Nostalgia Prose: Mother’s Vegetable Garden
In the season when wheat is about to turn yellow, farmers have a tense period of free time. Like soldiers on the battlefield, waiting for the moment when the Charge launches a general attack.
During this gap, if there is a continuous rain, it can make people sad to death. Affected by the wind and rain, the top-heavy wheat will either be spread all over the ground or grow directly on the wheat ears. Young sprouts, there will be "bud noodles" to eat next year!
It was on such a rainy day that my mother put on a straw hat, shouldered a shovel, and said she was going to open up wasteland.
What are you doing to open up wasteland? My second sister and I asked in unison.
Grow vegetables! The mother said that she had already gone out. I heard a series of footsteps in the muddy water, one step after another.
My family once had a vegetable garden, not far from home, on a sunny slope on the roadside. My mother doesn’t grow other vegetables, only Chinese cabbage and cabbage. Every year in late autumn, a jar of sauerkraut and a jar of pickles are pickled, and the excess vegetables and leaves are strung together and hung under the eaves as dried vegetables. In those days when supplies were scarce and food was in short supply, two jars of vegetables and dried vegetables side by side made up for many days when food was insufficient.
But just such a vegetable garden will one day become someone else’s farm.
The location where my mother opened up wasteland this time is in the northeast corner of the village. You can see it when you leave the gate and look east. Logically speaking, this place is not a geomantic treasure, because it used to be a tile kiln. Although it has long been abandoned, the soil nearby has been damaged. The weeds there are sparse, yellow in color, and malnourished. There are occasionally one or two sea buckthorn trees. , it doesn’t grow tall either, it withers away as it grows, and eventually becomes nothing more than firewood.
My mother fell in love with it because of its unique geographical location, which made it easy to manage and take care of. Many people in the village do not have vegetable gardens, so I heard the word "stealing vegetables" in the village when I was a child. I am very curious about the modern people playing "stealing vegetables" with their mobile phones. I wonder how they steal. Do you want to read it? Wall, cross thorns, or sneak in quietly?
Thanks to the rain and the soft soil, my mother braved the drizzle and spent three days cultivating a vegetable garden. After the land was cleared, my father carried it into the forest and cut down bundles of thorns, dug holes, and planted them one by one around the vegetable garden to serve as a fence.
After leaving the vegetable garden, my mother’s palms had a lot of blood blisters, and my father’s face and hands were covered with blood marks from scratches by thorns.
My mother mobilized my sister and me to carry sheep dung to the cultivated vegetable garden. The sheep are raised by the eldest father, and the sheep manure is naturally under his control. In his opinion, fertilizing other places except the grain fields is a waste of fertilizer. After a lot of trouble, the eldest father finally relented, but the quantity is limited, so don’t take too much.
My mother used a cage to carry the load, and my sister and I each carried two cage mouths and followed my mother, delivering manure to the vegetable garden one at a time.
My mother said that we can’t just count on a few loads of sheep dung, we have to take action and pick up dung in the fields.
Every day after school, my sister and I put down our schoolbags and went to pick up excrement.
Hard work pays off. Under the leadership of my mother and the efforts of the whole family, the soil in the vegetable garden becomes more fertile year by year, and the vegetables grown are better than the last. I remember one year, my father invited a Zhejiang carpenter to build a set of furniture for his home, which attracted many people to come and watch. While they admired the Zhejiang carpenter’s craftsmanship, they also did not forget to praise the delicious food cooked by his eldest sister.
The meal that my eldest sister often cooked at that time was spinach noodles. The spinach was grown by my mother because my eldest sister often went to the forest farm to play and met some staff from other places. The one she cooked the most and was best at was Pull out the dough pieces. Before that, the villagers rolled the noodles on a chopping board, cut them into long strands two fingers wide, and then put them into a pot of boiling water. But the new trick I learned is that you don’t need to roll the dough, just knead it twice more, then apply a layer of clear oil, seal it and let it sit for more than half an hour. When you pull it, just roll it gently, and then pull it... …
Before the noodles are cooked, they are sprinkled with green spinach grown in their own vegetable garden. Before the rice is cooked, the aroma has already spread out, which has attracted people in the village to say that the smell wafts from the kitchen in a house with a good time. They are all fragrant.
