Another year of yellow wheat

I went back to my hometown last weekend and saw that the wheat fields were still golden. When I went back this week, there was only bare wheat stubble left. The summer harvest, which had been robbed of food for many years, ended quietly. The busy scene of summer harvest in my childhood only remains in my childhood memories.

I was born in a small village in the Weibei dryland. For as long as I can remember, the wheat harvest season has been the busiest and most difficult time of the year for rural people. Every time it is wheat harvest time, everyone has to be busy for at least a month.

In the Xiaoman season, wheat enters the filling period, the grains begin to swell and plump, and a bumper harvest is in sight.

After a heavy rain, my father got up early and went to the cutting field. First, use a big old cage to pick up a basket of last year's wheat seeds and scatter them evenly on the field. Harness the animal, hang the rope on the rope, tie a cluster of willow branches covered with fine leaves behind the rope, and put one or two stones on the willow branches.

The man led the animal and slowly turned around in circles. When he encounters bricks and tiles in the field, he picks them up and throws them far away. After a while, use a milling shovel to remove the mud on the wheat field, then sprinkle some kang ashes on the wheat field, and continue to turn around and around. Three poles high in the sun, and the threshing field has been ground to a porcelain luster. Waiting to harvest the wheat.

After mowing the field here, my father began to prepare sickles, sickle blades, brooms, dustpans, fork handles and other wheat harvesting and threshing equipment for wheat harvesting.

At that time, these household items were also the most popular at the Yaoxian and Huangbao meetings. Often on the way back from the market, you will see some rural people wearing straw hats and daggers on their backs, talking happily for a long time about buying a piece of satisfactory furniture.

After the wheat began to turn yellow, my father would go to the fields every now and then to see if the wheat could be harvested. Then I discussed with several uncles to set up work to harvest together.

Finally, we were ready to start harvesting the next day. The night before, my father listened carefully to the weather forecast, sharpened the sickle, set up the cart, and brought a pot of wheat bran to the livestock. It was just daybreak, and after a simple meal, my parents and uncles pulled the cart to the fields.

Cutting wheat is both a physical job and a technical job. Generally, the left hand is used to gather the wheat, and the right hand holds the sickle to cut ridge after ridge. In order to make it easier to plant corn back, the wheat stubble is generally no longer than ten centimeters.

I am left-handed. I usually use my left hand to grab chopsticks and pick up things, but when it came to cutting wheat, I changed my left-handedness. Although the cutting skills are not very good, one more person is better than one less person.

The invention of the samarium wheat pole greatly increased the speed of wheat harvesting. The Shamai pole is shaped like a P, a large wooden fan-shaped open net. The net is made of bamboo and equipped with a long wooden handle of about one meter. It is placed vertically on the rim of the basket on the straight side. A pointed piece of wood about 30 centimeters long, commonly known as a sheep's horn, is mainly used to gather wheat. There is a thin rope on the wooden handle tied to both ends of the Samarium pole surface. The length of the rope can be adjusted. The bottom of the samarium pole is made of wood, and a blade about one meter long is tightly embedded in the bottom edge. This blade is mainly relied on when samarium is used.

When using Samarium Magnet, the operator's legs should be separated by forty or fifty centimeters, the right hand should hold the handle tightly, the left hand should gently lift the cable, the hands should be slightly moved back and to the right, and then the left hand should be pulled forward and downward to the left. The blade of the knife is about ten centimeters away from the ground. Then, the left hand curves and pulls back to the left. The right hand grip is pushed hard, and the waist is twisted to the left. When the blade of the Samarium pole is turned behind you, the right hand is quickly raised and the Samarium pole is passed. Behind the shoulder, relax your left hand, and the wheat will be poured into a pile accurately.

This goes back and forth. A person can cut two or three acres of wheat in a short time, several times as long as a sickle. But this is both a physical job and a technical job, and you might end up cutting your legs if you don’t do it properly. My first cousin is a good hand at swinging wheat poles. He can cut more than three acres of wheat in one hour.

I also tried to swing the samarium wheat pole several times, but it was always because I was not skilled in the movements. My father thought it would affect the progress of harvesting wheat, so he only had some time left to let me learn how to do it. Before I could master this skill, my family would have no crop land.

At noon, my parents and uncles loaded the harvested wheat onto the cart, hitched up the borrowed donkeys or oxen, and drove to the wheat field. My sister and I started to pick up and load the cart. There are no ears of wheat to be gleaned.

When I was a little older, I helped my family cut wheat several times, but the cutting was slow and irregular, and the wheat stubble was high and low. So I often went to the wheat field, mainly to help the adults glean wheat ears, or load wheat onto the truck.

