Chapter 109: Chapter 106: A Garden Full of Melons and Fruits

A week later, Lin Lan returned from her stall. As she reached the courtyard gate, she heard Little Douzi teasing Dahuang inside. Delighted, she pushed open the gate, spread her arms, and called out, “Little Douzi, Mama’s home!”

“Mama, I missed you so much!” Little Douzi ran and threw himself into Lin Lan’s arms.

“Mama missed you too. You’ve gotten taller! What did Grandma feed you? You shot up in just a few days.” Looking at her son, who was a few shades tanner but even more cheerful and lively, Lin Lan felt that letting him stay at her mother’s place for a few days had been the right decision.

“Grandma’s house is fun.” Little Douzi tugged on her hand and chattered away, telling her all about his time at the Shilian Brigade—how he, his cousin, and his friends went up the mountains and down the gullies, catching fish and playing games.

Wu Shufen happily told Lin Lan that her grandson was smarter than her other grandsons. When Lin Qing came home to do homework and read his lessons aloud, Little Douzi only had to listen twice before he could recite everything from memory.

“Mama, Little Hong also gave me a textbook, and she taught me how to recite poetry.”

Lin Lan watched him, her eyes crinkling with a smile. “Recite one for Mama to hear!”

Little Douzi nodded and recited loudly, “Hoeing the fields beneath the midday sun, sweat drips down onto the soil…”

Lin Lan gave him a thumbs-up. “Great! My son is so capable! I’ll send you to preschool in the second half of the year.”

Little Douzi happily snuggled into her arms, his eyes sparkling as he looked at her. “Mhm! I’ll study hard and get a hundred percent.”

Lin Yuezhen watched him happily and picked him up.

This time, Wu Shufen brought beans, rapeseed oil, mushrooms, and a full jar of honey.

She also told Lin Lan that the family had set aside plenty of rapeseed oil and beans for her. Her two brothers were at home making oil drums, and they had even found lumber to build her an Eight Immortals table.

Her heart warmed, Lin Lan nodded repeatedly. She went to the repair shop and bought all their remaining picture books to send back with her mother for the children.

Wu Shufen stayed at Lin Lan’s for a few days. Seeing that Lin Lan’s business was doing well and that she was getting along splendidly with Lin Yuezhen, she headed home with the money Lin Lan gave her for purchasing walnuts and peanuts.

At the end of the month, the rapeseed on their private plot was ripe, and Lin Lan prepared to harvest it.

Wang Zhixue and his brother stopped Lin Lan and her sister, insisting they not do the work themselves. The two brothers spent half the afternoon harvesting the rapeseed and bringing it all back to the courtyard.

Lin Lan and her sister spread the rapeseed stalks on drying mats. After letting them bake in the sun for two days, they threshed them with flails, harvesting a whole basket of rapeseeds. They took the seeds to the oil press and got thirty to forty pounds of rapeseed oil in return.

The dried rapeseed stalks and husks were stored in the woodshed to be used as kindling.

As more families began harvesting rapeseed and pressing it for oil, most were willing to sell a portion of what they produced.

Li Guizhi returned from her parents’ home with several barrels of rapeseed oil and several sacks of fava beans, red beans, mung beans, and soybeans. After inspecting the goods, Lin Lan bought all of it.

When Li Guizhi and her husband saw they had earned over twenty yuan for half a month’s work, they were grinning from ear to ear. The relationship between their two families grew closer as a result.

After the rapeseed harvest, the leafy greens in the field had become old and tough. While Lin Lan was at her stall, Lin Yuezhen harvested them all and brought them home. She plucked off the withered yellow leaves, peeled away the tough outer layers, and then carried them to the ditch to be washed clean.

She strung up several rows of rope under the eaves and hung the greens one by one on the ropes to dry. The sun was strong, and after two days, the greens had wilted.

When Lin Lan returned from her stall in the afternoon, the sisters took down the wilted greens. They washed them with well water, placed them in a large, clean wooden basin, then added salt and kneaded them until the vegetables released their juices.

Salting the vegetables was exhausting work. After Lin Lan got home from her stall, she and her sister, along with Wang Zhixue and his brother, worked until nightfall. They finally finished kneading all the greens, squeezed out the excess water, and packed them neatly, bunch by bunch, into a bucket. They pressed the contents down firmly and put on the lid to let them pickle.

Lin Lan went to the supply and marketing cooperative and bought two inverted pickling crocks, each able to hold thirty pounds, specifically for making salted vegetables. After bringing them home, she scalded and sun-dried them in preparation for packing the salted greens.

