Defeat natural disasters with farming

After Ye Yu woke up, he smelled a sour smell in the room. He yawned, and followed the smell to the stove, where he saw a clay pot covered with a layer of white cloth.

"Mom, what are you doing?" he asked.

Mother Ye glanced at it, and then replied cheerfully: "It seems to be fermented glutinous rice. After it is cooked, according to Taohua, it is delicious with a little brown sugar and eggs. Cook a bowl every morning. After drinking it, you will feel warm all over your body, especially It is suitable for winter. I think I still have some glutinous rice and koji at home, so I can try it out.”

When Ye Yu heard this, he suddenly realized. No wonder he felt familiar. They were the so-called fermented glutinous glutinous rice balls. It was also delicious to rub glutinous rice into small balls and put them in fermented glutinous rice. The effect is very good.

Mother Ye continued: "I prepared it last night. Look at the wine koji in the middle. I also specially added some spirits that your father drank. I think it will be finished in a few days."

Sure enough, after the pot was placed by the stove for three days, a strong smell of fermented wine came out.

Mother Ye brought the clay pot to the stove, lifted the white cloth covering it, and saw glutinous rice with yellow in the white inside. She lightly pressed the surface with a spoon, and cloudy wine poured into the spoon.

She took a sip first, then nodded and said: "Sure enough, the sweetness is very strong, but it's hard to taste the wine."

After saying this, Mother Ye scooped up another spoonful for Ye Yu, and nodded when she saw that he had finished drinking, then took out two cleaned earthenware pots with lids, poured all the fermented glutinous rice, soup and water into them, and sealed them up Then put it in the yard and freeze it. The frozen fermented glutinous rice will slow down the fermentation speed. If it is left to ferment, the sweetness will gradually turn into the spicy taste of wine. At that time, it can only be drunk as wine. .

Dig two spoonfuls of the finished distiller's grains into the pot every morning, and then crack in a few eggs. After the egg yolks change color, you can eat them out. After drinking the warm bowl, you will sweat all over your body. Ye Yu sometimes has cold hands and feet. , like his mother, will also drink a bowl of distiller's grains with brown sugar, and after drinking it, the whole body will be warmed up. It is just at this time to go out to shovel the snow. Although they don't need to shovel the snow outside the door, the city soldiers are responsible. But the snow in the yard can't be helped by others, so I can only do it myself, otherwise the snow will fall for a long time, and the door will be blocked, which will make it difficult to enter and exit.

Sometimes you can use glutinous rice flour to rub out small balls and put them in the distiller's grains. The small glutinous rice balls that are only as big as your thumb can be called one mouthful, and you can pour some prepared jam into the glutinous rice flour, so you don't need to add sugar. Although the colors of the dumplings are different, they are all extraordinarily sweet and have a strong sense of satiety. Even Father Ye, who has a big appetite, can fill his stomach after eating a bowl full.

Distiller's grains balls are the new favorite of Ye Yu's family recently, especially Ye's mother likes to eat such sweet food the most.

Others have gradually accepted distiller's lees balls, mainly because they are made quickly and taste good. If you don't have time to make breakfast for your children in the morning, you only need to dig a spoonful of distiller's grains into the pot, and you don't even need to make rice balls. Some people don't pay attention Some people don’t even sell glutinous rice balls. After all, the exchange price of glutinous rice is not low. They only cook some noodles in it. The taste is quite good, sweet and sweet, and children love to eat it.

Ye Yu would drink a bowl every morning, and today was no exception. He ate a pink ball into his stomach, um, it smelled like raspberries, probably made with raspberry jam.

As soon as he thought of this, he recalled that he went up the mountain to pick the raspberries with Brother Xu, and he didn't know if Brother Xu had arrived at Jingbian City before the snow fell, what was the situation in Jingbian City, whether something happened to General Chu, and when Brother Xu can come back.

Questions like these kept circulating in his mind, causing the distiller's grain balls in his hand to be unpalatable.

Ye Yu sighed, not thinking about it for the time being, and drank the remaining lees at the bottom of the bowl first.

He drank the remaining soup in one gulp, and just after washing the dishes, he saw Ye Minghui running in from the door. While running, he thanked Ye Mu who opened the door: "Thank you, Aunt Ye."

"Brother Bao, come quickly, there are a lot of pears growing in the paddy fields and the water bubbles beside them, just so we can go and pick them, the pears are sweet to eat raw, they are delicious, and they are also delicious when cooking." Ye Minghui He said and licked the corner of his mouth.

The area of ​​the paddy field is not large, mainly because the yield of rice is not as good as that of wheat and sorghum. Many people don’t like to grow rice, and it is bothersome and the yield is low. Therefore, all the people in the city except Ye Minghui and Ye Yu’s family have more fields. Some of the public and public fields will be transformed into paddy fields for growing rice, and the rest are basically the original fields.

In fact, another reason is that they eat a lot of pasta here. Except for Ye Yu, rice is their favorite. Others belong to that kind of food. It’s good to eat some, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t, but sometimes it’s good to change the taste. , so the rice planted does not have to worry about being exchanged, and the old rice cannot be kept in the basic warehouse.

Ye Yu's paddy field was planted together with the old house, and the harvested food was split in half, and the field snails and ground pears in it naturally belonged to whoever picked them up.

It's cold today, and the snails are gone, and Ye Yu hasn't seen the pears ripen a few days ago. He thought they didn't grow this year, but he didn't expect that they would ripen when the weather turned cold.

Thinking of this, Ye Yu couldn't wait to go there with Ye Minghui. On the way, they also met many people walking in the same direction as them.

Shen Qingyu joined them with a bucket, "I don't know how the ground pears are growing?"

"I hope it grows better." Ye Minghui also carried a bamboo basket.

Soon Ye Jing and Xinghua joined them, but within a quarter of an hour the group reached their destination.

Ye Yu originally thought that there would not be many ground pears in the paddy fields. After all, the weather is cold now, which is not suitable for fruit ripening, but what he didn't expect was that the ground pears grew quite lush this year. He went down to the field covered with thin ice. You can feel a lot in it, it is as big as half a palm, and it is heavy in your hand. The purple-black skin is covered with wet mud, which looks extraordinarily dirty.

Many people went home with a basket full of pears, and Ye Yu was no exception. Although he only went into the water for a while, some of the pears picked by Ye Jing and the others were shared with him, so he gained a lot. .

After saying goodbye to them, Ye Yu went home and changed clothes, and when she opened the door, she saw Mother Ye was scooping up water to wash the pears.

Seeing him coming out, Mother Ye immediately smiled and said, "Today's harvest is good."

Ye Yu nodded, "Thanks to the help of the third brother and the third sister, I will send some of the cooked food in a while."

"Success." Ye Mu replied.

After cleaning, the surface of the ground pear is purple-black, extremely smooth, and the whole is flat and round. After cutting it with a knife, the flesh inside turns white. Mother Ye sliced ​​it into pieces and handed it to Ye Yu, "Taste it. "

Ye Yu took it and put it in his mouth. After chewing for a while, abundant juice gushed out. It was not too sweet, and even had a bit of an earthy smell because it was buried in the soil. It wasn't delicious, but it was novel enough to be a Ordinary fruit is more than enough to eat.

However, the most suitable way is to mince it and mix it with meat to make bun stuffing or lion head.

The refreshing and crisp ground pears are very greasy and can offset the greasy taste of meat fillings. They are especially suitable as fillings. The pork buns made by Mrs. Ye with pieces of ground pears are Ye Yu's favorite.

-

Just when Jiwang City was gradually getting on the right track, another incident broke the original calm. A group of refugees came under the city gate.

Ye Mingde's team was on duty that day. As soon as he saw the crowd appearing in the snowstorm, he immediately sent someone to notify the city lord.

Father Ye was discussing next year's construction with Shen Fu and the others.

"This year, due to various reasons, the land reclamation has been delayed again and again, and next year we can't delay it any longer." Ye Zhong said: "We will be confident if we have more land, and we will not be afraid if the grain production is reduced again."

Shen Fu looked at the household registration record in his hand and frowned slightly: "But we don't have enough people, even if we succeed in opening up wasteland, we don't have enough people to cultivate it."

This is a problem. Everyone at the table frowned, and it took a long time for someone to speak, "If it doesn't work, let's get tired. Anyway, there are cattle, maybe it's not so tired."

Father Ye sighed: "It seems that this is the only way to go."

After hearing what they said, Ye Yu fell into deep thought. He rubbed his chin and thought, it would be great if the agricultural tools could be improved, even if it is not improved, it would be better for all families to use iron agricultural tools, just like their family. What I use now are iron plowshares, iron inserts, and iron shovels, all of which were bought at the blacksmith shop in Heihe County before the natural disaster. The price is not cheap, but the quality is very good. However, no matter how good the quality is, it has been used for so many years. , even though they cherished it when they used it, they repaired it many times by themselves, and the efficiency of farming has dropped significantly in the past few years.

