Text: Yang Xiaoguang
The autumn harvest after the autumn harvest is tempting, and it is no different from the second autumn harvest for the farmers. After the production team returned to the warehouse, people ran to the ground to find their own unexpected surprises. The gossip about the "liberation" of autumn was spread by word of mouth for several days, and the big loudspeaker of the brigade finally sent exciting news: All the members of the society have paid attention, and from tomorrow onwards, they can freely pick up autumn when they are idle. As soon as my grandmother and I heard the exact news, we packed a basket that night and rushed to the peanut field in the south of the village. The bright and dangling moon shines on the road and repeatedly rushes to pick up autumn people. Walking into the field that emits the fragrance of herbs, I found that picking peanuts in the moonlight is blind and futile, and any tiny objects cannot be seen, only to see that the white expanse of the earth is really clean.
Nostalgia essay: Picking autumn in the hometown
Crops that fall into the ground, such as peanuts, corn... After the autumn, the men, women and children of the production team, with their own strength and good searching eyes, can pick them up and go home. The first to be included in the collection are peanuts. At the same time that the production team produced peanuts, the women's members and the children on autumn vacation were mobilized to pick peanuts for the production team, and they only picked them up in general, and they stopped at a shallow taste and ended hastily. The real highlight is in the process of picking up autumn. People use small pickaxes to plan and scratch rakes until they use their hands to turn the sand of the peanut field over, although they sweat a lot, let alone the tiredness, but looking at a basket of ginseng fruit-like peanuts, their hearts are still happy to blossom.
As the saying goes, "insiders look at the doorway", picking peanuts also has a trick, one is to look at the location of the lot, the more remote the location of the land, the fewer people to go, our three teams of "large sections" of peanut fields, far north of Huangshuangtuo Village, like this plot of land, if you go first, you must have gained a lot; second, the best plot of land is more sandy, next to the well, near the edge ridge of the trench, such a plot is easy to lose when peanuts are produced; third, there are many dead peanut seedlings, plots that are not very good, more peanuts and fruits, and more losses. Of course, only members of the community who are well aware of the terrain of the production team and the growth of crops can pass on these peanut picking skills to their families. Pick up peanuts in a targeted manner, and you will be able to do more with less.
After a rain, the peanuts that sprouted buds, with small umbrellas on the shells of peanuts, scrambled to break out of the ground, like small mushrooms. Usually peanut pickers are dismissive of sprouted peanuts, so I effortlessly picked up a full bag of peanut sprouts, took them home and washed them for grandma to fry and eat, chewing out a mouthful of fragrance.
Picking white potatoes is also planing white potatoes, which is equivalent to shaving two and three stubbles from the field where white potatoes are harvested. Every year after harvesting the white potatoes, both men and women, young and old, take time to pick up the white potatoes in the field, generally love to pick up the white potato fields of the production team, the production team planing the white potatoes is collective labor, compared with the white potatoes that planed their own land, the fineness is poor, and they are lost a lot.
Picking sweet potatoes relies on strength and luck. Take a small pickaxe and keep planing, or wield a sharp shovel and dig lazily, as long as you keep doing it, you will reap the rewards. Freshly harvested sweet potato fields, perhaps not carefully loaded, some buried by floating soil, with a shovel, or even with a foot to pull, you may be effortless to pick up a piece. If you dig with a shovel, you have to follow the whiskers of the white potato and dig down with perseverance, there may be unexpected surprises and discoveries. Some white potatoes grow into "flying potatoes", and some grow into "hangings" because the seedlings are not serious. The root system of the snake, or the root system of the deep underground, lost the fruit and left it to the lucky people. No matter how big or small the sweet potato is, it is the last word to pick it up in a basket and carry it home.
Go to the field to pick up the pods, cut the beans obliquely when cutting the beans, and cut the beans with a knife, leaving the beans bare with hard stubble, and there is a feeling of "no place without a cone" in the middle. Picking beans requires patience. On the ground, at the edge of the ditch, all kinds of beans were planted in the seam. The pods of soybeans and black beans contain only two or three beans, while the pods of red beans and white beans are full and slender, and can peel off a bunch of beans. After all, picking beans is not better than collecting beans, and sometimes Baali's eyes are looking away, and it is not necessarily possible to pick up how much. Occasionally, when you find a few bean stalks that fall during harvesting, you will be excited. They stand alone in the wind, and the swaying stalks hold up the plump pods. I carefully pulled the pod down and carried it into my pocket to prevent it from exploding and leaving the beans. The beans were also uprooted and picked up and brought home to burn on fire. Sometimes I will dig a rat hole, and when I am lucky, I can harvest several bunches of beans, of course, more often I am tired and wet and sweaty, but in the end I will make a bamboo basket to fetch water and have an empty joy.
As the old saying goes: basket weaving, the emphasis is on closing. Picking autumn is to "close the mouth" for the harvest of the year. In the old home of Changli County, no matter what you pick up, pick up more and pick up less, as long as there is a harvest, it is worth people to go into the field, "the right hand with the ear, the left arm hanging from the basket", to achieve "granular return to the warehouse". Look down and pick up every fruit, and you will always be grateful for the selfless gift of the earth. Today, although hunger is a thing of the past, we still need to be respectful and grateful for food. It is reasonable to cherish every grain of rice in the rice bowl, and to be worthy of the hard years of the past, to live up to the hard work of "planting a grain of millet in the spring and harvesting ten thousand seeds in the autumn". Saving grain is the best respect for a bumper harvest and the best gratitude for grain and grain growers.
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