Spring is coming, flowers are blooming, and wild vegetables are coming out too!
Sage grass is also called Qingming grass. It can be mixed with starch paste to make green dough and eat it to improve everyone's taste.
The sage by the water is spicier than garlic and can be used as seasoning or fried bacon.
In March, wormwood is used as poles in April, and in May and June, it is used as firewood.
Each herb has a different harvesting season. While Jiang Zhi is concerned about his family's crops, he is busy digging herbs in his free time.
She is busy outside, and Qiaoyun is also busy at home. She is spinning threads and helping to dry medicinal materials. When the sun is not shining, she has to use the earthen kang to dry them. Everyone is very important.
The locust flowers on the mountain are also in bloom.
Whenever the flowering season comes, strings of locust flowers decorate the entire branches, and the air will be filled with a light and elegant fragrance.
Different from those white locust trees with beautiful and sweet flowers, the locust trees here are all yellow, called yellow locust flowers, also called national locust trees and bean locust trees. The trees are tall and have no thorns.
The white acacia flower, also called black locust, is an exotic species and is not a product of this era.
Sophora japonica is slightly poisonous and cannot be eaten, but it is the best medicine for cooling blood and stopping bleeding.
To use it as medicine, you need to pick the unopened flower buds, also called sophora rice. In summer, you can mix it with Prunella vulgaris and chrysanthemum to make herbal tea.
The flowering period of the Sophora japonica is not long, so you have to hurry up if you want to harvest it. It’s just that the Sophora japonica tree is tall and difficult to pick.
Moreover, Jiang Zhi felt that it was dangerous to climb trees on these cliffs, so it was safer to stand under the trees.
Fortunately, there is a bamboo forest at the foot of the mountain.
Taking advantage of the full moon nights of the past few days, the moonlight was as bright as day, so Jiang Zhi and the other three secretly went down the mountain to chop bamboo without using torches.
Afraid of being discovered by the refugees on the road, they hurriedly cut off the bamboo branches and carried them up the mountain. The three of them were so tired that they almost turned into dogs.
There are many uses for bamboo. Xiaomanye split bamboo and made baskets. Jiang Zhi also tied a sickle with a thin bamboo stem and stretched it to a high place to collect sophora rice.
Only rice-sized kernels of Sophora japonica are used as medicine. If the flower buds are not up to standard, the branches will not be wasted.
Although it is slightly poisonous, it is not harmful to eat a small amount after blanch it in water, wrap it in powder and steam it.
And because of its medicinal effect of cooling blood and detoxifying, eating it in spring can reduce the heat caused by the fire in winter, which is beneficial to health.
Yellow Sophora japonica is poisonous, and due to the climate, there is no shortage of vegetables all year round. The locals are not very interested in these dangerous products. At most, children only want to taste the nectar.
Knowing from Er Rui and Qiao Yun that they had never eaten it before, Jiang Zhi sent the cooked steamed locust cake to the two old people so that they could try it too.
Sure enough, Xiao Manye was shocked again.
From the moment he saw the wild yam that he misunderstood as Huang Du, Xiao Manye probably brought back those painful memories. Now when he saw the medicine, he felt frightened and everything he looked at was poisonous.
What's more, the yellow locust flower is indeed a bit poisonous.
This Er Ruiniang is really troublesome and wants to test the poison on herself every day.
The stubborn old man couldn't say anything to save face, so he had to bite the bullet.
Eat it! Eat it! Death by poison is death, death by starvation is death!
Jiang Zhi doesn't know yet, but her current image has changed again in Mr. Man's mind.
From tormenting people to tossing places, now I am the one who starts to torment people again.
The food she eats is either medicine or poison, and a group of people follow her around in poisonous and non-poisonous situations every day.
I have to say that during the period of food shortage, these sophora flower cakes can still be eaten. They are fresh and refreshing, especially when eaten with folded ear roots, they are very delicious!
On this day, new items were added to the dining table of the two families, from cold folded ear root to blanched malan head, and even more sophora flower cakes.
In the continuous land reclamation, another terrace was added.
It's April now, and although the chill in the morning and evening has not abated, the temperature has risen rapidly at noon, and I can already feel the heat of the sun while working.
