Author: Xian Xiaoyu
Away from the vermilion green bushes, it seems that the burning mountains are red everywhere. October is the season when oranges are red. A friend sent a box from home. The friendship of thousands of mountains and rivers. I don't say thank you! Know each other.
The oranges were picked by a friend's daughter from a country tree, thank you. Thank you dear girl! The girl works in the township government and is responsible for poverty alleviation. When chatting idly for two sentences, the girl said, our country is really good, look at this poverty alleviation work in place, the people's life is getting better and better. I talked to her about the fact that when I was young, my hometown had agricultural poverty alleviation planning projects. However, at that time, transportation was not convenient, information was not developed, people's awareness and acceptance were not large, and other factors did not continue to develop.
At that time, there were many projects in our village. When each crop arrives at harvest, there are special buying points on the street, buying them one by one. Farmers only plant, regardless of sales. Mainly based on agricultural cultivation, such as tomatoes, mushrooms, tobacco, olive trees, paulownia trees, hemp, castor trees, mulberry trees are definitely there, all in the field, on the edge of the ground, in order to raise silkworms and planted. The orange tree is the most (in fact, we call it a small citrus tree, which is also called now.) Yuzu we call it Mandarin. Oranges are called broad oranges).
The people in the village were still active, and they chose the crops that they could grow and began to work.
The slope to the left of my old house is full of sand slopes and tomatoes. Tomatoes are good seeds, when they grow to half a foot of seedlings, they are put on the shelf, only early insecticidal and weeded, and when they grow to flower, they are just fertilized and watered, only waiting for picking and selling fruits, which is not too troublesome compared to other crops. Neighbors have a variety of family, they are on the tobacco, making tobacco is a labor-intensive thing, but the income is good, his family also specially vacated a room to grow mushrooms, which is also a labor-intensive crop.
I like my neighbor's mushroom room, when I pass by the window of his mushroom room after school, I always have to look at it for a while. Layer by layer of fungal beds, brown loose fungal soil on top of the white heads exposed one by one, like many paratroopers wearing hats, big heads, long feet, fleshy chubby, is cute. The main thing is that they emit a burst of aroma that makes me salivate. Sometimes I would stand outside the window of this house, smell the mushroom scent wafting out of the house, and turn out the little people's books secretly hidden in my bag. When the neighbor's uncle came home and saw me, he would always pick some mushrooms that were too big to sell and bring home for me.
In the evening, my father brought the pork home from work, washed and brushed, and cut and chopped and marinated various ingredients. The mother burned the stove vigorously, and the father got busy on the stove. After a while, a large bowl of fried meat slices with mushrooms, a large bowl of tomato meatball soup, and then a bowl of vegetables grown in their own fields, the aroma of the four square rice table is overflowing. Father poured wine, and mother, one person took a sip of wine, ate another bite of food, chatted about daily life, sometimes laughed, sometimes whispered, and our sisters only took vegetables into their own bowls. Many years have passed, but this scene has been reproduced before my eyes.
The right halfway up the mountain is full of olive trees, from seedling to tree, the branches are luxuriant, and they all bloom and bear fruit. Farmers also plant dwarf crops such as soybeans, beans, peas, potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc. under the olive trees as the seasons. Reasonable intercropping crops can play a role in loosening soil to breathe, inhibit diseases and insect pests, and effectively promote crop growth and increase income.
At that time, these olive oils were really cash cows, and they are also good things today. Unfortunately, at that time, the neighbors did not pay attention to the management of trees, and should also be limited by the living standards at that time, this high-grade thing is not easy to sell, and the farmers have less harvest, so they often use the fertilizer sent down by the team to the olive trees for other crops. And he raised his hoe and dug deep under the olive tree year after year, digging out the roots and whiskers every year, not allowing them to grow, saying that it would affect the growth of other crops. Olive trees grow less than a year. Within a few years, the olive trees of that mountain had all grown thin and thin, and in the end, they were gone.
