The land in Changqing Village is divided per capita, and each person in Zhang An's family has one acre.
This is because there were few people in the village at that time. In other villages with many people, about half an acre per person would be enough.
The rice in the paddy fields has not yet been harvested, but the corn is ripe. This has a lot to do with the sunshine this year.
Zhang An's family has a total of five acres of mountainous land, but in fact, less than four acres can be cultivated. The rest are small patches on the rocks. The land has little fertility, and there is not much yield for growing crops. There are still many people.
tired.
But Zhang An's parents didn't want to leave them there, so they were still full of seeds.
Last year, Zhang An went to school and there were no horses at home. Zhang Jianguo and his wife broke them off basket by basket and picked them back from the mountains.
But this year is different. Not only has Zhang An joined, but he also has horses at home, so the transportation capacity is directly full.
Don't underestimate the transport capacity of a horse in the mountainous area. If it is carried home manually, one person can carry up to eighty or ninety pounds at a time, and it will take a lot of time on the road and require frequent breaks.
But horses are different. Although carriages cannot be reached on the mountain roads, horses can be used to carry them back.
A horse can carry five bags at a time, weighing at least two to three hundred kilograms.
Not to mention Zhang An's horse, it can weigh as much as 500 pounds.
Breaking corn has never been a big problem, but transporting it takes too much time.
After Zhang An got up, Wang Fang had already gotten up early to cook the noodles and fried a duck egg by herself.
I packed dozens of bags and put them in baskets, and started to work after breakfast.
There are usually two corn cobs on a corn stalk, and they are easy to break.
Zhang Jianguo and Zhang An broke off the corn in the corn bushes, and Wang Fang followed behind and chopped off the broken corn stalks.
If it is a village in other places, the corn stalks on the mountain must be collected to feed livestock and retting.
But there is no need for it in Changqing Village. Compared with other places, there are so many paddy fields, so there will be a lot of straw.
Compared to corn straw, livestock prefer straw, and the effect of straw retting is much better.
In this way, the corn that originally took Zhang Jianguo and his wife seven or eight days was packed home in three days.
Since no one has started to break the corn these days, only Zhang An’s family has already carried it home.
So the grain drying field was occupied by Zhang An's family. By the time others started harvesting, Zhang An's family had already finished drying the grain.
Corn needs to be peeled before being brought back. Rural people are so busy that they break it back from the mountains during the day and peel the corn at home at night.
The scorching sun in early autumn is so hot, otherwise why would it be called Autumn Tiger?
On the large dam, the corn was exposed to the sun for two days, drying and dehydrating all the corn.
While no one was using the drying ground, a family of three beat corn directly on the drying ground.
Since there is no threshing machine, we can only use manual threshing method - flail.
Two wooden sticks, one long and one short, are connected with a rope. When you want to use it, hold the long end with your hand and wave the short part to exert force.
Corn is a good thing. In the era when there was not enough rice to eat, corn became the staple food.
Where rice is abundant, corn can not only feed livestock, but can also be sold for money.
The corn cobs that have been threshed can also be used to make fires. In rural areas, everyone has corn cobs at home. These can make fire much faster than dry firewood.
By the time the corn issue is settled, the rice in the fields has matured and it’s time to harvest it and take it home.
Unlike corn, corn can be harvested slowly in the field, not so urgently, and they are quite durable.
But rice is different. If it's time to harvest, if you don't harvest it, it will soon fall to the ground.
And if the weather is bad and it rains heavily, there may be no harvest.
When Zhang An's family was harvesting rice, the whole family of his second uncle and third uncle came to help.
As the hostess, Wang Fang must cook at home and then help in the fields after cooking. There is quite a lot of food for seven or eight people.
Early in the morning, the second uncle and his father set off with buckets on their shoulders, and the rest followed closely with sickles, water to drink, and bags of millet.
A bucket is a large square wooden basin made of wooden boards, specially used for threshing rice. Basically every household has one.
After cutting the rice connecting rod in the field, he picked it up and beat it against the inner wall of the bucket. In this way, the millet was pulled down.
Work goes faster when there are more people. Zhang An's three acres of paddy fields are all next to each other, so he doesn't have to move to another place after harvesting the fields.
By noon, one-third of the harvest had been finished. The sun was too hot right now, so it was time to eat.
Seven or eight people came down, and the harvest of three acres of land was completed.
The next step is to dry the millet and help the second uncle and third uncle's family to harvest.
After all, people have come to help you, so you have to give it back so that someone will come to help you next time.
When helping the two families, the whole family of Zhang An's family also went out. This time because it was the National Day, the two sons of the second uncle's family came back to help, so there were even more people.
In two days, everyone has finished harvesting at home. There is only corn in the field. I can just pick it back slowly at home. It's not in a hurry anyway.
Now Zhang An was assigned a new task. The family's horse was borrowed from his uncle's family, and his parents also went out to help the villagers.
Zhang An himself was left to dry the millet.
Drying millet is no easier than drying corn, because the large swarms of sparrows in the sky are the most annoying.
Every time you are not paying attention, they all fly down to eat the millet, which is very annoying.
Even if the dummy is released, they are not very afraid.
But Zhang An's family is okay, with the presence of the Three Tigers, Zhang An can be lazy.
Every time a flock of birds came down, the three tigers would pounce on them. As time went on, they seemed to think Zhang An's house was not easy to deal with, so they went to other people's houses.
So Zhang An also enjoyed his leisure time. He only had to get up and use a rake to dry the rice on the ground every once in a while, so that they could all be exposed to the sun, so that they could be dried more thoroughly.
If you don't turn it over, the bottom layer will take a long time to dry.
Of course, drying rice is not just about this, you also have to pay attention to the weather. The reason why you need to have a special person to watch is also the weather problem.
You must always pay attention to weather changes. As soon as God changes his face, you have to pack up quickly because you are afraid of rain.
If the millet is exposed to rain, it will become moldy and the rice will be unpalatable.
Even people who collect grain can smell it immediately, and it is something that others don’t want and don’t even feed the animals.
Zhang An is very lucky. Every time he packs his bags, the sky starts to change his attitude.
The sun-dried millet also needs to go through a process where the shriveled millet or empty shells are blown away with an air bucket.
This can also be done at home. Pour the millet in from the top and catch it with a bag from the bottom. What comes out from the other opening is just empty shells. They are usually used to feed cows and horses. Forget about pigs, they won’t eat this stuff.
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After everything was done, the warehouse was closed. The Zhang An family's granary was built in a special room and could hold a lot of grain.
In the countryside, rodent damage has always been the biggest problem when storing grain. Whether it is raising cats, placing clips, or administering medicine, the ultimate goal is not to let rats contaminate the grain.
The granary at Zhang An's house has just been renovated in the past two years, and it's in pretty good condition. It's sealed everywhere with cement. No matter how powerful the mice are, they can't chew the cement.