CHAPTER 798: FAMINE ERA 3 (1ST UPDATE)

Ye Huan insisted that everyone should not spare even the grass because in that era, everyone had a hard time making ends meet. Foraging for wild vegetables wasn’t a task exclusive to one family; everyone participated. Some wild vegetables were dug up before they even had the chance to sprout. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that where humans had passed, not a single blade of grass remained.

This was even without keeping livestock. If there were animals to feed, they would have to be even less discriminate.

Truly starving refugees wouldn’t spare even the wheat seedlings.

So, rather than regretting not having eaten grass later, it was better to start collecting it now. After all, many wild plants near the countryside actually possessed medicinal properties. It’s just that there were so many that she couldn’t name them all—anyway, as long as they weren’t poisonous, just keep digging them up and bring them home. When cleaning, then separate what is grass and what is a vegetable, making the distinction clearer.

With Ye Huan’s warning, the Ye Family immediately sprang into action, and their methods were simple. During the market days, they spread such rumors to unfamiliar people. Once or twice, no one would notice, but what if their family spread the word every market day?

Over time, would these rumors not begin to spread?

Of course, this depended on how hard their family worked.

This could be considered her indirect way of issuing a warning!

Afterward, starting from March, their family began to focus on collecting and digging up various wild vegetables, wild grasses, and tree leaves. Whether they were turning over the soil, hoeing, or fertilizing, they made every effort to bring home whatever wild vegetables they found.

After the vegetables had sprouted, they would also pick their leaves—like sweet potato leaves, Sesame Leaf, chili leaves, etc.—without affecting the plants’ own growth.

By the time summer came, with an overabundance of cicada monkeys, no matter how late it was, they followed the adults to the trees by the roadside, the small woods by the river, or the cornfields to catch cicada monkeys. They even collected discarded cicada shells because not only were they medicinal materials, but they could also be ground into powder for consumption.

In this era, after the wheat was harvested, people would pick through the fields again for any overlooked items, including peanuts, sweet potatoes, and potatoes.

What the Ye Family had to do was to go over the fields one more time after everyone else had done so. Though hardly anything was left, they could still find something.

They would keep the corn silk and corn husk as well; the corn cores were sold to feed factories by the collective, and they had no access to those.

Whenever she saw seeds from wild vegetables and fruits, she would keep some for herself.

It was just a shame that the vegetables sold from the ’space’ disappeared completely, or else she could have kept some radish tops and the like.

In addition to the ubiquitous wild vegetables and grasses they could find, they also saved a portion of food for one person during meals, hoarding it. To their surprise, after a year, they had actually stored quite a lot in the cellar. By the 1941 New Year, reflecting on the hardships of the past year, the old master felt immense emotion.

"I see that people in the village are starting to save up food as well. It seems our effort this year has not been in vain, and some people are finally listening."

Their household’s millstones were never idle, grinding into powder whatever could be dried, including corn silk, corn husk, peanut shells, and other miscellaneous things, anything edible was kept.

To prevent spoilage, during the hottest part of summer, when pests were most likely to infest, she would often store these items in the ’space’, despite the cost of ten Gold Coins per day’s storage fee. It was better than letting the bugs get them, right?

Of course, she only hid away a small portion and rotated it because the adults were also concerned about this and regularly took them out to air and dry.

Their family saved lots of pickles, dried radish, dried sweet potatoes, and dried potatoes over the year. Anything that could be ground into powder was done so, and what couldn’t be ground was chopped up and dried from time to time.

After a whole year of hard work, they had amassed over US$ 300 pounds of wild vegetables, wild grasses, tree leaves, crop leaves, husks, and stems, a considerable amount indeed.

With the arrival of 1941, their family worked even harder. In addition to last year’s efforts, they also took note of the frequency of the rains and realized that it was indeed much less frequent than before.

Moreover, both the summer and autumn harvests of 1941 were less compared to the previous year. The old master sensed trouble. The entire winter passed without rain, and in the first half of 1942, even during the summer season, which should have been washed by downpours, not a single drop fell. They watched helplessly as the crops withered, the ground cracked open, plants wilted, and the worst was yet to come—the locusts truly arrived.