Jiang Zhi led everyone to start raising sweet potato seedlings.
A shallow trench was dug in the newly opened terraced fields, poured with manure water, and then the seed potatoes were densely arranged in the shallow trench and covered with thick soil.
You can eat sweet potato leaves only after the seedlings emerge in half a month, and you can eat sweet potato roots after three months.
Originally, the emergence of high-yielding crops such as sweet potatoes and corn could basically solve the people's famine, but the people of the Great Yan Dynasty were still trapped in the problem of food and clothing.
There is only one reason, and that is lack of fertilizer and poor varieties, resulting in low yields of sweet potatoes and corn.
The largest sweet potato is only about the thickness of your wrist, or more like the thickness of your thumb, like a thin tree root.
Anyway, it is different from those modern sweet potatoes that have a yield of 5,000 kilograms per mu and are larger than a human head.
However, the yield of wheat, sorghum and corn is still higher than that of wheat, sorghum and corn, which yields 200 kilograms per mu. It is the most important coarse grain for farmers.
If you want crops to be productive, you need fertility.
Now there is not enough manure water in the manure pits for only a few people. The wheat fields are only fertilized with plant ash, and sweet potatoes can only be raised with clear manure water.
Fortunately, the new soil in the terraced fields is soil with humus on the surface, so there is no need to worry about fertility in the first year, but this will no longer be the case, and a method of supplementing fertilizer must be found immediately.
There is no chemical fertilizer and we can only use agricultural fertilizer, which requires raising poultry and livestock.
Don't worry about livestock. Neither family has cattle or sheep. The remaining food is not enough for people to eat, and they can't even raise pigs.
Although pigs are omnivorous and can eat anything, and can survive on grass, they will not grow meat without high starch grass.
Then just raise chickens!
Since hiding in the mountains, the happiest thing is probably the two chickens.
The family raised five old hens for Qiaoyun's confinement. Unfortunately, one of them was trampled to death the night the wildfire broke out, and now there are only four left.
A few chickens run all over the mountains and fields without feeding, and they can still pick up an egg every day.
In order to keep their children and Xu Dazhu healthy, Xiaoman's family also raised five chickens, one of which was a rooster.
Now this rooster has taken both hens into his harem, making friends every day, and his wives and concubines go into the forest in groups to look for insects, which is much more carefree than in the village.
Jiang Zhi wondered, these chickens are too carefree. Should they hatch more chicks and raise them to expand their family when there is food?
Before her idea could be realized, the crops that had just sprouted on the hillside suffered.
On the hillside, there were more than a dozen bean sprouts, only ten centimeters high, with their roots cut off. The ground was a mess, with broken leaves the size of rice grains mixed in the soil.
Jiang Zhi was extremely angry: "Who did this?"
These crops only have a few seedlings, which are the lifeblood of two families.
Not only is it related to the food and clothing of the two families, but I was so tired that I almost lost half my life before planting it, and it hurts even if one plant dies.
Mr. Xiaoman had arrived a long time ago, and was twirling these irreparable seedlings with a sad face. When he heard Jiang Zhi's question, he raised his head and said, "Oh! This is how crops are grown in the mountains.
First, it was difficult to open up wasteland, then after planting it, we were afraid of birds eating it, and now it’s rabbits.
Then there is the scourge of wild boars during the harvest. After a busy year, not a single particle falls. "
These bean sprouts are eaten by rabbits.
Jiang Zhi was speechless.
After the wildfire, Xiaoman and Errui dug a lot of rabbit holes. They thought they would be quiet for a while, but they didn't expect that they would come out and run around again.
Little Man sighed, the green hills all over the mountain fed countless rabbits, only a fraction of them were burned to death by the wildfire, and most of them ran away.
He didn't expect the rabbits to come so quickly. Looking at it now, at least half of the output would be lost.
Now the sorghum cultivated by slash-and-burn cultivation on the hillside has also sprouted. Although it is sparsely planted, it looks very pitiful on this grassy slope, but it looks strong when you get closer and look closer.
If there are good seedlings, there will be a good harvest, but now the appearance of rabbits is not a good sign.
To have a good harvest, rabbits must be removed or driven away.
