I was born in a small village in Weibei dry land. As long as I can remember, the annual wheat harvest season is the busiest and hardest time for rural people in a year. Every wheat harvest season, everyone has to be busy for at least a month.
In the harvest season, wheat enters the filling stage, and the wheat grains begin to swell and be full, and a bumper harvest is in sight.
After a heavy rain, my father got up early to cut the field. First take a cage of last year's wheat clothes and put them in a big old cage and scatter them evenly in the ground. Arrange the animals, put ropes on the wheels, tie a bunch of wicker branches covered with thin leaves behind the wheels, and press one or two stones on the wicker branches.
People lead animals around slowly. When you meet bricks in the field, pick them up and throw them far away with a whoosh. After a while, take a milling shovel to shovel the mud off the wheel, then sprinkle some kang ash on the wheel and continue to turn. By midnight, the threshing floor had been ground to porcelain, waiting for the wheat harvest.
After cutting the fields here, my father began to prepare wheat harvesting equipment such as sickle, sickle blade, broom, dustpan and fork handle.
At the Yaoxian and Huangbao meetings during that time, these things were also the most sought after. Often on the way back from the fair, I will meet some rural people with straw hats and tender backs, and they will happily talk for a long time to buy a satisfactory piece of furniture.
After the wheat turns yellow, my father will go to the fields from time to time to see if he can set up a sickle and harvest it that day. Then I discussed with several uncles to find a job and harvest together.
Finally ready to harvest the sickle the next day. The night before, my father listened to the weather forecast carefully, sharpened the sickle, set up the rack car and took a pot of wheat bran to borrow animals. At dawn, my parents and uncles had some simple meals, and then pulled the cart to the fields.
Cutting wheat is not only a physical activity, but also a technical activity. Generally, the wheat is harvested in the left hand, and the sickle is taken in the right hand, and cut one by one. For the convenience of replanting corn, the stubble should generally not exceed10cm.
I'm left-handed. I usually use my left hand to grab chopsticks and take things, but when it comes to cutting wheat, I changed this problem. Although the cutting technology is not so good, one more person is better than one less person.
The invention of wheat straw greatly improved the speed of wheat cutting. The wheat straw is shaped like a P-shaped, which is a large wooden fan-shaped net. The net is made of bamboo with a long wooden handle of about one meter. On the edge of the straight basket, there is a sharp wooden strip about 30 cm long, commonly known as sheep's claw, which is mainly used to collect wheat. A thin rope is tied at both ends of the wheat straw surface on the wooden handle, and the length of the rope can be adjusted. The bottom edge of wheat straw is made of wood, and a blade about one meter long is tightly embedded on the bottom edge, which is mainly used for wheat threshing.
When threshing wheat, the operator separates his legs by 40-50 cm, grasps the handle with his right hand, gently lifts the cable with his left hand, slightly swings his hands to the right and back, then pulls the blade forward and down with his left hand, so that the blade leaves the ground for about 10 cm, then pulls the left hand into an arc, and holds the handle with his right hand to twist the waist to the left. When the blade for threshing wheat straw turned behind him, his right hand quickly lifted and plowed out the wheat straw.
Return begins this week. A person has to cut two or three acres of wheat a day, which is several times that of a sickle. But this is not only a manual labor, but also a technical work. Maybe you will cut your leg. My brother in the hall is a good hand at waving straw. He can usually cut more than three acres of wheat a day.
I also tried to swing the straw several times, but it was always because of my lack of experience. My father suspected that it would affect the progress of wheat harvest, but I was left with only a little to learn. Before I master this skill, there will be no farmland at home.
Near noon, my parents and uncles put the cut wheat on the cart, put on the borrowed donkey or ox, and rushed to the wheat field, while my sister and I began to pick up the ears of wheat that were not picked up after loading on the cart.
When I was a little older, I helped my family cut wheat several times, all of which were slow and irregular, and the stubble was high and low. So I often go to the wheat field, mainly to help adults pick up the ears of wheat, or to load the wheat into a shelf car.
Don't look at loading wheat on the shelf car, it's also a technical job. When loading, you should put the ears of wheat into the shelf car, and a bunch of wheat will press a bunch of wheat, so that a lot of wheat will not be messed up. And when you install it, you should step on it with your feet to reduce the height. After loading, tie it with a rope.
