Chapter 320: Building a Chicken Coop
Old Zhou sat on the doorstep and looked up at the sky. Manbao had just finished taking notes and followed Keke's advice to go out and look into the distance to refresh her eyes. Seeing her father sitting on the doorstep, she also sat on the doorstep and looked up at the sky with him.
A man and a child sat on the doorstep, both silent. A passing villager couldn't help laughing when they saw them, "What are you two looking at?"
Old Zhou sighed, "Look at the sky."
Manbao nodded seriously, "Look at the clouds."
The villagers also looked up at the sky, only to see the setting sun. They leaned against the wall and watched together, "Uncle Jin, do you think it will clear up?"
It rained twice today, one after another. Although the sun came out in the afternoon, it was not easy to harvest rice in such weather.
Old Zhou touched his pipe and said, "No matter if it's sunny tomorrow or not, we can't wait any longer. The rice in the field has to be harvested once it turns yellow."
"Your family will start the harvest tomorrow?"
"Well, after harvesting, we pick them and bring them home to dry. We don't leave them in the fields."
The villagers were a little envious, "Uncle Jin, your family has a lot of people, so of course it's no problem. But my family is not so good. There are only six of us, and we have two children. We can only harvest one piece of land a day, so it's impossible to carry it back."
Old Zhou was a little proud, but he still laughed and said, "I have a big family, but I also have a lot of land. It's all the same, the same."
It would be strange if they were the same. The speed of one person mowing one piece of land and two people mowing two pieces of land are also different.
Although he didn't know why, it was just different.
They cannot calculate, but they can see with their eyes and compare directly.
Manbao pouted and said, "Master, there will be no holiday during the autumn harvest."
Old Zhou laughed and said, "If you don't want to plant rice, then don't plant it. There isn't much rice this year anyway, so there's no need for you little kids to work in the fields."
"That's right. My family planted 12 acres of rice, and half of it was destroyed," the villager said with some relief. "Thank goodness the government exempted us from tax, otherwise we wouldn't be able to survive this year."
In fact, although the imperial court exempted taxes, everyone still lived a tight life.
In the past, one acre of rice could yield about two and a half dan, but now it may not even yield one dan.
A lot of rice has not yet filled with grain. When you touch it, it is all empty shells. After cutting it, you can only use straw.
Old Zhou's family's luck with rice was no better. The same situation occurred. Several fields were directly washed away, and now there are more grass than rice in the fields.
However, the pressure on their family is not so great now, because the wheat harvest is good. Zhou Erlang has a fixed income every day recently. Coupled with the windfall from Fuling, Old Zhou is now quite calm and steady.
The Zhou family decided to harvest rice. As soon as the news spread, many families went to the fields to check on the rice. It was already August, and even though there had been floods, most of the rice had turned yellow and was ready for harvest.
They looked at the sky and decided to start harvesting tomorrow.
The country people made decisions so quickly and irrationally. The day before, everyone was so idle that they were sitting under the tree with twine to separate the ropes. The next day, before dawn, everyone took sickles and bamboo baskets and went out.
In an instant, the slack season turns into the busy season.
Rice is easier to harvest than wheat, but not many villagers in Qili Village are happy because the rice harvest this year is so poor that no one has much motivation.
The Zhou family simply didn't let He and Fang go to the fields. The rest of the people worked for six or seven days and harvested all the rice in the fields, and then began to thresh the rice slowly.
Because there is no rice in many rice husks, when you scoop them up with a winnowing basket and blow them against the wind, a huge pile of rice will be blown away in an instant, and there will not be much good rice left.
But everyone had already expected this, and although they sighed, they were not very sad.
People will also collect the rice husks that are blown out. If there is not enough food at home in the spring of the following year, they can grind them into bran and eat them.
Old Zhou's family also collected it, but after counting the food at home, Old Zhou felt that there was still enough to eat, so he decided to use it to feed the chickens.
Qian looked at the dozen or so bags of empty rice husks she had put away and sighed, "Let's go to the market and buy ten more chickens. The hens we raised last year are getting old, so we can kill them and eat them during the New Year."
"The chicken coop isn't big enough," Manbao said with a disdainful glance at the coop, "Mom, they don't like to lay eggs when it's too crowded."
Little Qian took a look at Manbao and took the opportunity to suggest, "Mom, why don't we clean up the wasteland behind the house and build a chicken coop there. It will be spacious and the house will not be messy."
Qian hesitated, "After all, it's outside the house. What if it's stolen..."
"Who would be so bold? Besides, we have a lot of chickens at home. If someone really tries to steal them, we'll know as soon as the chickens crow."
Xiao Qianshi complained more than once that the chicken coop at home was in the yard. Although the children cleaned the yard every day, she was the first to get up early and the last to go to bed late, so some dirt would inevitably catch her eye.
Manbao obviously brought up this matter because he heard her muttering.
Manbao really agreed with his sister-in-law's suggestion wholeheartedly.
"What if there's a weasel?" There are not only people stealing chickens in the village, but also rats and weasels.
Among them, rats and weasels are the most harmful.
Qili Village is relatively simple and honest. Although there are lazy people and annoying thugs, because there are few people and everyone is related to each other, there is no one who is particularly harmful to the neighbors.
The hooligans that the village despises are just lazy people who like to wander around the mountains and rivers.
For example, Zhou Silang was once classified as a gangster.
Zhou Dalang thought for a moment and said, "Don't we have some stones left over from building the house last year? We can just use the stones for the base, mud for the top, and build a fence around it. The weasels shouldn't be able to get in."
Zhou Erlang continued, "The tiles that were crushed in June are still piled up in the corner. We can use them to build a chicken coop, so the mice can't get in."
Only then did Qian agree.
The area extending from the right side of Zhou's house to the back of the house is their vegetable garden.
The vegetable garden on the right was opened when Old Zhou's parents were still alive. Later, Qian took over. As the family grew in number, she expanded the garden little by little. Anyway, it didn't belong to anyone, so she planted behind the house.
There is a mountain about 300 meters away from the land behind the house. It is the land allocated to Zhou Dalang by the village.
There are five or six clumps of bamboo growing naturally a little further up the mountain, and hemp used to be planted at the foot of the mountain, but now it has all been cut back.
The mountain is not far from their home. The open space of more than 300 meters in the middle is ownerless and few people walk there.
Qian automatically marked the land as his own, and without telling the village chief, he started to lay mud and prepare to build a chicken coop the next day.
When the construction really started, Manbao ran over there and looked back and forth, and then he found that it would be a good idea to put a chicken coop in the back, "In the future, I can drive the chickens to the mountains to find insects to eat."
Qian laughed, "How many bugs can there be in the mountains? We might as well go to the fields."
Qian was stunned when she heard this. "Yes, we can drive the chickens to the fields to eat insects."
(End of this chapter)
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