On October 1st, the team dug soil to prepare to plant wheat, and everyone held a basket when they set off.

The reason for carrying a basket is that when digging sweet potatoes, you only dig the roots, and there will always be vacancy picking them up; especially this year, I didn’t turn over the vines more than a month before digging sweet potatoes. When I was cutting the vines, I found that a large number of vines had grown small sweet potatoes.

When we were overturning the soil, we talked and dug, but did not slow down our pace of progress.

Long Jianhua remembered that he had eaten a very sweet dried sweet potato in his previous life. He tried to ask for advice. As a result, everyone knows how to do it: After air-dry the sweet potato until it becomes soft, wash and slice it, steam and dry it. This method of making is very simple, but it takes a long time to describe it; the other is very simple, slice the sweet potatoes and pass it in boiling water, and then dry it. This is hard.

During the digging process, Long Jianhua threw the dug sweet potatoes to people nearby, and only those intact were put into the basket.

In the morning, he dug more than a dozen kilograms of sweet potatoes, the smallest one was the size of a little finger, and the largest one was only one inch in size; in the afternoon, he only dug half a basket. The next day, he announced that he would finish work just one and a half hours in the morning, and arranged to go to distribute the sweet potatoes in the afternoon.

Long Jianhua was a little confused. Why did he only dig such a little bit of soil?

Chen Daniu laughed and said, "We don't like to eat noodles, so we can only eat flour cakes when we have no choice. Besides, if we plant too much, there is not so much wood ash in the team, so we can't get back the seed money."

Only then did Long Jianhua understand the reason. The people in Team Ninth generally do not like to eat noodles, and they grow wheat mainly to feed pigs. As for fertilizer, they are also helpless. Apart from farm fertilizer, they are all limited, so they cannot compete with rice for fertilizer. In terms of fertilizers, it is easier to buy ammonium carbon, and urea is difficult to buy.

Then he smiled and prepared to continue looking for sweet potatoes. After planting hybrid rice in the first half of next year, there will be no problem with food rations. If you don’t plant, don’t plant it. It is really not profitable to plant wheat by using manpower; even if you plant hybrid rice, it is not worth it, it is just a solution to food rations.

Chen Daniu shouted, "Jianhua, go dig with us and let you see how the fern flour you eat is made."

Long Jianhua suddenly became more interested and walked up the mountain with his backpack. He didn't expect that there were still many people going to dig, and men and women were walking up the mountain.

Chen Daniu introduced fern powder to Long Jianhua while walking.

You can cook, eat fresh or make jar dishes.

After the fern grows, the tubers grow. They are dug out in autumn, washed, dried and then ground into powder; however, this fern powder tastes bad and is not slippery; the best thing is to mash the washed fern roots, filter them again and again until there are no impurities, and then precipitate and dry the precipitate. This is the real fern powder. The fern powder made is lilac, beautiful and delicious.

After digging a lot of fern roots with them, he went home to eat lunch before going to his house. When he met Zou Shuxian after washing the fern roots, he went home; Chen Yuanshan was cleaning the stone mortar and wooden pestle in the corridor, while Chen Daniu carried a large flat bucket out and placed it in the square.

Zou Shuxian threw the fern root into the stone mortar. Chen Daniu stepped on the wooden mortar and raised his foot. The wooden mortar smashed the fern root inside, and the fern root inside was crushed and the juice was pounded. The wool root inside the mortar was gradually crushed. Zou Shuxian continued to throw it inside until the mortar inside reached 30% of the mortar inside, and then scooped the slurry inside into the wooden barrel.

Chen Yuanshan carried the wooden barrel and poured the slurry inside onto the three layers of gauze tied to the four corners, then kneaded the gauze into a ball and squeezed it hard; after there was very little dripping liquid, spread the gauze and let the water in the barrel enter it, and then cycled back and forth...

Long Jianhua stood aside and watched silently for a long time, feeling very powerless.

With the current conditions, there is no improvement to achieve time-saving and labor-saving effect; I have to sigh that the ancients were so powerful.

Chen Yuanshan asked while smoking, "Jianhua, have you never seen it before, how do you feel?"

Long Jianhua smiled, "I don't know how much I can get in the end, otherwise it would be too hard. If there is electricity and mechanization, it would be much easier."

Suddenly, I thought of another medicinal herb, "Uncle Yuanshan, do you have Pueraria root in the team?"

Zou Shuxian responded, "Kudzu root, it's everywhere."

Chen Yuanshan shook his head, "If you want to dig kudzu root, that's really time-consuming and labor-intensive. The kudzu root grows too deep, and sometimes one can't be dug out for half a day."

Chen Daniu gave his father a knife, "The harder it is to dig, the bigger the tubers. We have dug a single pill before, about twenty kilograms."

Chen Yuanshan found a kudzu root from the side of the road and picked a leaf for Long Jianhua to show it. Long Jianhua immediately realized that there were too many things, and it was really everywhere.

Immediately, Long Jianhua said goodbye and went home, and he was going to dig kudzu root.

When he was a child, he saw his grandfather occasionally soaking Pueraria root slices in water, and his grandmother occasionally stewed chicken with fresh Pueraria root ribs for her family to eat. Later, the number of times became less and less, and by the late 1960s, she never ate it again.

When he was joining in the fun on several mountains in his previous life, he learned that Pueraria root is known as southern ginseng. At that time, he realized that it was because the family’s financial situation did not allow it, so his grandparents did not continue to use Pueraria root.

Don’t say that there is one here, even if there is not, he will buy it at the medicinal material shop and let his grandparents eat and drink.

I went home to pick up the hoe, tied it with a scabbard, and walked into the canyon to the south...

Chen Daniu stepped on the wooden pestle and said, "What do Jianhua wants to dig kudzu root? Is that money sold? It's really hard to dig it. If you want to use that money, it's better to dig grass roots."

Chen Yuanshan said depressedly, "I guess someone in his family needs it, otherwise he wouldn't have suddenly remembered this thing. If he didn't dig it, we have to dig some for him. We rural people have nothing else, they just have strength."

Long Jianhua was lucky. He found a kudzu vine under the slope of the canyon, cut off the vine and dug it out. After digging more than three feet down and digging a pit of more than four feet in radius, he saw kudzu.

Unexpectedly, after digging like this, he asked him to dig down one foot and a half before pulling out the cylindrical pueraria root, which was more than two feet long.

Looking at this kudzu root, Long Jianhua felt a little strange; the kudzu root I had seen before was spindle-shaped, like a sweet potato, and this one was similar to a cylinder; he was a little confused and wondered if he had admitted his mistake.

However, this doubt was quickly dispelled. The leaves were provided by Chen Yuanshan. He had dug them before and processed them into Pueraria root powder and eaten them. There would be no mistakes.

Then dig the next one, and finally one that looks like a cylindrical shape.

The stem of the third column of Pueraria vine was twice as thick as the two plants just now. He dug a pit that was nearly six feet deep and five feet deep, and then he dug out the pit. The Pueraria root was more than three inches thick, more than five feet long, and weighed thirty or forty kilograms. It took a lot of effort to pull it out of the big pit he dug.

After bringing three kudzu roots home, he came to Chen Yuanshan's home with a small one and learned that kudzu roots have two shapes, one is similar to cylindrical shape, and the other is similar to sweet potato.
Chapter completed!