boyutpedia Chapter 343: Farm Daily Life 15
Chapter 343: Farm Daily Life 15
After dinner, Evelyn Ford and Ronan Kendrick walked hand in hand back to the log cabin. A thick layer of snow covered the ground, blanketing the entire farm in silver. It was a beautiful sight.
Amidst the exquisitely beautiful snowscape, the dangerous night fell once more.
"The authorities can’t be out of food. The provinces in the Northwest were barely affected, and the reserve granaries from other provinces and cities were all moved over. Why aren’t they distributing food to the refugees? They don’t even seem willing to hand out wheat bran. Besides, there are so many begging refugees in Tarr City. It shouldn’t be that hard to gather them and build a refugee shelter."
Evelyn Ford couldn’t understand it.
"It’s the eighth year," Ronan Kendrick reminded her.
"So they stop caring after eight years? No, that’s not right. They do care, but only for the people who got here first. The refugees who came later have all become walking corpses, barely human. Their physical and mental states are on the verge of collapse. They have no value anymore."
Evelyn wasn’t so much angry or accusatory. The principle of weeding out defective products also applied to humanity.
However, if the base still represented the authorities, they shouldn’t be acting this way. Ordinary people could weigh the pros and cons and be selfish, but the base could not.
But the reality now was that it wasn’t that they couldn’t see the problem; they were just pretending not to. It wasn’t that they lacked the ability to save these people; they just didn’t want to waste food and resources.
This was the consequence of order and civilization collapsing.
—
For the next ten days, the farm gates remained closed. Evelyn Ford went to check on the winter wheat and found it was ready to be harvested in stages.
The daikon radishes in the fields had grown quite large. Half were set aside to be made into dried radish strips and sticks, while the rest were all stored in the cellar.
The cellar was vast and its passages interconnected like a labyrinth, allowing the cabbage, radishes, and sweet potatoes to all be stored separately.
The roughly one-acre plot of wheat yielded a total of over 6,500 pounds of grain. The harvested straw was also enough to feed the argali sheep for three or four months.
Harvesting the wheat was a miserable job. The awns on the heads of wheat were very sharp, and if they got inside your clothes, they’d scrape against your skin, causing it to become painful and itchy.
The corn harvest was mediocre, as corn is a summer crop, after all.
The sweet potatoes and cassava also had to be dug up. After a busy month in the greenhouse, it was time to plant the second crop of grain.
"It’s too cold now, so let’s plant all wheat. Wheat is a cold-season crop, so planting it now won’t be a problem. For vegetables, let’s just plant these four: bok choy, radishes, celery, and cabbage."
After one planting cycle, they could already tell which crops were suitable for cultivation and which were not.
"Do we plant right after tilling the soil?"
Evelyn Ford nodded. "Yes, we can plant right after tilling, but we need to spread some fertilizer."
In any case, they now had eight short-term laborers. Chet Lawrence and the others were also very capable, so Evelyn Ford only needed to assign tasks; she didn’t have to do the fieldwork herself.
Half a month later, the second crop had been planted in the greenhouse. For the past few days, Evelyn Ford had been busy delivering one litter of rabbits after another. The number of rabbits in the hutch had already reached five or six hundred, and the chickens and ducks numbered over a thousand.
Besides the farm, Evelyn Ford also had to worry about the crops and chicks in her spatial storage. The space had a growth-accelerating effect. In just over a month, the ten chicks had already grown up. The chickens raised in the space also laid very large eggs. Evelyn was glad she had only hatched ten; otherwise, cleaning the breeding area every day would have made her question her life choices.
Most of the time, however, it was Ronan Kendrick who did the cleaning.
One day, the two birds that had been gone for several months suddenly flew back. Looking at the noticeably thinner Lola and Red Bird, Evelyn Ford seriously suspected they had been captured and imprisoned.
"What happened to you two? Don’t tell me you were actually caught?"
Evelyn heated some water, gave the two birds a bath, and then disinfected them.
"There’s an injury here." Ronan Kendrick parted the feathers on Red Bird’s tail, and only then did Evelyn see a bald patch.
"This looks like a wound from a sleeve arrow or a bullet. Lola doesn’t have any gunshot wounds, but it must have eaten something poisonous. It’s covered in ringworm."
Seeing the dense patches of ringworm made Evelyn Ford’s skin crawl.
"These two little rascals are driving me crazy. I always thought they were on Immeasurable Mountain. From the looks of it, they must have flown somewhere else."
Evelyn quickly dried their feathers and applied some anti-fungal medicine.
"I have no idea what it ate to get such a severe case of ringworm. We need to quarantine them so they don’t infect Mina and the others."
Ronan Kendrick got two cages and, after applying the ointment, separated the two birds into quarantine.
Evelyn was exasperated. "I seriously suspect they ate something rotten."
"Should we pump their stomachs?" Ronan Kendrick asked with a straight face.
"It’s long since been digested and passed."
Ronan Kendrick lowered his head and chuckled softly.
Mina was thrilled to see Lola back and even tried to squeeze into the cage to play with it. Evelyn had no choice but to hang the birdcage up high, leaving them to only gaze at each other from a distance.
The next day was a bartering day, but with the heavy snow blocking the mountain paths, very few people came to trade. The man and his daughter they had seen before came, too. They had a pushcart piled high with wood.
Besides food, people also came to trade for clothes, shoes, and pots and pans.
She hadn’t wanted to open a general store, but after all was said and done, the farm had ended up becoming one anyway.
"Honestly, you can make your own bowls, chopsticks, spoons, and basins. All you need is a knife, and you can carve them out of wood. They’d even be sturdy," Quincy said. He really couldn’t understand why some people would even trade for chopsticks.
"Some people don’t even have a knife. Do you have any idea how expensive a knife is now?" Miles Vaughn snorted, then held up a finger and wagged it.
"Out there, the market price for a single machete is a hundred pounds of grain. Someone wanted to buy one of our long blades today and asked me how many pounds of wood I wanted for it. I said five tons, and he accused me of robbery."
"A lot of the refugees over in Fairgate have moved into caves in the mountains. It’s unrealistic to build a house in this weather—it’s too cold, and without a heated kang bed, there’s no warmth. Some people are even digging holes in the mountainside," said Chet Lawrence, who had a real knack for gathering information. He was basically the one who found out everything that was happening outside.
"The mountains should be pretty safe now, right? The wild animals have probably all gone extinct."
"Living in a cave isn’t comfortable, though. It’s pitch-black, so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. If you don’t see light for a long time, your eyes will go bad."
"I’ve lived in caves and cellars before. It’s fine for a few days, but I really couldn’t stand it for long."
"With the heavy snow blocking the mountains, a group of refugees has left Fairgate. There should only be about two hundred people left now."
"When is spring ever going to come? I feel like I haven’t seen a spring in years."
As everyone chatted back and forth, Evelyn Ford stared blankly at the snow outside the window.
"Evelyn, did those two pet birds of yours fly back?"
"Yeah."
"Those two little guys are really something special. To think they actually found their way back. A while ago, that Pallas’s cat Quincy was raising ran off. We thought it was gone for good, but believe it or not, the next morning it was sitting right by the door."
"If only the people who got lost could come back too," Aunt Crane said suddenly.