Why harvest the sweet potatoes before the first frost? Because there's a saying in the countryside: "Frost kills all plants."
After the first frost, plants gradually lose their vitality.
Especially in the northern regions, the trees are bare and the landscape is desolate.
Although their current location is at the intersection of the North and South, they still need to follow the solar terms to ensure that the seeds will germinate.
Before the first frost, they harvest the sweet potatoes and plant rapeseed in the fields. The rapeseed can be harvested and pressed for oil in April or May next year. Then they can plant corn, and when it matures around October, they can plant winter wheat.
The remaining six acres of land are used to harvest wheat at the end of May or the beginning of June each year, and then wheat is planted there. This is top-quality land, which has a high yield and cannot be disturbed.
Four acres of land certainly can't all be planted with rapeseed. My father mainly considered that he was opening a restaurant this year and would need a lot of oil, so he planted rapeseed on three acres and coriander and spinach on the remaining acre. If they couldn't finish eating them, they could sell them and then use the land to plant potatoes and sweet potatoes in the spring.
Anyway, the land is just a constant cycle of planting and harvesting. It's not always planned perfectly to utilize all 12 months of the year seamlessly. There are always times when the land is idle.
Their winters aren't very cold; the coldest they get is around -3 or -4 degrees Celsius, but normally it stays around 10 degrees Celsius.
However, the coldest weather usually occurs in January each year, lasting for about ten or twenty days, when your nose and hands are freezing.
I experienced it last year, so I don't think it's that cold here. It's located at the junction of the north and south, so it's not as damp and cold as the south, but it's not exactly dry and cold either. So it's not wrong to say that the weather here is the most suitable for living.
Almost no one here has a kang (heated brick bed), unless there are elderly people in the family who are particularly afraid of the cold in winter. They might consider it, but most families don't have one. They just have ordinary wooden plank beds.
In areas far from the mountains and forests, it's difficult to find firewood for heating in winter, unlike the three northeastern provinces where there are so many mountains and forests and plenty of dry firewood in winter. Here, even if you collect firewood, it's mostly used for daily cooking.
She brought all the corn stalks home and stacked them in the yard, as they are the most durable material for cooking and heating in winter.
They were all dried and stacked up, then covered with plastic sheeting to prevent them from getting wet in the rain.
Besides corn stalks, there are also dried sesame stalks and bean stalks, quite a lot of them. The barn in the backyard is already piled high with sweet potato pith and peanut pith, which are the main sources of feed for sheep and rabbits in winter.
Autumn is a harvest season, and animals can actually enjoy foods they don't usually get to eat.
Ever since their sweet potatoes, potatoes, and corn have been harvested, their family's meals have become noticeably more varied.
Grandma also harvested the sugarcane stalks in the corner and chopped them into sections for the children to eat. She didn't chop them all at once because my older brother said he wanted to eat them again next year, so Grandma kept the seeds and put them in the cellar to wait for them to sprout in the spring before burying them there.
"I'll plant more in the yard next year; you can just enjoy the taste for now."
Xiao Jiu was very happy to see that the sugarcane had been passed down, which proved that her initial decision was correct.
The onions, like the scallions, were saved for seed. They will probably flower and produce seeds early next year, and can be planted around May.
Grandma also discovered the difference between onions and scallions. They had been cutting and eating onion sprouts for several months. They found that the onion sprouts tasted sweeter than scallions and were somewhat similar to the garlic scapes they grew here, but not quite. So she wanted to try keeping the onion seeds and see what she would discover.
When the weather gets cold, the Panax notoginseng dries up, but Grandma doesn't care and just waits to see if it will sprout again next spring.
Purple potatoes have a purplish-black skin and a fragrant, mealy texture. They are best eaten steamed or stir-fried. Regular potatoes offer more versatility in cooking and are rich in anthocyanins, sharing the same origin as purple sweet potatoes and purple cabbage.
After discovering the difference in taste between purple-skinned potatoes and regular yellow-skinned potatoes, Grandma saved seven or eight as seeds, planning to plant more next year to try.
Seeing that her grandmother had the potential to discover new species, Xiao Jiu deliberately threw ten or twenty pounds of purple sweet potatoes into her sweet potato cellar.
The goal, of course, was to let Grandma discover the charm of purple sweet potatoes, so that when planting regular sweet potatoes next year, she could also plant some purple sweet potatoes. As a rare variety, it might even bring the family a small profit!
Grandma was puzzled as to why there were these purple sweet potatoes in the house, and they were also unusually clean.
"I didn't see this when we collected it before. Where did it come from? Have you seen it before?"
Everyone they asked said they'd never seen it, but Xiao Jiu volunteered, raising her hand: "I've seen it! I rubbed the dirt off it!"
Fortunately, she rolled the purple sweet potatoes in the soil before putting them in, so they looked cleaner and had less soil than the original soil.
In addition to purple sweet potatoes and purple-skinned potatoes, she also added some carrots with mud on them, because her grandmother had grown them, so she added a little more of them.
Not only were the carrots Grandma grew small, but they were also all crooked and twisted, not straight at all. Unlike the carrots she took from the warehouse, which weren't the particularly clean kind, but rather covered in mud and radish greens, these carrots were long and thick, and looked quite rare.
She even deliberately picked out some cracked, small, and unevenly sized carrots and threw them into the cellar. But her grandmother still found them because she was the one who pulled them up and she remembered them.
So after busying himself in the cellar for a while, he climbed up with a puzzled look on his face.
"This is so strange. I don't remember planting so many, and they didn't grow so well. How come there are so many after I put them in here? Old man, look at these. They look so good and pleasing to the eye, and they're so juicy when you pick them. It's really not something I could grow."
"Maybe you're mistaken. It's just a few carrots. If you didn't grow them, who did? They're all in our cellar. You must be mistaken."
At this moment, Xiao Jiu silently turned away and chuckled. Too much wouldn't be good, because if they had more, their vegetables could be rotated and eaten. Eating more vegetables would ensure nutrition, especially since these vegetables grown in the soil would have less chemical fertilizer and pesticides than those grown on the ground, right? Especially those grown in greenhouses, which are much better than those grown outside.
Of course, this is a way of comforting oneself; in terms of being completely natural, nothing is cleaner than this era.
Not only is the water clean, but even the air, vegetables, and fruits are all competing with insects for food. It's already extremely difficult for them to grow up and make it onto their tables.
Before sowing the rapeseed, fertilizer had to be spread on the ground first. The fertilizer had been stored up for a month or so, but there wasn't much left. The previous fertilizer had all been used in the wheat fields, and there wasn't much left for these dry and sandy lands. My father could only find one weekend to go with my grandfather to the public toilets around the county town to empty the latrines, because the area around the town had already been cleaned up by the farmers. If we wanted fertilizer, we would have to go to the town to get it.
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