In my hometown, the climate is very cold, from October 1 of the solar calendar to April 30 of the following year, the heating season will be as long as half a year, so long, naturally greatly compress the time of the other three seasons.
When the weather is cold, it is too late to plant all kinds of crops. In rural areas, there is a large yard in front of and behind the house, and except for fruit trees, the others are cultivated into vegetable gardens to grow all kinds of vegetables. In summer and autumn, there are too many vegetables to eat. But in winter and spring, there were no greenhouses at that time, and logistics were not developed, so it was difficult to transport vegetables from other places, and even if they were shipped, they were very expensive. Wanting to eat fresh vegetables is basically a luxury that can only be enjoyed during the Chinese New Year. In the long winter, potatoes, cabbage, sauerkraut, radish, or dried vegetables or pickles dried in the summer are eaten differently, but that's all.
The primary school in the village is only about 200 meters away from home, and when I was in primary school, my father was a teacher at the school. When I came home from school, my mother was usually doing farm work in the mountains and had not yet returned. My father's habit when he came home was to bring out the leftovers from noon, and then let me go to the garden to pick some greens, garlic sprouts, etc., wash them and dip them and drink them. I can feel that he is enjoying it, but eating cold dishes and drinking cold wine, now that I think about it, these are not good habits. It's just that at that time, no one could persuade him, and he didn't understand, of course, someone really had to persuade him, and with his temperament, it should be useless.
In my memory, around the Dragon Boat Festival every year, the garlic seedlings in the garden are only a bundle high, and other green vegetables have just emerged. My father's wine could not be drunk, and it was necessary to order snacks to drink more or less, and when the greens in the garden were not green, the wild vegetables helped a lot.
After school, I often go to the mountains to dig wild vegetables.
The sky is high and the clouds are wide, and I like to climb mountains. In the spring, there is only Po Po Ding in the fields on the mountain, and the spring in the north comes late and goes quickly. When the summer is approaching, the mother-in-law Ding is old, and there are more other wild vegetables. Endive, clover, four-leaf clover, pheasant wing, carrot, children's boxing, etc., one after another, scramble to grow vigorously.
Both father and mother were very fond of eating mother-in-law and lettuce, which were dipped in soy sauce and eaten raw. These two kinds of wild vegetables are not just side dishes with meals, they both have medicinal properties and are said to have a strong heat removal function.
Most wild vegetables need to be blanched with boiling water before eating. There are quite a few others, all of which have a more punchy taste. I remember that both of my parents used to love to eat a kind of spicy wild vegetables (like Huoxiang Zhengqi Shui?). The green leaves are so rough that I have completely forgotten the name; There is also a kind of artemisia flavor, parents love to eat, now I think it may be willow artemisia sprouts, I don't like to eat, now I have forgotten the appearance.
I also love to eat mother-in-law, which is slightly bitter and very refreshing to eat with dipping sauce. Borage is much more bitter than my mother-in-law, if I don't use cold water to remove some of the bitterness before eating, I can't eat it at all, and my parents can eat it without pulling it out with cold water. Three-leaf clover and four-leaf leaf vegetables are very similar in appearance, and they can often be picked a lot when they meet, but there is a little left after blanching in boiling water, and they are not eaten. This dish does not have any peculiar smell except for the natural freshness of wild vegetables, and it is my favorite wild vegetable.
In summer, the mountains are full of gray cabbage and amaranth. I remember my mother said that amaranth can be eaten, but the family has never eaten it. I often go to pick it, put it in a fertilizer bag, and carry it home with a bag full of them, and the pigs, cattle and other livestock raised at home are very fond of this kind of food. Time has passed, and now in supermarkets and vegetable markets, amaranth is a very common vegetable, I often buy one or two handfuls, go home and stir-fry, the taste is not bad, it is delicious.
Sour pole is a delicacy for rural children who lacked snacks in that era. Broken from the root and torn off the outer layer, the inside reveals a turquoise inner diameter, which tastes sweet and sour. At that time, it was also a very exciting thing for anyone to hold a large handful of very thick sour rods. The sour rod matures quickly, and when it grows tall, it grows to more than half a human height. When the purple flowers bloom, eating the sour stem will taste the same as chewing firewood, and it will be tasteless.
There are also wild lilies in the mountains, which do not appear in large areas, but they are often seen. When pulled out, its tubers are similar in shape to garlic and are also white. Peel off the soil on the outside and uncover it layer by layer to eat it raw, refreshing and slightly sweet. More often, it is taken home and simmered with freshly burned wood ashes at the bottom of the pot, and eaten after cooking, the entrance is soft and soft, but not so sweet. There is also a kind of fine grass on the mountain, a bit like a leek, chewing a green onion flavor, not spicy, generally not swallowed, the taste is gone, just spit out the green residue, leaving a mouth full of green teeth.
At the end of summer, the meadow is full of yellow flowers, which are wild daylilies. Daylily is different from other wild vegetables, it only grows for a short period of time, and it wilts after the flowering season. So either it is not invisible, and once the flowers bloom, they are like midnight stars, quickly dotting the entire grassland.
The second brother likes to pick daylily, which is easy to pick and eye-catching. Take it home, pinch off the stamens and dry them well in the sun. My mother made fried shredded pork with daylily, which fully combined the fragrance and tenderness of daylily with the thick and fragrant flavor of pork, which was a must.
On the meadow, there is also a kind of safflower, the flower piece is smaller than the yellow flower, and the flower piece can be directly torn apart and eaten raw, sweet and silky.
Memories are always good in the countryside fields, which carry my childhood and youth.
In recent years, when I returned to my hometown, maybe the season was wrong, or maybe there were no children willing to go up to the mountains to pick, and there were no wild vegetables on the table.
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