The Zhejiang master has been making furniture in the village for more than two months. Before leaving, he said that he had not eaten enough of my spinach noodles.
Sutai Village is located in the hinterland of Liupan Mountain. Affected by the climate of Liupan Mountain, many vegetables cannot be grown. Peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, and cucumbers are all rare varieties. My mother grows most cabbage and bread. Vegetables, onions, garlic sprouts, beans, zucchini, pumpkin, coriander.
Others also grow these vegetables, but they are not as good as those grown by my mother, especially onions. Others dig them out after autumn, and most of them have walnuts that are considered big. Some people really do what my mother said: the walnuts are big.
Many years later, I followed the local Writers Association and went to a place called Longquan Village to collect folk songs. As soon as I entered the village, I saw someone watering the vegetable garden. I don’t know if my grandson or son was following behind. He was carrying two Empty wine bottles were staggering back and forth to carry water, and a white plastic bucket was placed on the vegetable bed not far away.
This scene reminds me of myself when I was a child. One year there was a drought, and my mother arranged for my second sister and me to take good care of the vegetable seedlings in the vegetable garden. In this way, my second sister and I carried water from the river, put the water into wine bottles, and then swung it towards the vegetable garden not far away. After autumn of that year, the family had a bumper harvest of cabbage. When my mother was chopping and pickling vegetables, she kept praising my second sister and me to the aunts who were helping us, saying that it was all the work of the two children, which made us feel happy. .
The local climate is damp and humid, and the frost comes early, so corn cannot be planted. Before the corn matures, the leaves have already turned yellow and have entered the shrinking stage early. Therefore, chewing corn on the cob was an extremely luxurious thing for me when I was a child. If I ate cooked corn on the cob in the summer, it would be like a new year. When I saw some children eating corn sent by their relatives, it felt like I had many hands growing in my mouth, fighting with myself who couldn't eat the corn.
After my second sister and I begged, my mother tried to plant a pile of corn as big as a bed in the vegetable garden. Waiting for a long time, hoping for a long time, longing for a long time, summer has come, summer has passed, autumn has come, autumn has not left yet, hoarfrost has come, I look forward to the corn that I dreamed of, but it is still unwilling to grow up, the old man has a beard The same corn silk just refuses to turn brown.
There was no hope of eating mature corn until it grew up. My second sister and I sneaked into the corn bush, chopped it down with a knife, chewed up the cores piece by piece, and spit out the residue. The garden is full of them. What awaits us is, of course, mother's punishment.
I know that my mother beat us because we failed to live up to our expectations. Because there is a distant aunt who is forty miles away from my house. Her family can grow corn. On the day my mother beat us, she had just returned from her aunt's house to ask for corn. The corn did not arrive, but she was looked down upon by her aunt.
My mother went to ask for corn, but my aunt refused to give it because the corn was not ripe. But my mother clearly saw gnawed corn cobs thrown in the yard of my aunt's house...
More than ten years after my mother beat my second sister and me, our family moved to the Huangguan District. The yard and the vegetable garden are connected together. Half an acre is used as a courtyard and one acre is used as a vegetable garden. You can plant whatever you want, and whatever you plant will grow.
In addition to growing vegetables, my mother also grew corn. There was so much glutinous corn and fruit corn that I couldn’t finish it. On the edge of the vegetable garden, my mother planted fruit trees, including peach trees, pear trees, apple trees, and plum trees. Unfortunately, the cherry tree died, and my mother felt very sorry.
Every year during the corn and fruit ripening season, my mother called us in advance and asked us to come back to eat. If we couldn’t come back, she would find ways to bring them to us.
I have repeatedly suggested to my mother that she should plant less sticky corn and fruit corn and plant more ordinary corn, so that she can sell more for pocket money. But every spring, my mother still plants so much that she can’t finish it all.
In the autumn of 2019, I took my mother to the small town where I was, and we agreed that she would go back after a short tour, but as the weather gradually turned colder, she was not allowed to go back. Come back after the new year.
However, it is good now. Due to the epidemic, my mother still stays with me and cannot go anywhere.
Mother can’t go back and doesn’t care about anything else. She always misses the one acre of vegetable garden and often says that it’s February 2nd and it’s time to water and sow the seeds.
Written on February 21, 2020