Don’t look at loading wheat on a rack truck, it is also a technical job. When loading, the wheat ears should be loaded facing the inside of the rack truck, with one bundle of wheat pressed against the other. This way, a lot of wheat can be loaded without mess. Moreover, you need to step on it firmly with your feet while installing it to reduce the height. After it is installed, tie it firmly with ropes.

When pulling, use both hands to hold the shaft. When encountering a turn, you must make a wider turn, otherwise it will easily cause the car to overturn. Once the car overturns, people will not be hurt. It’s not an injury, but two or three carts of wheat may not be able to finish the originally one cart of wheat, and a lot of wheat will be wasted.

Pulling wheat down a steep slope is both a technical job and a physical job. If you don’t have any strength, it will be very dangerous if you can’t hold the shaft, and if you don’t do it properly, someone may die.

I remember that in the second year of junior high school, because there were few people at home, I pulled a cart of wheat from the southern field to the lower field.

Usually people think it is difficult to pull things uphill, but actually it is even harder to pull things down a steep slope.

When pulling wheat down the red steep slope, the road is particularly steep. Due to my weak strength, when I got halfway down the slope, I found that the frame car was getting faster and faster due to gravity, and I could hardly control the shaft of the car. The car was rushing down quickly, and it was getting faster and faster. I thought if I didn't find a way to stop the car, I would be finished.

I don’t know where the force came from. I suddenly used my shoulders to hold the car’s shaft, and then twisted the car’s shaft. The car turned in one direction and finally stopped. Only then did I feel He was soaked all over.

The wheat has been ripe for a while. It may still be a little green in the morning, but it may be scorched in the afternoon. If the wheat ears are not harvested, they will fall to the ground. The weather in June changes at any time, and it rains heavily immediately. Therefore, people often describe the work of the three summers as "taking food from the dragon's mouth", which is not an exaggeration at all.

In order to rush to harvest and plant seeds, adults often work continuously without taking a rest. They often carry a kettle and a few steamed buns and work all day long. They do not get the wheat to the field and do not go home.

Wheat on dry land on the plateau matures about ten days earlier than on land irrigated by rivers. After the wheat on the plateau is cut and transported to the field and stacked, the grinding begins. Each family's wheat field is not too big, and several families need to join forces to use it. When it comes to drying wheat, each family also agrees on who will dry it today and who will dry it tomorrow, so that everyone can help each other.

Often after hearing the weather forecast the day before, our parents would wake us up at four or five o'clock the next morning and go to the field to spread the wheat. Usually my sister and I would be responsible for removing the wheat from the stacks. Pulling it down and pushing it in front of their parents, they then scattered the wheat and planted it. After an hour or two, a large field was covered with wheat.

The wheat had to be turned several times during the process. After the scorching sun at noon, my father looked around for a tractor and started grinding the field. When household quotas were first implemented, there were very few tractors.

In the eyes of rural people, those who can drive tractors are talented people. Seeing the tractor driver wearing black sunglasses, holding a cigarette in his mouth, and circling the wheat field, I I once thought that it would be nice to drive a tractor when I grow up.

After an hour or so of the tractor's wheels turning, it's ready to go. First use a fork with wider thorns to shake off the long wheatgrass, and then use a fork with narrower thorns to remove the short wheatgrass. After they are completely transported away, the wheat grains mixed with wheat grains are pushed to the center of the field by raking and raking, and they are circled into a pile. After looking at the wind, they start to spread out.

If the wind is not favorable, the work often lasts until midnight or even the next morning. My first cousin is a good showman. My father once asked me to learn how to show off from my cousin so that I would not be able to show off in the future. Unfortunately, I did not learn it seriously.

When the wheat harvest on the plateau is almost complete, the wheat on the ground irrigated by the river will gradually become ripe. After grinding the wheat for the first time on the plateau, everyone began to collect the wheat for irrigating the fields. After harvesting the irrigated wheat, corn must be planted immediately, which is even more difficult. As soon as the wheat arrives at the field, the plow must be hitched to plow the land to plant corn. After planting the corn, we started to work in the wheat field.

Slowly due to the development of industry, factories have been built on many relatively flat lands in my hometown, and the land that can grow crops is becoming less and less. With the advent of windrowers and combine harvesters, wheat has become easier to grow.

In the past, the wheat harvesting season often took more than a month, but now it takes less than a week to finish harvesting and planting. Many times, villagers go to the fields in cars or motorcycles with their mobile phones in their pockets. The golden wheat grains are delivered to their doorsteps without much effort.

?The wheat harvest scene on the Weibei dryland has been completely different over the past forty years, which makes people lament the great changes in the countryside over the past forty years of reform and opening up.

Some scenes from childhood will never be seen again. This is the development of society and the progress of mankind. Some scenes should be left as memories forever.