After finishing, Xu Han took her basket and left home. The goji berries on the hillside had turned red in the past two days.
Now is the perfect time to pick them; we can pick some to make tea later.
It's also great to add a little when making soup, or to soak goji berries in wine. It has many uses!
Wild goji berries are easy to find; their red berries are particularly eye-catching. Even in modern times, they could often be seen growing by the roadside and along riverbanks.
Xu Han even picked them with her mother! Of course, she knows how to process them.
She had just left home and hadn't gone far when she saw a goji berry tree. Xu Han took out a small bamboo basket, put on gloves, and started picking berries.
Goji berry trees are very short, so you have to bend over to pick them, which makes them difficult to pick.
After picking all the goji berries from the tree, Xu Han went to the hillside behind the house.
There are many goji berry trees growing on the hillside over there, forming a large patch. More importantly, because they grow on the slope, they can be picked without bending over.
Upon arrival, we immediately got to picking goji berries, but because they were so small, we didn't manage to pick many after half an hour.
Because some goji berries haven't turned red yet, and we can't just cut off the branches, it's really too much trouble.
Xu Han thought that there was a large area here anyway! Even if she picked them all, there would still be quite a lot. It would be easier to just pick some of the branches that had already turned red, cut them off, and take them home to pick at her own pace.
Picking them one by one is so slow! I don't know how long it will take to finish picking all of them!
So he took out the scissors and started pruning the branches, specifically cutting off those branches that had turned completely red, while leaving the ones with many green goji berries uncut.
After you've cut off the red branches, you can slowly pick these off, or you can do it again after a while.
After pruning for about an hour, I finally finished cutting all the ripe branches. Since it was still early, I picked up my basket and started picking the ripe goji berries from the branches.
When they get tired of picking, they can take out a bamboo tube to drink some water and eat some fruit to rest.
We ate lunch right here. We just took out some food from our space and that was enough for a quick bite, which was quite convenient.
After picking all the goji berries, it was already past 2 p.m. Xu Han carried her basket and went to look for wild goji berry trees near her home.
There are still quite a few wild goji berry trees here, but they are scattered here and there, unlike the large patches we saw earlier.
The most they grow together are five or six, and some are even just one.
These are easier to pick; the branches aren't so tangled. You can grab a branch and pick them all in one go, unlike the ones over there which were all intertwined and impossible to reach. The process was actually a bit slower.
The only problem is that you have to bend over the whole time when picking them, or you have to squat down to pick them. Fortunately, there aren't many of them, so you can finish picking them in no time.
She walked and stopped along the way near her home, and before she knew it, the sun had set. Xu Han started heading home, continuing to pick fruit as she went.
When I got home, it was already dark. I went to the kitchen to boil water for a bath, added firewood, and then went to the backyard.
After refeeding the chickens, ducks, and geese and adding water, I returned to the front yard.
After the bath water was heated, I carried it to take a bath.
After taking a bath, I returned to the main room. After having dinner, I sat in the main room and began picking the goji berry branches that I had cut that day.
I have to say that it's definitely faster to pick them while sitting in a chair. You can pick a handful here and there, which is much faster and less tiring.
By 10 o'clock, Xu Han had finished picking all the goji berry branches, and this time she picked three baskets full of wild goji berries.
These will last a long time, since goji berries are just an extra and you can't eat many of them.
After they ripen in a while, we'll pick some more. They won't take up much space anyway, so it's better to have more than less!
After cleaning the house, Xu Han went to sleep. Lu Chuan was often away from home lately, and Xu Han had gotten used to it. She was quite comfortable living alone.
I wonder what Lu Chuan would think if he knew Xu Han's idea.
The next morning, after Xu Han finished breakfast and tidied up the house, she put out the things to dry and started preparing to process the goji berries.
Fortunately, after these few days of intense sun exposure, all the dried fruits except for the raisins have been dried.
Now only the pumpkin shoots and peppers need to be dried. Otherwise, there really wouldn't be any time to dry the goji berries!
Goji berries that have been picked cannot be dried directly in the sun. If they are dried this way, they will never be completely dry and will always feel damp.
Freshly picked goji berries need to be washed in alkaline water. After washing them clean, simply spread them out in a winnowing basket to dry.
Because it's wet, it needs to be air-dried for about a week to be completely dry.
After finishing with the goji berries, Xu Han went to the backyard and picked all the ripe vegetables. Now that it was getting cooler, there weren't many vegetables left.
Apart from peppers and tomatoes, which are still growing like crazy, other vegetables have stopped growing and will have to be pulled up and replanted in a while.
Chili peppers and tomatoes should be pulled up after the first frost. Sweet frost is fine, they won't die from it, but bitter frost is a disaster!
Therefore, all of these must be pulled up before the bitter frost falls.
After picking the vegetables, there seemed to be nothing much to do for the time being. The dogs had just finished their main meal, so Xu Han went to the kitchen to start preparing the dough so she could make steamed buns for the dogs later.
They went to the backyard again, took out three baskets of potatoes from their spatial storage, washed them, and cooked them all in a little while. That would last them for several days.
We can't feed them only potatoes, but we also can't feed them only steamed buns, not even the dark flour kind, we can't afford that!
After all, the puppies are growing bigger and bigger, and their appetites are naturally increasing as well.
Ordinary families really can't afford to raise them. Only Lu Chuan and Xu Han are willing to feed them, and they have meat as their staple food every day.
But the dogs are all very hardworking; at least they earn enough money to support themselves.
You can't expect people to make money for you and then not let them eat their fill! That would be incredibly heartless.
Regardless of whether the dogs found the ginseng or not, Xu Han never considered cutting back on their food and had already included their rations in her stockpile list.
Besides developing a bond through daily companionship, they also hope to protect the two of them during times of famine!
While I don't expect them to eat the best food, I'll make sure they're well-fed.
It's not a famine year now, so the dogs can usually handle their own meat needs, and they can even feed the puppies along the way.
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