frightfiction Chapter 157 Autumn Harvest
Chapter 157 Autumn Harvest
After dinner in the evening, everyone went to rest. Zhao Huanxi took a nice bath and then checked the accounts in the study.
It was the same time last night, and Xu Qingzhao was still knocking on the door.
"Huanhuan, are you asleep?"
Zhao Huanxi complained in his heart, why did this guy come knocking on the door at a certain time every day like an NPC.
After opening the door, Xu Qingzhao looked tired. He walked into the room and sat down in his seat.
"Why do you look like that? What have you been doing?"
Xu Qingzhao was very nervous. She couldn't say that she was going back to clean the house in the afternoon, otherwise Lu Hongguo would go to her house to block her again.
"I went home to pack my things and ran into a little trouble... I was delayed."
Zhao Huanxi said casually without even looking up, "Could it be that little Hongguo girl went to your house again?"
Xu Qingzhao didn't say anything, just nodded.
"Ah? Really? What did that girl tell you?" Huanxi was a little embarrassed. She had just said it casually, but she didn't expect it to be true.
Xu Qingzhao said with a bitter face: "It's all just nonsense, unbearable to listen to."
Zhao Huanxi could already imagine what the girl said. It was nothing more than those random words...
"The kitchen made pigeon soup today, and I even used a small ginseng root. It's still warming in the pot for you. It's probably still hot now."
"Okay, thank you Huanhuan for thinking of me."
"You're still talking nonsense. If you don't eat more later, I won't let you go."
Xu Qingzhao followed behind Huanxi and said with a smile, "Hehe, I will definitely eat more."
The warm pigeon soup was taken out of the pot, along with a few dishes of side dishes, and placed on the dining table. Xu Qingzhao helped himself to some rice, and once the dishes were served, he began to devour them.
After taking a sip of the soup, he praised it sincerely, "Chun Liu Xia He's cooking skills are really good. This soup doesn't even have the slightest bit of pigeon smell."
Huanxi smiled and said, "Yes, and I like their temperaments too. I'm thinking about whether I should ask these two to be the chefs for the farmhouse in the future."
"Of course I can, but if I want to be a chef with this skill alone, I'm afraid I'm still a little short of it. But if you have some novel recipes, I can give it a try."
"That's inevitable. I still have a secret weapon that I haven't used yet. I'll harvest two more batches of winter eggplants, dry them, and remove the seeds. Then I can use them in cooking."
Now there is only one batch of peppers left on the smaller plant, and the larger one has long stopped bearing fruit. Zhao Huanxi couldn't bear to throw it away, so he let it grow in the field.
The peppers harvested can weigh about two kilograms. The first harvest in the next two days will almost all be dried up, and then the autumn peppers will be ready.
You can get more fruits, and you will never be short of peppers in the future. Every time I see dried peppers, I swallow my saliva several times, and I can't bear to use even half of them.
The next afternoon, Zhao Huanxi sat under the eaves and called Chunliu and her sister to come over to help deseed the peppers.
I picked out the largest ones, and the seeds alone filled up half a bowl.
Then find a small wooden basin, soak the seeds in it, take them out the next day, drain the water, pick them up with wet gauze, and put them indoors to germinate.
Zhao Huanxi stayed at home for the past three or four days, and Baoer followed her around like a little tail. She was a little scared of her at first, but then she realized how gentle Huanxi was and how patiently she taught her, so she gradually stopped being afraid.
Over the past few days, she turned the pepper seeds over every day. On the third day, she finally saw tiny sprouts emerging from them.
Zhao Huanxi quickly asked Su Yun to get some wood ash, and shoveled some soil from the chicken coop and mixed it with the sifted fine soil to make nutrient soil.
Then he took out the seedling pot that he had asked Carpenter Lao Lin to make, filled it with nutrient soil, evenly spread the seeds, and covered it with a thin layer of fine soil. He also found some dry straw to cover it with for insulation.