The weather was warm, so the initial pickling took only two days. Lin Lan took the greens out, washed them, squeezed them dry, and let them air-dry for two more days. Then, she took five or six stalks at a time, twisted them into tight bundles, and packed them into the special inverted pickling crocks.

Once the greens were packed in, she plugged the opening tightly with a clean bundle of straw. Next, she inverted the crock into a basin of water, adding enough to submerge the rim. After fermenting for half a month, the salted greens would be ready.

Then they hurried to dig up and till the private plot, spreading fertilizer and making furrows. They bought some potatoes that had sprouted, planted cuttings from sweet potato vines, and sowed vegetable seeds in the furrows.

As the temperature rose each day, the mosquitoes became more numerous. Little Douzi’s fair, tender cheeks got a few red, swollen bites, which only got better after she applied some medicated oil.

The mugwort that Lin Lan had dried came in handy. Every day at dusk, she would light some and let the smoke fill the rooms, and the number of mosquitoes and insects in the house decreased significantly.

In the blink of an eye, it was June. The newspaper-covered windows were airtight, making the house incredibly stuffy and hot.

Lin Lan bought a few meters of screen mesh from Hou Bing. She tore off the newspaper and replaced it with the mesh. Using some leftover floral fabric, she sewed curtains, and the rooms became much brighter.

In the vegetable garden, the purplish-red horn peppers, slender and shimmering green Erjingtiao chilies, lush green cucumbers, and fresh string beans… were all ripe.

She could pick plenty of fresh vegetables from the garden every day. The tender cowpeas were sun-wilted and stuffed into pickling jars, along with the greenish-red chili peppers. She bought three more pickling jars and filled them all to the brim.

She also gave some to Zhou Xiaohong and Li Wu, who didn’t have their own vegetable plots.

Zhou Xiaohong laughed, saying she hadn’t bought a single vegetable all year. Her family couldn’t even finish all the produce they received from Lin Lan’s and Yang Liying’s households.

In July, Lin Lan’s vegetable garden was overflowing with gourds and melons. Millstone-sized old pumpkins, bucket-sized white winter melons, and oval, white-skinned muskmelons hung heavily from the trellises.

She would pick the muskmelons, put them in a basket, and lower it into the well to keep them cool. When she returned home from her stall, she could eat two in one sitting.

The potatoes in the garden were ripe. She pulled up the potato vines and threw them into the manure pit to compost. From a single row, she dug up an entire wicker dustpan full of potatoes.

The biggest were only the size of goose eggs, the well-formed ones were the size of duck eggs, and the small ones weren’t even as big as chicken eggs.

Braised ribs with potatoes, mashed potatoes, roasted potatoes, french fries… Lin Lan cooked them in a variety of ways for Little Douzi.

The young hens started laying, and they collected over twenty eggs a day. Lin Yuezhen took the surplus eggs and either pickled them in brine or preserved them as century eggs.

’Life in this era is so much more comfortable,’ Lin Lan thought. ’If you want to eat something, you make it yourself. Most people are simple and honest, and all the food is grown naturally, with a pure, rich flavor.’

As the weather grew warmer, sales of her orchid beans slowed a little, so Lin Lan started making mung bean cakes to sell instead.

More variety meant more income. With four stalls, and excluding rainy days, she averaged over a hundred yuan in daily income.

Thinking about how Little Douzi wanted to go to school, Lin Lan made another trip to the primary school in the Second Production Team. She learned that four-year-olds could enroll in the preschool class, and Little Kai volunteered to come get her when it was time for registration.

When Lin Yuezhen found out, she cut a piece of army-green cloth and made him a small schoolbag. At some point, she had also taken Little Douzi to buy paper and pens, and a metal pencil case printed with the words, “Study hard and make progress every day.”

In the blink of an eye, it was the beginning of the seventh lunar month. On August 29th, Little Kai ran up to Lin Lan and said, “Auntie, school registration is tomorrow.”

Lin Lan smiled and nodded. “Alright! Come get us tomorrow morning.”

“Okay!” Little Kai agreed and turned to leave.

“Wait. Auntie steamed some buns. Take a couple back to share with your sister.” With that, Lin Lan went into the house, brought out a meat-filled bun and a plain steamed bun which she had skewered on a chopstick, and handed them to him.

“Thank you, Auntie!” Little Kai took them happily and ran outside.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep