Pull hogweed
Huang Tian
Take a walk in the suburbs and look around and see the greenery. Beside the village greenways, on the field paths, and by the streams and ditches, all kinds of green weeds grow. Pick a piece and smell it, the leaves exude a burst of fragrance, stuffed into the mouth, sweet and sour. I can't help but think that these weeds are a delicacy for pigs, and when I was a child, it would be nice if the fields in my hometown were full of so many weeds.
My hometown is a hilly terrain, straight to the point, and green through the window. It was the mid-70s of the last century, and each household could have one or two pigs. If you raise two heads, one of them can be handled by yourself and slaughtered until the lunar New Year. At that time, everyone was relatively poor, some families had a large population and few laborers, and at the end of the year, they would overspend, and the pigs raised for the New Year would often be sold to subsidize the family in the end. The other is used as a pig. Purchasing is a directive purchase of agricultural and sideline products from farmers in accordance with the state plan. The government compensates farmers according to the national unified price, and the production team will supplement 200 catties of rice for each pig as a reward. Therefore, pig raising is the main source of income for the family.
My family has to raise two pigs every year, and I have to consume a lot of pigweed every day. My parents and sister went to work early in the morning and returned at sunset, so they had to use their lunch break to pull a handful of pigweed on the mound. Therefore, pulling pigweed has become my daily priority, even more important than reading. Sometimes, I dream of pulling pigweed at night. I was in elementary school at the time, and when I came home from school, I went to the fields with my companions. Each person carries a bamboo basket and takes a small crooked sickle, and wherever there is more pigweed in the hill field, they can run together to fill a basket in more than an hour. Common pigweed has cat's ear grass, grass and vegetables, plantain, wild celery, stinky knotted roots, cold vegetables, etc., as long as it is a hundred herbs that Shennong has tasted, there is no poison, pigs love to eat. The pig lies in the pen every day and sleeps a lot, and never picks fat and thin for eating, which looks quite cute.
When the rape blooms in spring, it is a special pleasure to pull the hogweed. The rape flowers in the fields are large and large, and they are blooming golden. Butterflies fly around, bees compete to collect honey. All kinds of wild grasses and rape grow wildly together, and the field is like a thick carpet. We children, in groups of three or five, burrowed into the sea of flowers like fish, all of them were nimble, squatting under the rape stalks taller than people and pulling pigweed, and we couldn't use a sickle, so we pulled it with our hands. It is a slender, tender green, dew-stained grass, and it is the favorite "mountain game" of the piglets. Pull a basket out of the sea of flowers, hair, eyelashes, clothes are covered with pollen, petals and blades of grass, friends, look at me, I look at you, I can't help laughing.
In spring and summer, the grass is abundant, and it is not difficult to pull pigweed, which can basically solve the problem of food and clothing for pigs. But in autumn and winter, when the grass is decaying in the fields, it is difficult to find green pigweed. At this time, the men, women and children of the village had to find another way, trekking through mountains and rivers, climbing hills and hurdles, and going to the big ravine in search of a new continent, which took more than two hours to walk back and forth. In those remote ravines, the land is fertile, the temperature is moderate, and some weeds and vine leaves are still verdant, and they can fill a basket in a morning. Carrying the heavy pigweed back, every time I sweated and was soaked.
Later, I was admitted to the town's junior high school, a 10-kilometer round trip, went to school at 6 a.m., and when I came home from school, it was almost dark, and my mother stopped asking me to pull pigweed. But in order to increase her income and improve her life, her mother still raised pigs and raised many chickens and ducks.
In the past, every household raised pigs and fed cattle, chickens and ducks in herds, but today, decades later, there are almost no pigs and cattle in the countryside, and most people work in enterprises, and their income is much higher than that of raising livestock. As for the responsible fields, they have also been contracted to large grain growers, and they can also get a lease fee of several hundred yuan per mu of land if they practice mechanized farming. The bamboo basket at home has long been shelved, the sickle is rusty, and the pigweed has faded out of people's lives.
Today's suburbs, no one picks weeds, but it also adds to the ecological beauty and wild interest. The countryside seems to have been transformed into a park, full of lush vegetation, and wandering through it is like walking into an idyllic picture full of earthy atmosphere. I have a habit of going for a walk in the countryside after work to see the green grass in the fields. When I was a child, I would never have imagined that these pigweeds, which are closely related to livelihoods, would become a different kind of scenery - bringing vigorous greenery and carrying our lingering nostalgia.
Source: Guangming Daily, October 11, 2024, page 15
Author: Huang Tian