However, their family is already considered good. Some families who could not afford iron farming tools still use wooden columbine carts and curved plows. Although the efficiency of farming is higher than that of pure manual farming, it is not much higher. The main reason is that they don't have serious blacksmiths here, even if they have iron ore, it's useless, no one can make iron tools.

When Ye Yu was thinking about how to train a blacksmith, he suddenly heard someone knocking on the door.

A knock on the door interrupted their discussion, Father Ye raised his voice and said, "Please come in."

It was Ye Zhouyuan who came in, and he reported, "There are refugees approaching the gate of the city."

Everyone in the room was stunned by these words, Father Ye got up and immediately stood up and said: "It's a coincidence, just now I said that there are not enough people, someone came over, let's go, let's go and have a look together."

Shen Fu followed him, and said in a low voice: "You still have to be careful, it will be bad if you encounter bandits, the most common method they use is to pretend to be refugees, and once they enter the town, they will cooperate with outsiders. It’s impossible to guard against.”

Father Ye nodded slightly, and replied: "I know, let's go and have a look first."

Seeing that he knew what was in his mind, Shen Fu shut his mouth and stopped talking. After all, he was only a deputy and could make suggestions, but he could not make decisions for the city lord. Besides, he also agreed with the decision of the city lord. In fact, they have to observe to make a decision.

A group of people went out from the inner city gate, bypassed the Mingzhu Lake covered with a thick layer of ice, and soon reached the outer city gate. They walked up the stairs one by one, stood on the tower and looked down.

Ye Yu glanced around and saw that there were about seventy or eighty people in that group, among which young and middle-aged people accounted for more than half, and women and children accounted for only one-third. All of them were in a state of distress, their hair was knotted, and some were even skinny. There were no old people. And babies, the youngest ones are around ten years old.

Everyone looked at each other, and they were all slightly relieved. No matter how they looked, this group of people didn't look like gangsters.

Ye Zhong observed for a while, then said, "I'll go down and talk to them."

Father Ye didn't agree immediately, he pondered for a while before saying, "Don't worry, let them send someone over alone."

If they send people down, there is no guarantee that there will be no accidents. It is better to let the refugees send people over, which is safer, and the initiative is in their hands.

Father Ye looked at Ye Mingde, Ye Mingde nodded to express his understanding, then took out a wooden loudspeaker and shouted down: "Which of you is in charge?"

It is said that the loudspeaker is actually a similar appearance, the effect of the sound amplification is not obvious, it can only be said that the people below can hear it loudly, but this is enough.

When the refugees outside the city gate heard this question, they immediately became agitated. After a while, a man in his 30s who looked like he was in a mess stood up and shouted loudly, "I am."

Ye Zhong said: "His voice is a bit lacklustre."

Father Ye nodded, which meant that the man probably hadn't had enough to eat for a long time.

Ye Mingde continued to shout: "We will open the city gate in a while, please come in."

When the refugees heard this, they started to commotion again. Ye Yu suppressed the commotion after seeing the man comforting him a few words. It seems that his prestige is quite high.

"Okay." The man replied.

At this moment, Father Ye thought about it, and decided to send Shen Fu and Ye Zhouyuan down to negotiate.

Seeing this, Ye Yu quickly said, "Remember to put on the mask and don't get too close to him."

Who knows if this group of people has any infectious diseases, it is better to have a layer of protection, if there is an epidemic, something big will happen, after all, most of the group of people are dying.

Masks are a standing tool. After Shen Fu and the others put them on, they immediately went down the stairs. When the city gate was opened, the man walked in calmly.

"Shen Fu." Shen Fu clasped his fists and introduced himself.

"Lu Wen." The man said.

Hearing this name, Shen Fu was stunned for a moment, "Lu Wen, governor of Liaodong County?"

The man, Lu Wen, said in shame: "Now there is no Liaodong County, only me and some people are left."

Shen Fu looked at him carefully, but he saw some familiar shadows on his face, he had met Governor Lu before, but he had seen him, but he had never seen him.

"What happened to you, Commander Lu? How is the situation in Liaodong County?" Shen Fu asked. As the head of a county, he shouldn't be in such a mess. After all, the county has a garrison. As long as it survives the initial turmoil, it should be easy to stabilize.

Lu Wen shook his head and said, "Don't call me the governor, just call me Lu Wen."

After finishing speaking, he smiled wryly again, "It's a long story."