Chapter 70 Harvest! Rice and Corn
October 26, 3033, sunny, 42 degrees Celsius.
The two waited all night without sleeping, and at five in the morning, they climbed out of the cellar before the sun came out.
Today is finally the day to harvest rice.
Even though the two used all means to cool down and provide shade, the high temperature inevitably affected the harvest.
Fortunately, there were some gains.
There is no water in the rice fields anymore. The soil is dry and cracked. There are a few leaves still green among the golden rice grains.
When harvesting rice, you have to be fully armed - wear gloves, sleeves, and wrap your neck with cloth.
The leaves of mature rice are hard and have sharp edges, which can easily cut your hands. The dust they raise can get into your collar and make your skin itchy if it comes into contact with it.
The techniques for harvesting rice and thatch are similar. Both require grabbing the roots and cutting them with a sickle, leaving a short piece of rice stalk on the ground.
The area was not large, and the two men finished harvesting in an hour and a half. When they saw the piles of rice rising up at the edge of the field, all the fatigue from harvesting rice disappeared.
Only the joy brought by the harvest can comfort the tired soul and make people persevere year after year.
Zhao Yeqing thought that when everything calmed down, she would contract all the fields at the foot of the mountain.
The satisfaction brought by the harvest is delayed. After several months of waiting, it is more fulfilling than the instant satisfaction brought by playing with mobile phones and watching videos in the past.
The harvested rice has to be threshed first. There is definitely no thresher at home, so the two of them can only use the primitive method of threshing.
Mu Xi made a threshing barrel out of wood two days ago. It was less than one meter high, square, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.
Zhao Yeqing had no experience and only relied on his childhood memories. He grabbed a handful of rice stalks with both hands, held them at the roots, lifted up the rice grains and smashed them hard against the wall of the wooden barrel.
The rice ears above were hit and the rice grains were knocked to the bottom of the bucket.
A handful of rice needs to be beaten back and forth several times until all the rice grains on top are knocked down, then the straw in hand can be thrown down and another handful can be grabbed to continue beating.
In the field, two people took turns, one hitting the rice and the other lifting it up. The rice hit the wooden barrel, which was hollow and had a large cavity, making a "bang! bang! bang!" sound.
The sound echoed in the woods for an hour, and gradually died down when the red sun appeared in the sky.
The golden grains in the threshing barrel had already popped out. Zhao Yeqing leaned against the barrel, feeling tired but happy. Even Mu Xi relaxed his recently tense mood and curled up the corners of his mouth.
As the saying goes, if you have food at home, you will not be worried.
Zhao Yeqing went home and got some sacks, put all the millet in them, and finally filled three sacks.
There is only an old-fashioned beam balance at home, and the weight is not big enough to measure weight.
Mu Xi picked up a bag with both hands and put it down, then picked up the other two bags, weighed them back and forth several times before speaking, "It should be a hundred kilograms."
One hundred kilograms of millet can produce about seventy kilograms of rice, which makes Zhao Yeqing very satisfied. In fact, according to the area they planted, the harvest should be more than two hundred kilograms.
But their rice seeds were not carefully selected at the beginning, and the fertilizers were not applied according to the characteristics of rice. They just used whatever fertilizers were available at home, and then there was a long period of high temperature.
It's really a series of twists and turns.
Fortunately, the result was good. Seventy kilograms of rice should have been enough for the two of them to eat for half a year, not to mention the confiscated corn and the sweet potatoes and potatoes left in the cellar.
There is no need to go out to look for supplies anymore.
But this time, the temperature was too high and the weather was too abnormal.
Mu Xi speculated that if the temperature continued to remain at this level, the drought would either continue until the water source dried up, or there would be a counterattack with continuous heavy rainfall.
In either case, it is not suitable for growing crops.
Instead of waiting to die, it is better to go out and see if you can find a way to survive.
As long as we can hold on and give this planet some time to complete its cleansing, maybe it will be able to heal.
Zhao Yeqing felt that this time it was as if the planet was sick. The areas with the most serious industrial pollution were being swallowed up by the ground cracks, as if it was pulling out the poisonous sting that had pierced its body.
The culprit is still people themselves.
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The two men poured the harvested millet onto the cement floor of the yard. It needed to be dried out for a day before it could be stored. The millet would not become moldy if the moisture was dried out.
There was no time to harvest the cornfield, so Zhao Yeqing broke off a few corns and planned to eat roasted corn for lunch.
The rest will be collected after the sun sets.
The rice straw left over from threshing the millet in the fields was also brought back, tied up and placed in the yard to dry.
Zhao Yeqing grabbed a handful of fresh millet to comfort the chickens that were still tenaciously alive.
Now the chickens have been moved indoors and are kept in Mu Xi's kitchen.
He built a chicken coop under the kitchen sink, turned on the faucet slightly, and water kept dripping into the sink above the chicken coop, making the chicken coop below much cooler.
Zhao Yeqing went to roast corn, while Mu Xi was making an automatic feeder and automatic waterer beside him.
Take a few large bottles of happy water that were left over from before, hollow out a round hole in the bottom, and drill holes around the bottom.
Get some larger plastic bottles, saw off the bottom, fill them with the prepared cement mortar, insert the bottles with round holes into them, and wait for the mortar to solidify tomorrow.
Zhao Yeqing’s roasted corn is almost ready. She likes to sprinkle cumin and hot sauce powder on the roasted corn, but Mu Xi doesn’t add anything.
At seven o'clock in the evening, the two were finally able to go to the fields to pick corn.
Holding the corn on the stalk and twisting it off is less labor-intensive than breaking it off directly. With a crisp click, a corn is twisted off and thrown aside, and then picked up together after a while.
After picking a corn, the corn stalks should be stepped on with feet. Only by breaking the stalks can it stop growing and stop absorbing nutrients from the soil. It can be dried and used as firewood.
The total corn harvest weighed about fifty kilograms.
Zhao Yeqing planned to peel half of the corn while it was still fresh, put the peeled corn kernels in the freezer, and fry them directly when ready to eat, and they would still be crispy and sweet.
There is no plan to save the corn seeds. There are still a lot of corn seeds left in Feng Lixuan’s seed bag, so he can continue planting next year.
If seeds are left for too long, their germination rate will decrease, and most corns are hybrid varieties, which are not suitable for seed preservation and will reduce yields.
Unless there is really nothing left to plant in the future, consider saving the seeds for further planting.
Peeling corn is tiring, so Mu Xi took over this job.
Zhao Yeqing processed the other half of the corn. After the corn was cooked, he pulled off the outer leaves, tied a knot between the leaves, and strung all the corn together.
A string of corns are hung on the eaves. Now they have tender yellow fruits and green leaves. When dried, the corns will turn golden yellow and the outer leaves will fade and turn white.
The two of them quickly finished the work at hand, then washed up and went to bed.
Starting from today, the two of them will adjust to the time difference, and after harvesting the dried millet and making the automatic feeder tomorrow, they will set out to look for supplies.
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