The hill opposite the olive trees is basically a paulownia tree. When the tongzi flowers bloomed, the mountains were all over the field, and I climbed up the hillside with my friends Daozhen and Ding Xiu to pick up the tongzi flowers under the trees and make a wreath. Together, they joyfully sang "The Children of the Mountain Love the Mountain" from the slope to go home. The song was taught by Teacher Cui. A young female teacher with long braids and a soft-spoken speech. Later, when I saw Murong Xi's poem "The Blossoming Tree" written for Tong Zihua, I immediately thought of Teacher Cui and my childhood friends. Read romantic poems and reminisce about the old times.
Kirito tree is full of treasures. I will not elaborate on them all. At that time, farmers illuminated with tung oil to illuminate the night. The family sat around, and my mother sewed clothes and shoes for us as she talked. A few of us sat under the lamp or did our homework, or read a book, or put our hands on the pillow on the table and listened to our mother or father tell some stories from heaven and earth, from ancient times to the present.
Paulownia trees are luckier than olive trees, growing on rocky land or in forests where they don't produce much crops, but I think it's the main reason why they can survive because they continue to maintain their income for farmers. Until I grew up and joined the work, there were old people in my hometown who went to the slope in the winter to pick up the tung seeds that had rotted out of their shells and came back to sell, saying, to earn a few pocket money for smoking. Later, the unified planning of the country, the hometown returned farmland to the forest, and the tung tree was gradually submerged in the mountain forest, becoming a truly pure tree, and together with the hometown, the mountains and rivers were long.
Then there's the question of hemp. Hemp is an herbaceous plant, hemp does not refer to a plant, is a general term for a plant. But when we were young, we didn't know exactly what kind of hemp it was, and we all called it a word "hemp". When the hemp seedlings grow and blossom and bear the yellow leaves, they cut the whole plant from the roots, peel off the skin on the stem, and the mother then uses a special knife to remove the outer layer on the lower skin, leaving the hemp wire, and then soaking, washing, and drying in water. A small amount is kneaded into fine twine thread, the sole of the shoe, the quilt is sewn, the rope, etc. Mainly sold to special acquisitions on the street, this year's income increased by another one. There is also a kind of castor, and each door has one or two plants. I learned many years later that castor is marijuana. poisonous. After professional refining, it has medicinal value. Finally understood why there was this crop at that time, and thought it was useless, it turned out to be one of the economic sources of farmers. I was shocked that when I was a child, I actually held it in my hand and played with it. What ignorance and fearlessness.
The most planted is the orange tree that can be seen everywhere. At that time, Sichuan red oranges were on fire and were very famous. When my cousin returned from his military transfer, he took up his post as the secretary of the brigade for thirty years. A few years ago, I talked to him about the orange trees of that year, and he said that it was the main economic income at that time. Together with the staff of the street acquisition office, the village cadres set off from the village to the approval of the relevant departments in the city, transported the hopes of the neighbors, crossed the Three Gorges, and ran all the way from the docks along the Yangtze River to sell. My cousin said that it was really a booming era.
My favorite spring when orange trees bloom, orange blossoms are small white, five-petaled, yellow buds, slightly slender petals, among the dark green leaves, dotted and dense. After school, I like to move a small bench, sit under the tree, smell the flowers and read books, such an environment is very pleasant to read. "Legend of the Eagle Shooter", "Laughing Proud of the River", "Snow Mountain Flying Fox", "The Legend of the White-Haired Witch", "Little Li Flying Knife", etc., the air is wafting with the faint fragrance of orange blossoms. When I was a young girl, I hardly read a romance-related book, and I was always in the "jianghu". When you grow up, your friends laugh whenever they talk, hahaha, you didn't look like a girl when you climbed a tree and took a stick. Oh, I doubt it, hahaha, I always had two long braids when I was a kid.
When I was reading a book, I secretly picked orange blossoms and put them in boiling water to drink, adding orange blossoms is just to increase some mood, and later I knew that orange blossoms can promote digestion and relieve liver and qi. Even if it is not wasted those orange flowers. Orange leaves, but also a good thing, Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" quoted Zhu Danxi's experience, summed up the effect of orange leaves: "guide the chest diaphragm against the qi, into the yin, the liver qi, reduce swelling and disperse poison, cradle carbuncle pain, use it to travel the scriptures." Miao Xiyong (1546-1627), a little later than Li Shizhen in the Ming Dynasty, also affirmed the efficacy of orange leaves in his book Shennong Materia Medica. In our hometown, when steaming the bowl, it is placed at the bottom of the bowl to remove the fishy Titian; the stew also puts one or two leaves, which is equivalent to the role of using incense leaves. I also enjoyed doing that until now.
