags of belongings, returned to the tenement building where the Li family lived.
"Yulan, you're back from your 'homecoming'? What are you carrying? Were you kicked out?"
Li Yulan's neighbors also knew about the Zhou family's situation and what a terrible and wicked mother-in-law Chen Suwen was.
When Zhou Cunming had just married Li Yulan, Chen Suwen caused a scene at Li's home and cursed Li Yulan's parents for a long time.
Even though several years have passed, the Li family's neighbors still remember that scene vividly.
So when they saw Li Yulan and her husband return with so many things, they assumed that the things they brought hadn't been given to the Zhou family yet, and that they had been kicked out.
But that shouldn't be the case.
Even if Chen Suwen resented her son becoming a live-in son-in-law, she wasn't the kind of person who wouldn't accept a bargain.
Even if she doesn't let her son's family in, she can't very well refuse to accept their gifts.
"Ah Cong's dad, why did you bring so many things back? Your mom didn't even accept the gifts you gave her?"
Li Yulan paused upon hearing this.
Zhou Cunming explained, "These are vegetables my mother grew herself, and she asked us to bring them back to eat."
The neighbors were even more surprised when they heard this.
"Your mom grew these vegetables and wants you to bring them back to eat? Really? Isn't your mom always angry with you?"
"That's my mom, my own mother who gave birth to me and raised me. She was just angry for a moment. She can't be angry with me for a lifetime, can she?"
"She's calmed down now, so she gave me some things to bring back, right?"
"Your mother's temper has improved?" The neighbor aunt was very suspicious and came over to see what she had given her.
"By the way, Ah Cong's dad, did your mom raise a child?"
"What was your mother thinking? She brought someone else's little girl home to raise? She's a girl, you know."
"I really don't understand why your mother would raise a money-losing brat."
Li Yulan, who was listening nearby, couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Aunt Zhao, you really lack awareness. People always say that 'women hold up half the sky.'"
"What's wrong with a daughter? She's your own child too."
"Look at my family, I'm their only daughter, but I still take care of my parents in their old age, don't I?"
In fact, Li Yulan had heard many people say that her family line would end and that there would be such and such a thing if she didn't have a son.
She was still conflicted.
She really wanted to have a son, but she didn't necessarily think that having a daughter was bad, otherwise wouldn't that be a denial of herself?
"What? Aunt Zhao, do you think my parents didn't raise me well?"
Aunt Zhao smiled when she heard this. "Yulan, it's not that I'm being mean, but daughters can never compare to sons."
"Where is it inferior?"
Li Yulan put her son down and let him follow Zhou Cunming into the house, while she stood in the corridor and argued with Aunt Zhao.
"People in the countryside prefer sons because they prefer sons when doing farm work, since sons are stronger and can do more work than daughters."
"But more often than not, sons in the countryside are more precious than daughters, and some rural men are lazy and do less work than women."
"Let's not talk about that. Men are naturally stronger than women, which I can understand."
"But Aunt Zhao, we city people don't need to work in the fields like people in the countryside, doing those physically demanding jobs, right?"
“My daughter can also find a good job. Like me, don’t I also have a good job and a salary to support my family?”
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