Chapter 39 Autumn Harvest
When we got back, we set up a table and sat in the yard. Each person took two mooncakes, cut them into small pieces with a knife and put them on plates.
Then we watched the moon and ate moon cakes, sang songs from time to time, and talked about everything under the sun and our hometowns.
After eating the mooncakes, everyone dispersed. The autumn harvest will begin tomorrow, and it is necessary to get a good night's sleep.
The next day, just after daybreak, there was movement at the educated youth site. They had to hurry up for the autumn harvest, and everyone had to be at the threshing ground at dawn.
So today when it was Panyu and Tan Yanlu's turn to cook, they got up in the middle of the night and cooked a pot of porridge made of cornmeal and sweet potato cubes.
A dozen people each had a bowl, and after eating, they walked towards the threshing ground.
When they arrived at the threshing ground, there was already a large crowd of people gathered there. After they received their tools, the team leader gave an order and the ten team leaders led their team members to the fields.
Harvesting sorghum, rice, corn, sweet potatoes, millet, beans, peanuts, and all kinds of grains and beans, the autumn harvest is really a nightmare for this purely manual labor society.
Even Jiang Panyu, who was used to doing farm work, was no exception. Under the scorching sun, he wielded a sickle in his hand, cutting the sorghum one by one, and he could not stop.
Because a one-stop service is waiting for you, collecting the sorghum, bundling it, and then sending the bundled sorghum to the threshing ground to dry and thresh it.
And there were people picking sorghum ears closely behind me. I couldn't stop, because if I stopped, someone would keep urging me.
You won’t want to go to the toilet at this time because the water in your body can turn into sweat and flow out.
The towel around his neck had long been soaked with sweat, his body was covered with grass clippings, and the sorghum leaves scratched his skin from time to time, causing itching.
But you can't scratch it because the more you scratch it, the more itchy it becomes.
During the rush harvest period, there is no break at noon because there is no need to go home to cook. During the rush harvest period, everyone eats from a big pot.
This is the only benefit of the autumn harvest. You don’t have to produce the food yourself. The team takes food from the granary and cooks a big pot of rice.
After a busy morning, everyone can hardly stand up straight, not to mention the back pain and grimacing. If you want to sit down and rest for a while, you have to hold your waist and sit down slowly.
But no one wants to sit at this time, because the meal has already started. If you don’t line up, you won’t even be able to eat if you wait.
The big pot meal is very simple, just multi-grain steamed buns and wild vegetable soup. There are some egg flowers in the soup, which is a rare bit of meat.
After a short break after dinner, everyone got up and continued working.
This autumn harvest lasted for half a month before it was barely completed.
All the grain in the fields was pulled back to the threshing ground, and the team leader finally announced that there was no need to rush to harvest from dawn to dusk.
Starting tomorrow, work will resume as normal. Many people are cheering, but the new educated youth are crying from exhaustion. Jiang Panyu is also very tired.
After much difficulty in raising some meat, it was all gone after the autumn harvest.
Fortunately, the work won’t be so hard next time. We just need to dry and store the crops such as the sweet potato vines, corn stalks, and sorghum stalks in the field.
The cows and donkeys in the village rely on this mixed with bran, hay and picked out shriveled beans to fill their stomachs and keep warm in winter!
Then, everyone will go to the hemp field to cut hemp. Hemp is a plant that does not require much care. It can grow well and lushly as long as it is near water.
When the hemp grows tall enough to bear fruit and its leaves turn yellow, it is time to harvest.
Cut the hemp stalk and remove the leaves, leaving only the green hemp stalk. Then break it in the middle, align the two broken sections with both hands and peel off the green skin.
Throw the white, smooth hemp stalks aside, dry them and use them as firewood.
There is a huge puddle near the hemp field, which is filled with water, and the peeled green skins are thrown into it to ferment.
Wait for ten days or half a month, when winter comes, pick up the hemp skins, use a hemp knife to scrape off the rotten outer rough skin, and what remains is the bluish-white hemp.
If you use the hemp knife to scrape it a few more times, the hemp will become whiter.
After the hemp is dried, white hemp will appear, and then the women in the village will be organized to rub the hemp.
Take out the neatly collected hemp, separate a small part of it, spray a little water on it, and rub it into a hemp rope on your knees. The hemp rope can be thicker or thinner, longer or shorter according to your needs.
When twisting hemp ropes, one must pay attention to making sure the thickness is even and there are no marks on the joints. It is a job that requires a lot of skill and patience.
The most common use of hemp products is to use hemp ropes to tie shoe soles, hemp ropes to tie things up, and even the hemp used in mourning clothes.
In the era when there were no leather shoes or rubber shoes, cloth shoes made of hemp were a necessity in life.
It takes women a long time to sew a pair of soles one stitch at a time and make a pair of cloth shoes.
"Playing mahjong is relatively good. I can earn three or four work points a day. At least I am still in the house, and there is a kang to keep warm. Everyone can chat with each other, and the day will pass by quickly.
The men had an even harder life. They built reservoirs, repaired canals, and practiced the "three-light" strategy. The so-called "three-light" strategy meant using a rake to hoe away all the weeds in front of, behind, and on the ridges of the fields, and put them into the fields to ferment as green manure.
There are also migrant workers who participate in the construction of roads and complete the earthwork of designated sections.
These all come with work points, and a lunch is included. Many people in the village will participate, but most of them are heavy laborers, and most of them are men.
The weather was cold and windy, blowing on people's faces, and it could make their faces bleed in a few days. They had higher work points, six or seven of them. ”
While spreading out the corn stalks, Yang Guiying talked to Jiang Panyu about what to do next.
In short, you cannot sit idle. In the countryside, people work like this all year round. If they don't work, they won't have enough to eat. For a living, everyone has to work like this.
It was helpless and very hard, but that was how people survived in that era.
After everyone finished their work in the fields, they had to do their own things. For example, at the educated youth site, the radishes, squash and various autumn vegetables that had been planted earlier had to be quickly collected and stored so that they would have vegetables to eat in the winter.
And before it snows, you have to go up the mountain to collect firewood, pine needles and fallen leaves, otherwise there will not be enough firewood in the winter and you will have to endure the cold.
Fortunately, there were many people at the educated youth site and Li Gaoyang assigned the work reasonably, so no one complained and everything was going in an orderly manner in preparation for the winter.
After finishing all these tasks, it was already mid-September. With a whole month of good weather, all the grain was threshed and stored smoothly.
The captain waved his hand and gave everyone one more day off so that everyone could have a good rest.
Everyone was very happy, and many of them were discussing what to do during the rare break.
However, the people at the educated youth site were on holiday and slept until noon before getting up to cook and fill their stomachs.
Jiang Panyu felt like crying as she looked at her skin which had darkened by more than two shades.
I finally gained some weight, but because the autumn harvest was all gone, I am now dark, thin and skinny, even more rustic than a country girl.
At this time, she was very envious of Tan Yanlu. They were sunbathing every day and doing the same work, but her skin was not much darker. Isn't it because she was the reincarnation of a fairy koi fish that she was not afraid of the sun?
Jiang Panyu looked at her skin again and was so disgusted that she didn't even want to look at it anymore.
The melon-eating system couldn't bear to watch it anymore and reminded her: "Host, have you forgotten the mission reward?
The reward for the last mission included a beauty cream!
Why don’t you use the one that has sun protection, skin nourishing, whitening and beauty effects? ”
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