An orphan girl from a farming family: Everyday farming in the mountains during natural disasters

Chapter 117 Preparing for Winter (1)

On the third day, the dried fruits were ready and the foundation pit was dug.

The dried fruits taste sweet and soft, especially the dried apples and persimmons, which are the best. She and Heihei both like to eat them.

I can get about four kilograms of dried kiwi fruit.

Ten pounds of dried apples.

Fifteen or sixteen pounds of dried persimmons.

Store them all in cans and eat them in winter to satisfy your cravings and improve the taste.

The soapberry spices are dried, packed into sacks and placed in the bamboo cabinet in the utility room.

The dried walnuts and chestnuts are packed into sacks and placed next to the kimchi jars in a cool and ventilated place.

Xia Qingyue came to the cellar and planned to tidy it up.

The potatoes that originally occupied almost one-third of the area have become much less. She ate some and gave some to the Li family. Now there are only more than 100 kilograms left.

She wanted to eat some of the remaining potatoes, so she saved most of them for next year and planted some on the slope in spring.

There are more than two or three hundred kilograms of konjac.

I dug up about 100 kilograms of taro a few days ago. I’ll eat some and plant some for next year.

The cellar was rather dark, and it was a bit humid as it rained some time ago. Some of the potatoes and konjacs went rotten and were thrown away.

Today, in addition to sorting out the items, she also checked to see if any of the supplies were damaged.

To be on the safe side, she decided to spread a layer of dry straw on the ground and then move the potatoes, konjacs and pumpkins on it.

There were still several hundred pounds of pumpkin, occupying a corner. After all the work, she was sweating slightly.

Fortunately, there were not many bad ones. I picked them all out and put them in the backpack to be taken out later.

Tidy it up and make some space as I will harvest the sweet potatoes, cabbage and radishes later. There will be enough space.

The fruit trees she planted and the yams that were transplanted cannot be harvested this year because she is afraid that there will be heavy snow in winter and they will not be able to survive.

She suddenly had an idea, "Hey, I can put warm clothes on the tree."

Like drying straw and fur and stuff like that.

"Yes, let's give it a try then. It's better than doing nothing and watching them freeze to death."

Next, she focused her energy on building poultry houses.

Three square pits one meter deep are dug at equal intervals on each side of the foundation pit. A layer of earth bricks is laid on the bottom of the pit, and the gaps between each brick are filled with clay mixed with sand and gravel.

Lay it up layer by layer, fill up the pit, and build it into foundation pillars.

The foundation pillars of each earth pit were built to a height of more than three meters. She could not reach any higher, so she poured the soil that had been dug out previously back in and pounded it with thick wooden sticks.

This job was not an easy one. She worked for three consecutive days to tamp the soil to the same level as the ground and to make it firm and solid.

The earthen kang and the foundation pillars underneath were completely buried in the soil, with only the twelve foundation pillars at the top exposed.

The exposed foundation pillars were about one meter high. On this basis, she used clay bricks to build layer by layer, connecting the foundation pillars to form a square wall.

She first built up the four walls of the house a little bit to form a rough shape, and then built it one wall at a time from low to high.

When the construction reached a certain stage, she was not tall enough, so she moved a wooden ladder from the utility room and stood on it to continue the construction.

The clay was used up quickly, so she had to go out and carry some back every day.

A few days later, an autumn rain fell. Since then, the temperature has dropped and we have to wear long sleeves even when working during the day.

While building the house, she took care of the crops in the fields, applying fertilizer and watering them. In addition, three pregnant rabbits gave birth to more than ten baby rabbits.

The ducklings were hatched, ten in total, and they were raised separately just like the chicks.

Having had experience in raising baby rabbits and chicks, she is now able to take care of these new lives with ease.

In the blink of an eye, half a month later.

It's November now, and the forests are all colored. The leaves of the trees in the mountains are falling, and the ground is covered with yellow leaves. Some trees are beginning to become bare, and the flowers are withering and dying, making the scene bleak and desolate.

The poultry house built by Xia Qingyue was barely halfway built. Two walls had been built to a height of six meters, but the roof had not yet been completed.

The weather is getting colder day by day, and the sky is not very good, with mostly cloudy days.

It was a rare sunny day today, so she paused building the poultry house and went to the vegetable garden to harvest mustard greens, radishes, cabbages and spinach, carrying them back in baskets.

A small part of the 100 kilograms of mustard greens is used to make sauerkraut, and most of it is dried. A head of mustard greens is cut into two, and spread on bamboo rafts to dry without washing.

The mustard greens have been dried for two days and weigh about ten pounds. They are put into sacks and can be eaten later when you want to eat them by soaking them in warm water and cooking them.

The radish weighs a little more than the mustard greens. After washing, cut it into thick strips as long as fingers, sprinkle salt on it to drain out the water, put it in a bag, press it with a heavy object overnight, and then spread it on a bamboo raft to dry.

After two days of drying, the dried radishes became wrinkled and smelled fragrant. There were more than ten pounds of them.

Take out five pounds of dried radish, sprinkle appropriate amount of salt, chili powder and pepper powder on it, mix well, and put it into a jar to marinate.

Put the rest of the dried radish into a bag and eat it cold or stewed.

Cabbages were planted the most in the field. She pulled back two baskets, boiled hot water in a pot, grabbed the cabbage leaves with her hands, and blanched the roots for a while, then let go. She turned the whole cabbage over and blanched it, and took it out when she saw it change color.

She put the blanched cabbage into the jar. Because the jar was not big enough, she put them close together, filling the whole layer and then sprinkled a layer of salt.

I made two jars of sauerkraut made from Chinese cabbage, which needs to ferment for a while before it can be eaten.

After blanching dozens of kilograms of spinach, they were spread out on bamboo rafts to dry, and only a few kilograms were left after they dried.

After stockpiling vegetables for the winter, she did not rest and filled her day with activities.

In the morning, I stayed to fill the pit and build the poultry house. In the afternoon, I went out to find dry firewood. After dinner, I built the house for a while.

A few days later.

The wind was howling and the weather was too cold to wear just two layers of clothing, so she found some thicker clothes to put on and used some of the time she had spent building the house to nitrate the furs.

All the animal furs, mainly rabbit fur, two badger furs and two wolf skins were originally intended to be worn when entering and leaving the dense forest, but they had never been used, so they were simply nitrated together.

All the furs are dried and put into a clay pot with water to boil to make the skin looser. Dry skins are difficult to handle.

Scrape off the fascia and excess oil from the boiled fur, scrub it repeatedly with soapberry water and wood ash, and soak it overnight to remove oil and fat.

Put the processed rabbit skin and wolf skin into a large container, add appropriate amount of Glauber's salt and glutinous rice flour according to the weight of the skin, soak it in water, turn it over every two days to ensure that every side is soaked evenly.

Soak it for seven or eight days and it will be almost done.

This was done according to Xia Dasong's method. He had previously nitrated some furs and kept them in a cabinet in another room.

Xia Qingyue turned out the furs and counted them. There were three large ones, each one and a half meters long and sixty to seventy centimeters wide, and four slightly smaller ones.

Most of them are made of rabbit and deer fur patchwork and stitching together. They feel soft to the touch, but have a strange and unpleasant smell due to being kept in a closed cabinet for a long time.

At night she looked up at the night sky. There were many stars, so she thought tomorrow should be a sunny day. So she boiled a pot of soapnut water and rubbed her fur repeatedly to clean it.

After washing, hang it on a bamboo pole and dry it in the sun for two days.