Chapter 219 Finding a Vegetable Garden
Thoughts are the easiest thing to be influenced by oneself. Mu Xi admitted his mistakes with a very positive attitude and immediately proposed a solution.
"Then wait a couple of days, after the rice and sticky rice are all dried, we'll go down the mountain together to move the big aluminum barrel. You stay at home and dry the unfinished rice while I bring back the remaining pieces."
Zhao Yeqing agreed to the plan and started drying the rice at home before Mu Xi brought back the small and medium-sized aluminum barrels.
Rice and glutinous rice are considered good only when their moisture content reaches nearly 13%. Two days of exposure to strong sunlight will be enough.
After the last batch of rice was dried, Zhao Yeqing took one and bit it.
Crunchy and acceptable.
The temperature is now rising steadily at a rate of two or three degrees per week. The showers that were previously very annoying are now impossible to obtain.
Within a few days, Mu Xi moved the remaining sections back and assembled them all.
Mu Xi had been spending most of his time in the woods recently, and he didn't notice any changes because he was shaded by the trees. However, Zhao Yeqing was drying rice at home and didn't pay much attention to the sunlight, so he became noticeably darker in just a few days.
The winter lasted so long that she had long forgotten about sun protection in the summer and hurriedly took out her straw hat and put it on.
After the aluminum barrel was assembled, the two people worked together to pour the wheat and rice into the aluminum barrel and then closed the lid.
There is a grain outlet at the bottom of the aluminum barrel. You only need to pull up the aluminum valve and the grain inside will leak out. You can take out the grain without opening the lid on top.
Zhao Yeqing checked the rice seedlings that were being grown in dry cultivation and the corn in the fields.
"It will take another ten days for the seedlings to mature before the corn can be harvested. We can harvest a batch now, cook them, and then dry them to make shade corn. For the rest, we just need to wait for them to grow on the stalks for a while, which will be good time for us to go down the mountain and carry things."
It is still in the milky stage, which is the right time for people to eat it. In a dozen days, the corn will reach the waxy stage and become hard. The starch content in it will increase. After being brought back, it can be dried and shelled into grains, and it can be used as an excellent concentrated feed for chickens, sheep, cattle and horses.
If corn in the milky stage is cooked and then dried, the kernels will not become shriveled. Store it in a dry place and cook it again or fry it when you want to eat it.
There is no need to keep a lot of corn for human consumption, and it is rather troublesome to store it. The two planned to move the barrels tomorrow, and today they quickly picked up the corn to be cooked and dried before it got dark.
"We can't eat much, so we'll just break off 20 to 30 kilograms. When the wax is ripe, we'll grind some of it into flour."
The two of them took two baskets of corn home. Zhao Yeqing was a little tired of eating boiled corn in the past two days, so he asked Mu Xi to peel the corn kernels and take out the freshly made cheese.
After mixing the corn kernels with a small amount of sugar, add some starch and an egg and stir evenly, grease the pan with butter and pour the corn kernel paste in. When it is almost cooked, sprinkle chopped cheese on the surface.
Mu Xi loves sweets and ate a whole ten-inch tortilla.
Zhao Yeqing also fried one for himself in a small pan. The sweet corn kernels were paired with the milky cheese, and you could pull out long threads after taking a bite.
After eating the tortilla, she took another corn and roasted it on the fire, sprinkling salt, cumin and chili powder on it.
The first time she saw the barbecue restaurant owner sprinkle cumin on corn, she couldn't accept it. But after eating it once, she was immediately captivated by it. The combination of sweet and salty was inexplicably harmonious, and the more she ate, the more she became addicted.
When I was in Meishan before, to store Yin corn, we would just boil the whole corn and then hang it up to dry.
At that time, they were in a hurry to find water. Now that they have time, they sit in the kitchen after dinner to peel corn. They peel it first, then cook and dry it, which is more convenient to store.
Wait until daybreak and lock the sheep pen and cattle pen to prevent Dahuang from letting the cattle and sheep out to graze when you are not at home.
After the feed was stored in each barn, the two men walked down the mountain.
Mu Xi had run this road several times recently, and it had been tidied up even more than last year. They could go down the mountain faster, and the two of them walked and ran down the mountain, reaching the foot of the mountain just before noon.
The last time he came down, Mu Xi had already stood up the big aluminum barrel and placed it in the yard of that family's house.
The aluminum barrel was relatively thin, and when Zhao Yeqing slapped it, it made a rustling sound.
"You think these several hundred kilograms of corn are not enough? I was thinking about whether I should plant some more corn in the fall."
Mu Xi understood that she was planning to transport all three sections of the large aluminum barrel back, so she said:
"Corn is not particularly easy to digest when fed to cattle and sheep. It has to be mixed with other feeds. Straw and silage are more suitable because they are large in quantity and not laborious."
Zhao Yeqing disagreed.
"But if you want cattle and sheep to produce milk and grow meat, they still need concentrated feed. You should continue to mix corn and soybeans. Then the concentrated feed will be a mixture of soybean meal, corn and green fodder. If you can't eat beef for the time being, do you still have to worry about not having mutton?"
"Okay, I'll listen to you." Mu Xi was persuaded and tied the hemp rope he brought with him to the aluminum barrel.
I had to take all three large aluminum barrels back with me, so it would take at least three days to go back and forth.
After spending two days transporting the two sections back home, Zhao Yeqing planned to stay at the foot of the mountain for one night on the third day and spend some time in the fields to see if there was any harvest.
The two of them left their backpacks in the brick building in the village and went to walk around the fields holding hands.
Mu Xi is not hopeful. "It was too cold last year. Not many plants can survive the winter. Maybe we can still find some harvest in the vegetable garden."
In their fields, besides growing rice, only a few people grow some wheat and sorghum.
Sorghum is used to make wine.
Zhao Yeqing doesn't like drinking sorghum wine. Among the homemade wines brewed by farmers, she only likes rice wine.
So the only supplies in the village that she did not favor were various kinds of liquor, except for a few sorghum liquors, and mostly sweet potato liquors.
The alcohol content of homemade wine is not high, so it cannot be disinfected. The operation process may also cause the number of colonies to exceed the standard. She is terrified to drink the rice wine she brews, and she dares not drink the wine brewed by others.
Mu Xi smiled and said, "Maybe if we go to the vegetable garden, we can find some sweet potatoes that have successfully survived the winter buried in the soil. The sweet potatoes that have survived the cold winter on their own are good evolved varieties."
But Zhao Yeqing didn't believe it. He ran around the few remaining fields, but found nothing.
I could only go back to the vegetable field where I found sesame seeds last time.
Last year’s sesame harvest was a little late, and many of the sesame seeds had already burst, with the seeds scattered across the ground.
Zhao Yeqing originally thought that he could harvest a bunch of wild sesame this year, but unexpectedly the winter was too cold. When he went to the vegetable garden, he saw only a small piece of weak sesame seeds struggling to survive among the weeds.
The two men had sickles and hatchets in their hands and cleared away some of the weeds.
Last time, he only found these two small vegetable plots. Zhao Yeqing planned to walk further, maybe he could find other vegetable gardens.
After all, I stayed at the foot of the mountain for a day just to gain some special benefits.
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