Chapter 139: Not Their Hope For Survival
After filling sixteen large animal hide bags with white bean fruit, Su Ran stopped collecting more white bean fruit.
But for those two four-eared oxen, she cut many more grass leaves from the white bean fruit and dried them all into dry grass.
She bundled all this dry grass into stacks with willow branches, then enclosed about thirty square meters on the left side of the house with wood to make a dry grass pen, and piled all the dry grass inside the dry grass pen.
For this, she also sewed a huge animal hide blanket with animal hide and placed it outside the dry grass pen.
If there was windy weather or rainy snowy weather, she could use this animal hide blanket to cover the grass pile, preventing the grass pile from getting wet from rain or snow, or the grass leaves from being blown everywhere by the wind.
Su Ran felt that the stock of green soap fruit powder and white bean fruit she had now should be enough for her and Gray to eat their fill without going hungry during the long winter, and there would even be some left over to feed those small animals.
However, most of the time, Su Ran would eat this green soap fruit powder and white bean fruit, while Gray still needed to eat more meat.
But having these foods on hand would at least ensure that if no other food was available during the winter, she and Gray wouldn’t have problems from going hungry.
And besides these two foods, the other foods that needed storage still had to be stored.
Gray’s main food was meat, so definitely more had to be stored.
But Su Ran felt that with the current weather, no matter which method was used to store meat, it would still spoil quickly.
She planned to wait until the weather was a bit colder, at least until the time to wear long-sleeved clothes and pants, before starting to store meat food for overwintering.
However, according to Gray, when beastmen started storing food each year, it was at least four thirty-day periods later.
In other words, four months later, winter would arrive.
And the beastmen’s food storage method was to process the hunted animals cleanly and then place them directly outside the dwelling for freezing.
Su Ran also planned to freeze some of the hunted animals like these beastmen did when the time came.
However, by the time food could be frozen, the weather would definitely already be very cold.
So before that, Su Ran still decided to make some different foods like cured meat sausages before winter arrived.
To make it convenient for her and Gray to change up their flavors during winter.
After all, winter was long, and not only was it impossible to get different foods at any time, even hunting for food was very difficult.
Because according to Gray, every winter, there were still beastmen who froze to death or starved to death.
Although those were some older beastmen, if it weren’t for the cold weather and lack of food, how could such things happen.
For this reason, Su Ran also taught some of her current food storage methods to Xiao Ju and Yao Yao and Xiao San, and when it came time to make salt-cured meat and sausages later, she would teach them too.
And she also hoped they could teach these food storage methods to the beastmen in the settlement.
Su Ran did this partly to help the beastmen not go hungry during winter.
Most importantly, she didn’t want her and Gray, who had plenty of food, to become the focus of attention for the food-scarce beastmen during the cold winter.
Although up to now, the beastmen had all acted very friendly and very mindful of boundaries.
But when any animal faced a life-and-death crisis, the instinct to protect their own life would override all other rules.
In that case, it would be hard to guarantee that if these beastmen really hit a bottleneck where they couldn’t survive this winter, she and Gray wouldn’t become their last “survival” hope.
For this reason, Su Ran also had Gray go propagate these food making methods in the settlement.
Even if the beastmen could only learn one food making method, the “danger” she and Gray might face would be reduced by one part.
These past few days, after collecting the white bean fruit, Su Ran took advantage of the still somewhat warm weather to first make the foods that needed to be sun-dried before storage.
Also, she still needed to dig a cellar, then collect some green vegetables and wild vegetables to store in the cellar.
During the long winter, not eating any meat at all definitely wouldn’t do.
But she didn’t know how long the growing season for housheng vegetable and wild cabbage would last.
Because if stored now, even in the vegetable cellar, they would spoil from the heat.
But if not stored, she worried that by the time it got cold, the season would be over and they couldn’t be found even if she looked.
For this, Su Ran specially went to find Bai Bai and Xiao San to ask about the growing season for these wild vegetables.
Fortunately, the beastmen, who were herbivores in body type, knew about these.
And not only did they know, after understanding that Su Ran wanted to store vegetables, Bai Bai also took Su Ran to find a new kind of vegetable, as repayment for Su Ran telling her the vegetable storage methods.
The vegetable that Bai Bai took Su Ran to find was a fruit growing underground that looked almost exactly like a radish, with a crisp and tender texture full of moisture, but no real flavor.
Su Ran just directly called it radish.
This thing really had a lot of moisture.
Su Ran tried stewing some beef with it, and the taste after stewing was almost no different from radish, just without that spicy flavor.
So she pulled up a lot of this radish and brought it back, sliced it and dried it, so now her winter food types had one more vegetable.
And besides radish, Su Ran also gathered a lot of housheng vegetable and wild cabbage and dried them into dried vegetables.
The leaves of the current housheng vegetable had already turned almost blackish in color.
The leaves were also much thicker than before.
Su Ran felt that the current housheng vegetable tasted much better than when she first discovered it, and when eaten raw, it even had a slightly sweet texture.
After cleaning off the rotten leaves and bad leaves from these gathered housheng vegetables and wild cabbage.
She threaded each plant whole onto ropes, then hung them on the eaves of the storage room and rain shelter to sun-dry.
Once dried, she hung them all on the roof inside the storage room, to be taken down when needed to eat.
To sun-dry as much food as possible at once, Su Ran set up another long table side by side behind the original long table, and also erected four drying racks on the open spaces to the left and right of the long tables.
This way, these green vegetables, including for making sausages later, could be hung directly on these four drying racks without competing for space with the animal hides that needed drying.
Su Ran spent over ten days drying three large barrels of dried fruit and two barrels of dried radish.
The dried vegetables were almost hanging full on the roof of the storage room.
She even didn’t spare the flowers of the wild cabbage, but picked them all off, dried them and stored them to brew flower tea.
She also dried a lot of Sweet Leaf Vein Tree Leaves and vinegar fruit, ground them into powder after drying, put them in jars, to use as sugar when cooking.
I also drew the floor plan of all the buildings at Su Ran’s dwelling and put it in the comment section, interested friends can go check it out.
Also begging for votes, the recent data drop has me so panicked.
