Volume 1: Reborn in the 1980s, selling lunch boxes with my mother Chapter 32: Bean Cutter
The beans in the vegetable garden grew very fast in the summer. After just a few days of not picking them, Hu Qiongfang had already brought back a whole basket full of them.
Jiang Tian thought that was all, but unexpectedly, after putting down the heavy basket, Hu Qiongfang pulled out two more urea bags.
This time, I brought back two big bags full of them!
Jiang Tian was shocked: "We planted so many beans this year?"
I’m going to die. There are so many beans. How many of them should I dry?
Doesn’t this mean that we will have to eat all kinds of dried beans throughout the winter?
Jiang Cheng, who had just boasted that he would help his family dry the beans, felt sick instantly when he saw the two bulging urea bags.
At that time, there was no such "magic tool for cutting beans" as in later generations.
There are two ways to dry beans in rural areas.
One is to blanch the whole beans and then dry them directly.
The other one is more troublesome, as you have to pick the beans and then cut them into shreds.
Although it is a bit troublesome to dry the beans in this way, it is much more convenient . Soak them in warm water, wash them and you can use them to cook.
When Jiang Cheng thought about having to cut dozens of kilograms of beans tomorrow, his head suddenly started buzzing.
He really paid a huge price to be able to eat the food cooked by his sister!
Fortunately, Hu Qiongfang is her biological mother, not Snow White's stepmother, and she would not be so cruel as to let her son cut dozens of kilograms of beans by himself.
While Jiang Tian was cooking, Hu Qiongfang started picking beans with her son.
After dinner, Jiang Cheng stayed at home to look after the house and continued to pick beans. Hu Qiongfang and Jiang Tian went to put down all the more than 300 fishing hooks they had used during the day, and then came back. The whole family worked together to continue picking beans and cutting them into shreds.
The Jiang family’s yard was filled with the fragrance of beans.
Perhaps because she felt that her daughter was half an adult now, Hu Qiongfang was cutting beans while talking to Jiang Tian about their plans for the autumn harvest.
She doesn't plan to harvest rice with the villagers this year.
"I thought we should postpone it for two days until other families have almost finished harvesting their rice, and then we can invite people to come."
"We don't have much land anyway, so we can hire two strong laborers and finish the harvest in one day ."
Hearing this, Jiang Tian's heart moved.
"Mom, why do you have to wait two days?"
Hu Qiongfang burst out laughing: "You said you would take a leave of absence from school to come back and help me with my work, but you can't even figure out this account?"
"If it's two days later, other people's rice will have been harvested, so it will be easier to hire people, and the wages won't be too expensive."
"Besides, we don't have a man in our family, so it will be troublesome to pay the public grain tax when the time comes. If we harvest the rice a few days late, we will have to pay the public grain tax a few days late. When other families have paid, we won't have to wait in line."
"Then why are you all in such a hurry to hand it in early?" Jiang Tian didn't understand this at all.
In her previous life, her father would take leave every year to come back to pay his taxes. Sometimes he would take the bus in the morning and have to wait in line until the next day before he could come back. This was a phenomenon that always puzzled Jiang Tian.
Since you know that there are so many people paying their taxes ahead of you, can't you pay it later?
Hu Qiongfang smiled happily: "Because the grain is stored at home, it is dry in autumn. The drier the grain is, the less moisture it has, so it doesn't need to be weighed!"
"Just think about it, when you take the newly harvested and dried rice to the grain station, it weighs about 100 kilograms."
"If I leave it at home for a few more days, wouldn't the 100 kilograms become 80 kilograms?"
Jiang Tian suddenly realized.
That’s indeed the truth!
If it were in the past, when her father was the only one earning money in the family, he would definitely not be willing to spend so much.
They would rather queue up all night to hand in the public grain as soon as possible, so as to avoid it shrinking at home. Originally, their family only needed to hand in 700 kilograms, but if they delayed for a few more days, when the grain dried up, they would probably have to hand in an extra 100 or 200 kilograms, which would be a huge loss.
But that was all in the past.
Now they have separated from Jiang Lesheng, and her family now only has three acres of paddy fields. According to the standard of handing over more than 100 kilograms of public grain per mu, their family actually only needs to hand over 400 kilograms of public grain.
Even if they were a few days late in handing in the tax, as long as they submitted it by the deadline, they would only lose a few dozen kilograms of rice at most.
In the past, Hu Qiongfang would definitely feel sorry for these dozens of kilograms of food.
But now, Ms. Hu, who has learned how to make money, no longer cares about these dozens of kilograms of food.
Apart from anything else, she just spent half a day digging loaches on the river bank, and the money she earned was enough for her to buy a lot of food.
Besides, the accounts cannot be calculated in this way. If the rice harvest is delayed for a few days, some labor costs can be saved, and there is no need to queue up to pay the grain tax. With the time saved, she and her daughter can make one more trip to the provincial road and earn dozens of yuan.
Compared with the little bit of food that was lost, these few dozen dollars are obviously more worthwhile.
Jiang Tian was once again stunned by her mother's meticulous logic.
Damn it! If anyone dares to tell her that rural women are ignorant village women again, she will definitely give him two big cunts!
However, what Jiang Tian didn’t expect was that the surprises Ms. Hu gave her were more than that.
After agreeing to go to the provincial road the next day to sell the eels and loaches they had saved over the past few days, Hu Qinfang went to the vegetable garden early the next morning, carrying two urea bags, and picked some green and red peppers, lentils, eggplants, cabbage, loofahs, bitter gourds and the like.
Filled two urea bags.
Seeing her daughter looking at her with a puzzled look, Hu Qiongfang seemed a little embarrassed. After thinking for a while, she mustered up the courage to say to her daughter -
"I asked in a town on the provincial highway the other day, and the vegetables there are more expensive than those sold at the market in our countryside."
"I thought, since we are going to sell eels anyway, why not bring some vegetables with us? We can deliver them to their doorsteps and sell them at a lower price. Besides, they are fresh vegetables that we just picked from our own garden, so we can always sell some, right?"
“It’s okay if you can’t sell it, just bring it back and dry it.”
Jiang Tian couldn't help but give her mother a thumbs up.
As if one wasn't enough, she put up two.
"Mom, if you had started a business earlier, our family would have become rich a long time ago!"
Jiang Tian thought that she had been reborn from the afterlife, and her thoughts and vision were at least not bad in the village.
But unexpectedly, Hu Qiongfang, a native of this place, was even smarter than her.
As expected, any housewife has potential in the workplace, and netizens are right.
Seeing that her idea was praised by her daughter, Hu Qiongfang felt a little embarrassed. She coughed, picked up the cooled red bean porridge, and started eating it.
After breakfast, the mother and daughter each took a shoulder pole, and Hu Qiongfang carried the heaviest bucket, which was filled with hundreds of kilograms of river seafood.
My daughter had to pick the remaining two bags of vegetables.
Seeing Jiang Tian's fair forehead covered with beads of sweat in a short while, Hu Qiongfang felt so distressed.
No, I'd better buy a bicycle when I go to town this time.
Having a bicycle at home makes everything convenient. At least next time she goes to the provincial road to sell things, she can make two more trips back and forth, first use the bicycle to carry the things to the roadside, and let Tiantian watch over there.
Then she rode her bike back home and walked to meet Tiantian so that her daughter wouldn't have to carry such a heavy thing.
I heard that if children carry heavy loads too early, they will not grow tall?