After the orange blossoms are gone, the small oranges begin to grow. Throughout the summer, the trees are full of small green fruits, which are always green, growing slowly, and only begin to turn yellow in the autumn, and only mature to a golden yellow around the end of October.
On July 30, 1984, the eldest brother got married. The oranges had grown, and my father plucked some of the green oranges from the trees, mashed them, filtered them, took the juice, put them in rock sugar, and sealed them in a large clay vat. At the big brother's wedding table, we invited relatives, friends, neighbors, and villagers to drink wine and eat meat for three days and three nights, and drink this purest homemade and delicious orange juice. Luo Yingqing, a staff member of the town's cinema, was also invited to bring the equipment for the movie to be displayed on the dam of my house, and the summer night full of stars was full of stars, and the open-air movie was played for two days and two nights. "Thirteen Sisters of the Heroine", "Ten Days", "Dripping Guanyin". Later, for many years, the people in the village always remembered and said, if nothing else, just juice, is also the first time the villagers have drunk it. Uncle Big said that oranges can still be eaten like that, and there are so many delicious dishes, the one called Xiang Pi, poured with that juice, sweet and sour, at that time I ate two more bowls of rice. He smacked his mouth a few times as he spoke, as if the smells were still flowing between his lips and teeth. That's the taste of happiness. I pursed my lips and smiled.
Every year until the oranges are ripe. Father was in the middle umbrella space of the orange tree in front of the door, building a tree house where one person could sit and lie down and rest. The younger sister was delicate, and the father asked the younger sister to live in the hut during the day to tie the soles of flowered socks, learn to make shoes with soles, or read some books. My sister only had to look at the orange trees on the slopes of our house once in a while. Presumably, my sister slipped down the tree alone at that time to taste the oranges of every tree on the slope. Thinking about it, my sister naturally knows which tree has the sweetest oranges. When we want to eat oranges, we generally listen to our sister, according to the sister's words and the third brother and brother to accurately find the tree, after many times of comparison, admit that as long as it is to pick the oranges on the tree said by the sister, it is sweeter than the tree next to it. It was a little happy time we had together as children!
Around the beginning of October, it is the season to dig sweet potatoes. Oranges are just right at this time. Plucked from the tree and broken the skin, I did not go to the white silk, eat one petal, two petals, three petals,..., ate the whole thing, felt refreshed. However, after eating oranges, you must clean your hands, and my mother said that the taste of oranges will rot sweet potatoes, and they are compatible. Whether it is true or not, it has not been examined, but it is absolutely done according to the words of the mother. I thought that sweet potatoes were going to spend the winter in the kiln, and not letting them rot in it, which was disrespectful to labor and food.
At the end of the orange purchase, the sweet potatoes were also dug up, that is, in the winter leisure time, the big girls and daughters-in-law of the village could make money again, and they went to the canning factory to do temporary work and peel oranges. The oranges are peeled by hand and canned in a cannery. The work was basically completed in only one month, and the salaries came out, and the daughters-in-law bought their own and their families' new cotton clothes in winter. Most of the girls also buy some households, and they will also buy some colorful threads and tie flower insoles for their sweethearts.
For many years I often thought that it would be nice to have an orange tree in front of the door. After the Spring Festival last year, I returned to my home in the south, pushed open the floor door, and on the ground exposed by the balcony, there was an orange tree, which was already two feet high, with a little yellow in the green leaves, and shook my head in the spring breeze to wave to me, and the fragrance of orange leaves drifted over, and the fatigue disappeared. I don't know where it came from, but it grew on my doorstep. The joy in his heart, without a moment's rest, took the small hoe and weeded it, pine, watered, and fertilized it.
Looking forward to the orange tree growing up quickly, then, when the four seasons are idle, I can move a chair and sit next to the orange tree like when I was a child, a book, a cup of tea, spring has the fragrance of flowers, summer has a moon, in the autumn, the orange will ripen, pick one a day, do not go to the white silk, one petal, two petals, three petals,......, eat refreshing. When the last one is picked and the sweetest is strongest, it is the New Year again.