It’s getting late now, so it’s time to set up the greenhouse, otherwise these things won’t survive the winter.
Xu Qingzhao came in wearing a short cotton-padded jacket. Seeing Huanxi finished her work, he said, "Huanhuan, the rice in the field is dry. It's time to hire someone to thresh it today. I borrowed a threshing bucket from Uncle Youmao (the village chief). If it doesn't rain, it will take several days to finish."
Huanxi said, "Then call a few more people, finish threshing as soon as possible, and borrow a few more threshing buckets so that we can dry the rice when we get back."
The rice was harvested a few days ago, tied into bundles and stuck in the ground to dry. Now it is dry enough to be harvested directly.
If the rice is harvested, it is still a problem to find where to dry it. When I was a child, the yard in my grandmother's house was very spacious. She would just spread bamboo mats on the ground and dry them in a few days.
Looking at my own house again, the only spacious area may be the half-acre of land outside the new house. At that time, people came and went and turned this land into a flat ground. Now it is accidentally used for drying millet and it is quite good.
So he went to Old Master Lu's house to borrow bamboo mats. The rice in Old Master Lu's house was not yet ripe, so he borrowed two bamboo mats from Huanxi first and asked Lu Lingen and Liu to deliver them to him.
Because this period is the busy farming season, the reclamation of the wasteland at the back will be temporarily suspended and will be resumed after the rice is harvested.
After all, they were all farmers, and food was their foundation. So Zhao Huanxi generously gave them a few days off.
She went to check on her own fields. A gentle autumn breeze blew, and the golden rice fields resembled a vast golden ocean, shimmering with light and a breathtaking beauty. Fallen leaves, like fragments of time, gently drifted down the ancient village road, laying a golden carpet.
As the sun sets, a brilliant red glow appears on the horizon, which contrasts beautifully with the golden rice fields, forming a magnificent autumn picture.
The villagers, holding sickles, shuttled through the rice fields, their faces filled with the joy of harvest, and from time to time laughter echoed in the fields.
There were also many little kids picking up fallen rice ears in the fields. Although there were not many of them, the amount they picked up was enough for an average family's meal.
"It is noon and I am hoeing the fields. Sweat drips to the ground. Who knows that every grain of rice on the table is the result of hard work?" Zhao Huanxi looked at the villagers working in the fields with their backs to the sky and their faces facing the earth, feeling infinite emotion in his heart.
At this time, one or two children passing by came forward to greet Huanxi, and she was extremely happy when they called her "Auntie Huanxi".
She quickly took out some candies from her arms and gave a few to everyone. In her previous life, she didn't like children very much. But after traveling through time, she saw mostly sensible and obedient children. Gradually, she got used to carrying some candies with her when she went out in the village.
When they see a well-behaved child, they will give a few to him. So Huanxi has a very good reputation among the children. When they see Huanxi, they like to come up to him and say hello.
When we arrived at the field, some men were threshing the rice in handfuls into threshing buckets. The rice grains fell steadily into the buckets, and then when they were almost done, they packed them into sacks and carried them home.
Zhao Huanxi roughly calculated that a jin (jin) in this era weighed about the same as a jin (jin) today. The yield per mu of this top-quality land was worth about 500 jin (jin) per mu, and that was for top-quality land.
Looking at the slightly sparse rice in other people's fields, it is estimated to be only about 300 kilograms at most.
She remembered that in her previous life, a god-like grandfather had created a high-quality rice variety, which allowed the common people to produce more than 2,000 catties per mu, and even poorer land could produce 800 to 900 catties per mu.
In this era, even if the common people used their hoes to dig up everything, they would only get 500 kilograms, and they still had to pay shockingly high taxes.
She felt endless sadness in her heart. If there was a good way, she would be willing to guide them and provide them with more options.
After all, in this world, except for the heroine of the novel, no one can get rich by farming.