After the autumn harvest, the grains had to dry properly before they could be taken in as public grain. As before, he handed over one hundred pounds, but this time it was corn, not rice. He had stored all the rice at the grain station for the family’s consumption.
Having cleaned the harvested sesame, and after drying it, he took it to the mill to press it into sesame oil. According to the ratio of one pound of sesame yielding four taels of oil, his one hundred pounds of sesame eventually produced forty-one pounds of sesame oil.
The sweet potatoes and peanuts in the backyard were also harvested. The peanut yield wasn’t much – just fifty pounds with shells – far from enough for oil pressing, so they were kept at home for snacking.
There was no shortage of sweet potatoes, which amounted to about two hundred pounds. This year, he neither sold them nor made dried sweet potato, but ground them into glass noodles. One pound of sweet potatoes could make 0.2 pounds of glass noodles, so from two hundred pounds of sweet potatoes, he obtained forty pounds of glass noodles, more than enough to last a year.
It’s no joke that being a farmer sometimes isn’t too bad. City folks have a better environment, but once their salary is cut off, life becomes unsustainable, unlike them, who can manage food and warmth by planting just a bit. Perhaps because his family was small and they had plenty of land, they had never experienced the feeling of hunger.
But she had gone through it before. Qing knew well the bitterness and hardship when there wasn’t money to buy food. Read complete version only at noⅴelfire.net
Last year, when they had just moved here, they didn’t manage to celebrate the Spring Festival properly. This year, he had bought meat and sausage casings well ahead of time, making cured sausage and hanging them in the western room where no one could see, allowing them to be preserved for a long time. The cured meats were both five-spice and spicy.
In Southern, people generally make smoked meat, but he didn’t quite like the taste, so he didn’t make any. Combined with the home-pickled fish, spicy cabbage, and dried radish, this year’s New Year feast was set to be abundant.
With fish, meat, and eggs available, along with an unending supply of flour and rice, life was good, likely unparalleled in the entire village.
He didn’t have a salary now, but he received ten yuan of assistance money each month, and with his previous savings, he had over seven hundred yuan in the bank now.
Every month, Zheng Kai also received a subsidy allowance of six yuan. He had paid for those Monkey Stamps he bought, and the money to compensate the landlord for the crops was also sent by him. After spending over the past two years, his savings of a thousand yuan had dwindled to just over seven hundred.
If it wasn’t for taking daily necessities from the Space Supermarket, his previous savings would probably have been stretched thin long ago.
The winter in the Southern can’t be said to be not cold, it’s just not as dry and cold as the Northern. But the cold here is a damp cold, very moist. Chongqing often gets foggy winters with very low visibility. Fortunately, there is no smog, and the air quality is still very good these days.
His green vegetables were growing well. He only needed to water them once a week, because the plastic film helped generate condensation, relieving him from watering too frequently. Judging from the current growth rate, the vegetables were looking quite pleasing. The coldest it got here was around ten degrees, which was within a bearable range, unlike the Northern where temperatures often drop below zero. As a result, seeing snow around here was a rare occurrence. (This is fiction, do not correlate directly with reality, thank you)
Wherever he went, a little follower was always behind him. He had placed a small potty in her room early on. After she learned to speak, she would tell him on her own when she needed to poop or pee, even during the night she could express herself in time. This made him very happy. It not only saved a lot of diapers but also meant she could meet the standards to enter kindergarten earlier, how great was that?