Turn the axle with both hands when pulling. When you meet a curve, you must turn it a little bigger, otherwise it will easily lead to rollover. In the event of a rollover, people will not be injured, but one car of wheat may not be pulled by two or three cars, which will waste a lot of wheat.
Pulling wheat down a big slope is not only a technical activity, but also a physical activity. Without a little strength, it is very dangerous to hold the shaft, and people will die if it is not done well.
I remember when I was in the second day of junior high school, because there were few people in my family, I pulled a cart of wheat from the south tableland to the field under the tableland. Usually, people think it is difficult to pull things uphill, but it is even more difficult to go down a big slope.
The road is particularly steep when pulling wheat down the red steep slope. Because of the small strength, when I went down to the middle slope, I found that the shelf car was getting faster and faster because of gravity, and I almost couldn't control the shaft. The car is rushing down and looks faster and faster. I think if I can't find a way to stop the car, I'm finished.
I don't know where I come from. I suddenly picked up the shaft, then twisted it, and the car turned around and finally stopped. At this time, I felt soaked to the skin.
Wheat may look a little green in the morning and may be burnt in the afternoon when it has been cooked for a day. The ears of wheat will fall to the ground if they are not harvested. The weather in June is changeable, and it is said that it will rain cats and dogs soon. Therefore, it is no exaggeration for people to describe their work in summer.
In order to grab crops and seeds, adults often wander around without rest. They often carry a kettle and several steamed buns a day, so that they can't take the wheat to the fields or go home.
Wheat in dry land in Yuan Shang is about ten days earlier than that irrigated in river. After the wheat in Yuan Shang was harvested and transported to the fields, it began to be ground. Every wheat field will not be too big, so we need several wheat fields to use together. When drying wheat, several families also discussed who will dry it today and who will dry it tomorrow, and everyone helped each other.
Often after listening to the weather forecast on the first day, our parents will wake us up at four or five o'clock the next morning to scatter wheat in the fields. Usually, my sister and I are responsible for pulling the wheat from the crib and pushing it to my parents, and then they will disrupt the wheat and plant it. In an hour or two, a large field will be covered with wheat.
I had to turn over the wheat several times on the way. After the direct sunlight at noon, my father looked around for tractors and began to cultivate land. At first, tractors were rare when family contracted production.
In the eyes of rural people, all those who can drive tractors are capable people. Looking at the tractor driver with black sunglasses and a cigarette in his mouth, I thought to myself, it would be great to drive a tractor when I grow up.
The tractor can be started after the wheels turn for about an hour. First shake off the long wheat straw with a fork with a wider thorn, and then clean the short wheat straw with a fork with a narrower thorn. After being completely transported away, the wheat clothes mixed with wheat grains will be raked into a pile in Tian Xin, and the fields will be cultivated after watching the wind direction.
If the wind goes well, it will often stay up until midnight or even the next morning. Lobby brother is a good way to promote the field. My father once asked me to learn from him, so that I wouldn't promote it in this field in the future. It's a pity that I didn't study hard.
When the wheat harvest in the garden is almost the same, the wheat irrigated in the river will gradually mature. After the wheat in the garden was ground for the first time, everyone began to collect the watered wheat. It is even harder to plant corn immediately after harvesting the wheat in irrigated land. After the wheat arrived in the field, it was quickly put on a plow and turned over to plant corn. After planting corn, I began to work in the wheat field.
Slowly, due to the development of industry, factories have been built in many flat areas in my hometown, and there is less and less land to grow crops. With the emergence of lawn mowers and combine harvesters, wheat is growing better and better.
It used to take more than a month to harvest wheat, but now it is completed in less than a week. Many times, villagers go to the fields by car or motorcycle with their mobile phones. When they took out their wallets, they didn't need much effort, and the golden grains of wheat were transported to the door.
? The different wheat harvest scenes in Weibei dry land for more than 40 years can't help but make people lament the great changes in rural areas in the past 40 years of reform and opening up.
Some childhood scenes will never be seen again. This is the development of society and the progress of mankind. Let some scenes become eternal memories.