Chapter 171 Autumn Harvest
After harvesting the peanuts, the next step is to harvest the sweet potatoes and potatoes.
Similarly, pull out the sweet potato vines and set them aside, then put the harvested sweet potatoes into a plastic box.
It took seven whole plastic boxes to collect all the sweet potatoes.
By this time, the peanuts and peanut vines had been dried. The peanuts were stored in the basement, and the peanut vines were tied together with sweet potato vines and piled up in the side room for the rabbits to eat in the winter.
Space was cleared in the yard, and the sweet potato vines were immediately laid out to dry. There were far more sweet potato vines than peanut vines, almost covering the entire yard. It seemed that the sweet potato vines alone would be enough for the rabbits to eat for a long time.
I put my hands on my hips and looked around the yard. I picked some still-fresh sweet potato vines and threw them into the rabbit pen. The little rabbits loved them, their little mouths pouting as they ate.
Next comes harvesting the potatoes.
The book says that rabbits can't eat potatoes, so I really don't know if rabbits can eat potato vines. To avoid any risks, I immediately ruled out potato vines and left them all to dry in the sun, to be used as kindling in the winter.
The rabbits now have plenty of wild vegetables and grasses, peanut vines, and a large amount of sweet potato vines in their food reserves, enough to last them a long time, so there's no need to stockpile anything extra.
After finishing with the plants growing in the soil, the leaves started to turn yellow, so I needed to hurry up and harvest the sesame seeds.
Sesame seeds will burst open on their own when they are ripe enough. They need to be collected before they burst open, otherwise they will only be empty shells.
Cut the sesame stalks directly with a sickle, line the cart with a layer of plastic, and neatly stack the cut sesame stalks on the cart.
The sesame vines brought home are laid out on large plastic sheets in the threshing ground. When the sun gets stronger, the sesame husks will dry, and the sesame seeds inside will naturally burst out and fall onto the plastic sheet.
This way, you won't lose the sesame seeds, and you'll save effort.
Over the next two days, under the blazing sun, the sesame shells gradually burst open, and sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could even hear a crackling sound.
Over the past two days, I've been harvesting winter melons, pumpkins, radishes, cabbages, and other vegetables.
Some were kept for pickling and drying, and the rest were stored in the basement.
After harvesting the last of the vegetables, the sesame seeds were almost dried. I picked up the sesame stalks from the ground and threshed them back and forth to remove the last sesame seeds remaining in their husks.
Seeing that the sesame vines were almost completely destroyed, they were also piled up next to the woodpile to be used as firewood.
I really enjoy using sesame stalks as firewood. When I was little, I helped my grandma tend the stove, and the sesame stalks would emit a pleasant, sesame-like fragrance when burning intensely.
Just smelling the aroma of firewood makes me feel that the dishes stewed in the iron pot won't taste bad.
After harvesting all the vegetables, even though I don't want to face it, I still have to go through the hellish corn harvest.
I put on long sleeves and a mask and hat to prevent the sharp corn leaves from cutting any part of my skin, and began the endless work of husking and harvesting corn.
This is not the time to be lazy. There are three big, fat pigs at home waiting to be fed. I wonder how much grain these three pigs will eat in one winter.
Oh no, it's two. We're even planning to kill one of them during the Lunar New Year.
This way, we can have pork to eat while reducing grain consumption.
Picking corn was so boring, so I reluctantly put on my phone and played an offline audiobook while picking corn. It was much more efficient.
This year, we planted a lot of corn, and after several days, we harvested more than 20 sacks of corn, finally completing this arduous task.
He piled all 20-plus sacks of corn into the west wing and turned back to continue cutting the corn stalks with a sickle.
There were so many corn stalks that we cut down, and since there was already a lot of firewood drying in the yard, we piled all the corn stalks together and placed them next to the vegetable garden.
I'll wait until the firewood in the yard runs out in winter before slowly moving it home. I don't want to suffer now, so I'll just have to apologize to myself for hibernating.
Although I have more experience in farming this year than last year, I didn't estimate the amount properly and planted too much, so harvesting was really exhausting.
Supporting her aching back, looking at her thin and dark reflection in the mirror, she silently shed two lines of tears before continuing to harvest rice and buckwheat in the fields.
Having spent most of my life in the countryside, I have some knowledge of the habits of various vegetables, but I have never really paid attention to how millet and buckwheat are harvested.
Based on the farming books I bought, I learned the specific steps involved in harvesting millet and buckwheat.
First, use a sickle to cut the millet, remove the ears of grain, dry it in the sun, then beat it to thresh the grains. Finally, use different methods to violently remove the outer skin of the millet, leaving behind millet.
It looked simple, so I started to operate it.
Although it's the first year of planting, the millet harvest this year is really good. The ears of millet are very large, and each grain is plump.
Holding the yellowed and dried rice seedlings in his right hand, he cut them off one by one with a sickle. The cut rice was then placed in the yard on a plastic sheet.
Although not much millet was planted, it took a whole day just to bend over and harvest it.
After the rice seedlings were cut, they were laid out in the sun to dry. I sat on a small stool and picked the ears of rice off the seedlings one by one.
This process was incredibly grueling; picking the ears of grain from each seedling made me feel utterly hopeless.
Just as my eyes were becoming vacant and numb, the braying of a donkey rang out from outside the courtyard.
He quickly got up, went to the entrance, picked up the crossbow, tucked it into his waistband, and peered through the crack in the door.
Sure enough, it was Taozi and Brother Liu again. There was a man lying in the car whose face was obscured, covered with a tattered garment, and a woman sitting next to him with tears streaming down her face.
What happened?
I pushed open the door and asked loudly.
"I lost my footing while cutting corn stalks and fell. A corn kernel got stuck in my thigh. The base's medical room treated it before, but now it's inflamed and infected, and there's really nothing we can do. Girl, do you think you can help me?"
Brother Liu looked anxious and quickly explained the situation.
“I’m only a novice myself, I’m not sure either… Let’s bring the person in first, I’ll give it a try.”
After kicking aside the straw at the door, Brother Liu and Taozi carried the person into the house and placed him on the kang (heated brick bed) in the east room.
The injured person may be somewhat unconscious, and their face has an abnormal flush, which is clearly caused by a fever due to a wound infection.
How long have you had a fever?
“He started having a fever last night. He went to the clinic this morning, but the doctor said they couldn’t treat him, so we brought him here right away.”
The woman, whose face was streaked with tears, still spoke with relatively clear logic.
I nodded, looking at the injured man's relatively clean pants, it seemed I couldn't just cut them off.
He turned to the woman and asked, "Is it alright if I take my pants off?"
"Okay, okay, no problem."
The woman quickly nodded in agreement.
Brother Liu helped lift the patient's waist, and I pulled my pants down all at once.
The blood-stained gauze wrapped around his thigh was exposed, and the flesh around the gauze was already red and swollen. It was not hard to guess that the wound under the gauze was even more horrific.
I stood there in silence for a while, thinking about what medicines and tools I would need.
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