This article**: The people**.
Dai Zhigang. People** December 30, 2023 Edition 08).
The night was quiet and quiet, and I woke up early in the morning and went around the hill behind the courtyard where the team stationed in the village lived. It is a hill with Camellia oleifera trees as the main vegetation. It is the autumn and winter season, which is the peak flowering period of Camellia oleifera. Camellia oleifera generally blooms after the cold dew solar term in autumn, and the flowering period lasts until the heavy snow solar term in winter. Days of fine weather, mist and cooking smoke blend into a mesmerizing mist in the mountains, evoking memories from years ago. The mountain trail is crooked, the feet are wet in the morning dew, the yellow wild chrysanthemums on the side of the road, and the birds in the ears are singing, everything is familiar and distant.
Camellia oleifera is very adaptable, barren and drought-resistant, and is suitable for growing in the hills and hills of the south of the Yangtze River. My hometown, Linli County, Hunan Province, is located in the transition zone between the Wuling Mountains and the Dongting Lake Plain, which is a typical hilly landform, with four distinct climatic conditions and moderate acidity and alkali red soil, which has become a comfortable home for this kind of tree. I was born in a rural area, and when I was seven or eight years old, I caught up with the implementation of the household contract responsibility system, and the former collective Camellia oleifera mountains were distributed to every household, just like the paddy fields. I still remember that when dividing Camellia oleifera Mountain, people would match fat and thin according to the mountain, tree age, distance and other conditions, and use the soil method of drawing lots to reach an agreement. Therefore, the responsibility of each family is a piece of east and west, and some have seven or eight places. When it comes to the camellia picking season, people are generally arranged to pick or take care of each piece of their own responsibility mountain at the same time. Some families have a lot of responsibilities, and even children have to go into battle.
The oil yield of Camellia oleifera reached its highest at the turn of early to mid-October. This is also before and after the cold dew of the 24 solar terms. Therefore, every year the cold dew has become a day to go up the mountain to pick. Picking Camellia oleifera fruit is a very hard thing, often just after the dawn, people have to go out, and when they get home, it is already full of stars and moons. Because the whole family went into battle together, everyone went out in the morning with water and food, and was in the mountains all day. At that time, my family had a piece of Camellia oleifera Mountain in Huozhuo Bay, all of which were twenty or thirty years old tea trees, and the trees were high and dense, and they had to be picked on the trees. My mother considered that my brother and I were too young and light to climb trees, so she handed over the mountain to my brothers. My brother stood under the tree and picked the fruit that he could tiptoe on, so I climbed up the tree to pick the fruit from the high place, and when I couldn't reach it, I pulled the branch closer with a wooden hook to pick it. The camellia fruit on the branches is very tight, and it has to be picked one by one, and you can't be lazy. The branches of the Camellia oleifera tree are very tough, and they sway like springs when standing on them. One year, I shook the tree violently, trying to shake the camellia fruit down, which attracted my mother's reprimand. It turns out that Camellia oleifera is different from other trees, the flowering period coincides with the fruit ripening period, and there is a saying in the countryside that "mother and child meet", shaking the branches will shake the flowers off, and the next year will be a bad harvest.
Camellia oleifera fruit picking is divided into two stages, the first stage is to pick your own responsibility mountain. At that time, camellia was a precious thing, and every family protected it like a baby. After the completion of the first stage, it is time to enter the stage of picking up and cleaning regardless of land boundaries. Those camellia fruits left on the tree, as soon as the sun shines, they will automatically burst. The blackened tea seeds fell to the ground, in the grass and among the thorns. Neighbors will go up the mountain in groups to pick up. At this time of the year, my mother put aside the big things first, and going up the mountain to pick up tea seeds is the number one job. Many people in the city who do not have a responsible mountain just wait for the countryside to finish picking the responsible mountain and go up the mountain to pick up tea seeds. If you have good eyes and fast movements, you can harvest more than ten catties a day, and you can squeeze fifty or sixty catties of oil in one season, which can solve the problem of cooking oil for most of the year.
After the camellia fruit is picked from the mountain, it has to be spread out on the goose field to dry for a few days. Until all the tea fruits burst open to form a mixture of shell seeds, and then enter the "tea seed" stage where the shell seeds are completely separated. The practice of "selecting tea seeds" is usually a sieve for each person, filling a sieve with a mixture of shell seeds of Camellia oleifera fruits, and selecting the tea seeds one by one by hand. It is as short as ten days, and as long as more than a month, the procedure of "selecting tea seeds" is completed, and then the pure tea seeds are passed through two big suns, and they can be pulled to the oil press. The tea seeds turned into golden tea oil, dripping from drop to strand, flowing down from the cracks of the wood press, and the fragrance floated for ten miles.
Compared with other edible oils, tea oil has commendable taste, aroma and nutrition. When I was a child, the family didn't have a lot of dishes, but my mother could always use a few spoons of tea oil to make dishes that still memorable to my taste buds. For example, the fried egg in tea oil is golden in color, and the aftertaste is endless after one bite. And every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, my mother must make a dish of fried chicken with tea oil, which is charred on the outside and tender on the inside, and the lips and teeth are fragrant, which is still in my memory.
The times are developing, and everything is also radiating new vitality in the surging of the times, including a small camellia fruit. This fairy fruit gifted by nature to the world only solved people's appetite problems in the past, but today it has become an industry that leads rural revitalization in many places, from the small dining table of ordinary people to the broad market. Ten years ago, the village took Camellia oleifera as the main industry to lead the villagers out of poverty and become rich, not only reformed a batch of old Camellia oleifera forests, but also newly expanded more than 5,000 acres of Camellia oleifera forests, which have entered the peak production period, and dividends of more than 1,500 yuan per mu of Camellia oleifera every year.
Over the years, no matter where I was, I always had a picture of the labor of picking camellia fruits in my mind. It doesn't fade with age, nor does it blur away from its native land. In the fragrance of tea oil, I went far away again and again, and returned again and again.