She looks much happier now than when Zhou Chenyu first transmigrated.
Zhou Chenyu chuckled and teased her, "Grandma, it's just a piece of meat, why are you so happy?"
Li Xiuju was among the first to arrive, and the meat she bought was top-quality pork belly with a good balance of fat and lean. "Of course, you would have to spend several more coins to buy this kind of meat at the market."
In the past, Zhou Chenyu would just pick up any lean meat she saw at the supermarket, thinking, "Isn't this just a piece of pork?"
“You’re not married yet, how would you know if the meat is good or bad?” Li Xiuju added meaningfully, “You’ll know when you’re married.”
Not long after the pressure to get married subsided, Li Xiuju's thoughts began to resurface. Zhou Chenyu stuck out her tongue, silently shut her mouth, and didn't respond to her.
Li Xiuju glanced at her, then happily put the meat back into the well and hung it up. As she came out again, she saw the woman turning over the wet straw pile at the edge of the field. A thought suddenly struck her:
"With so much rain recently, there should be a lot of straw mushrooms growing in the haystacks. When you cook those mushrooms with pork, the soup tastes incredibly sweet and delicious. After we finish here, Mom will go and take a look."
Picking straw mushrooms?
Can mushrooms grow on straw?
Zhou Chenyu had never heard of this before. She was feeling cooped up at home lately and finally had an excuse to go out, so she excitedly said, "Me too! Me too!"
“Your legs have only just fully recovered, so stay home and don’t go anywhere.” Li Xiuju flatly rejected her idea without the slightest hesitation. After that, Qingshui Town experienced several days of thunderstorms. The spring rice harvest was complete, and the rice paddies, whose surfaces had cracked from the sun, were once again filled with water.
Because the rice in Qingshui Town is planted in two seasons, after the harvest, the preparations for sowing must be put on the agenda soon. So the villagers of Zhoujia Village have no time to rest. People from every household who have free time bring their hoes and appear in the fields. The bare rice fields immediately become full of farmers.
Taking advantage of the time between harvesting the rice and sowing the seeds, Li Xiuju let the chickens and ducks roam freely outside. Compared to the wild vegetables and rice bran that confined chickens and ducks eat, the chickens and ducks raised in the paddy fields taste better.
With the income from selling sweet soup gone, and it not being the season for picking bamboo shoots or gathering summer mushrooms, Li Xiuju's bamboo baskets and winnowing trays have become the family's only source of income while Zhou Chenyu is recovering from his foot injury.
Since she had nothing better to do, Zhou Chenyu calmed down and patiently learned from Li Xiuju for a while, and finally managed to weave a bamboo basket for holding vegetables that looked quite decent.
And so, while others tilled the fields, Baoyu went into the mountains to cut bamboo, and Zhou Chenyu and Li Xiuju sat under a tree in front of their house, doing handicrafts while listening to the birds chirping. No one was idle.
However, compared to harvesting rice, Zhou Chenyu felt that plowing was much easier.
When encountering paddy fields with soft soil, villagers only need to draw water into the fields and soak them for a few days. The paddy fields become soft and yielding, like evenly pounded cement. When you walk barefoot into the fields, you can easily tamp the rice roots into the mud. Children love this the most.
Zhou Chenyu stomped her feet hard in front of her, shook Li Xiuju's arm, and pretended to be pitiful while acting coquettishly, saying, "Grandma, my leg has been healed for a long time! Please let me go. If you don't let me go out for a walk, mushrooms will grow on my head. I beg you."
"Your hair is perfectly clean, how could mushrooms grow on it?" Li Xiuju was exasperated by Zhou Chenyu. "Fine, fine, Mother will allow you to go with her, she'll allow you to go with her."
"That's more like it." But when you encounter paddy fields with hard soil, even if you replenish the water, the surface is still hard and you can walk on it barefoot as if it were flat ground, and you can't step into the soil at all.
When encountering rice paddies with hard soil, villagers have to rely on hoes. In poorer families, the whole family carries iron rakes, hoes, and shovels to turn the soil bit by bit. It takes a whole day to turn over a small plot of land.
Those from wealthier families would send a able-bodied young man and a water buffalo. They would tie the plow to the buffalo's rump and use the buffalo's strength to pull the plow and turn the soil by whipping it. This method required fewer people and was much faster than manually harrowing the fields.
With more people farming, fewer people went to the market. Without customers, the butcher pushed his cart full of pork, traveling from village to village.
"Selling pork."
"The pork was just slaughtered, and it's all good quality meat!"
"Once you leave this village, you won't find another shop like this! Selling pork!"
Hearing the butcher's shouts, the people working in the fields hurried back. Li Xiuju put down her bamboo stick and said, "It's been a while since I bought pork. Mother, go buy a pound."
Zhou Chenyu watched as Li Xiuju walked towards the entrance of the Big Banyan Tree Village, and a short while later, she returned happily carrying a piece of meat.
The rice straw that had been burned to ashes had been raked into the fields and used as fertilizer, while the straw that hadn't been burned in time and had been rained on couldn't be lit and was piled up on the ridges of the fields or under the bamboo groves.
After weaving all the bamboo strips, Zhou Chenyu put on a straw hat to shield herself from the rain and followed Li Xiuju to the fields.
Even though there were several piles of straw right outside the courtyard gate, Li Xiuju insisted on taking a detour to the abandoned white house. "Grandma, why didn't you go and check those piles earlier?"
“Those places that are clearly visible have definitely been ransacked, and there’s probably nothing left. Let’s go to those secluded places, like the White House, where there’s plenty of shade and it’s cool. Everyone’s harvesting rice there, so there’s bound to be a lot of leftover straw.”
"I see." Zhou Chenyu silently memorized this survival skill. Li Xiuju stepped over the soft paddy field ridge and climbed the stone steps. The wasteland that had previously been covered with mugwort was now piled with several heaps of straw that had collapsed from the rain, and a faint smell of decay emanated from them.
Zhou Chenyu knew that mushrooms liked these places the most.
They went over and turned over the haystack, and sure enough, many straw mushrooms sprouted from it.
The head of the summer solstice mushroom is also umbrella-shaped, but its color is close to dark brown. The unopened tip of the straw mushroom is like a white ball, and when it opens, it looks like a slightly opened umbrella with a white base and the tip gradually turns dark purple.
The older straw mushrooms, with their heads resembling fully open umbrellas, are dark purple or black in color and are mostly rotten, so they should be discarded.
Li Xiuju rummaged through a pile of things, leaving Zhou Chenyu to pick them up, while she went off to other places.
The turned-over haystack was warm, with some small ants crawling on it. Zhou Chenyu carefully pulled out the straw mushrooms, which were covered with the scent of straw. After turning over the whole pile, he could grab a handful with one hand.
Because they are scarce and difficult to preserve, straw mushrooms cannot be sold at the market like summer solstice mushrooms; they are picked and kept for personal consumption.
"Chenyu, have you finished picking them over there? Mother has plenty here, come over quickly."
Li Xiuju called out, and Zhou Chenyu, having finished picking up the straw here and piling it back up, immediately went to Li Xiuju's side, "Coming, coming!"
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