There are many kinds of food in the cave, including common rice, wheat, millet, soybeans and other local crops of the Tang Dynasty, at the same time, there are sweet potatoes and corn from the Americas, which are quite comprehensive in terms of nutrition, and it seems that the quality of life of the horse thieves in the den is not bad.

And most of this grain must have been robbed, snatched from the hands of merchants and farmers, and some of the grain bags still had the mark of the merchant, and Li An knew about the robbery of this merchant, and these grains were naturally stolen.

However, it is nothing for the merchant to lose a little, Li An does not intend to send the grain back to the merchant, after all, the grain is already considered the spoils of war of the soldiers, and it is the efforts of the soldiers to get the grain, and the merchant has not contributed much, so why should he return it to them, as long as he does not tell them.

"Hmph, these hateful horse thieves eat better than in the barracks, and they actually hoard so much food, just like them, they can't eat it all in three years!"

Lao Guo saw that there was so much food here, and there were many key types, and the nutrition was very balanced, so he was naturally very angry.

"Lao Guo, don't be angry, in the future, these grains will be yours, and you will directly pull them back to the barracks later!"

Li An said.

Such a little grain is not a huge amount of wealth, it is just food, and there is nothing wrong with Lao Guo leaving it privately, and he will not check it if he knows it, not to mention that it is for the soldiers to eat, and it is not for the generals to personally embezzle.

"No, just stay here! This place is very good, it can be used as a military camp, in the future, there are 500 troops here, and there will be no horse thieves in a radius of dozens of miles, isn't this wonderful. ”

Lao Guo said.

He had long planned to deploy a military camp in the nearby mountains infested by horse thieves, but after entering the mountains several times, he had not found a suitable camping site, and it was not easy to build a semi-permanent military camp, there were many houses that needed to be built, and a large number of defensive buildings, all of which cost money, and the military expenses given by the imperial court were so much, and it was not so easy to reach out and ask for money, so the matter was shelved, and at this moment it was different, this lair of horse thieves, whether it was in geographical location, Or in the conditions are very good, a large number of houses are ready-made, the defense facilities are relatively complete, if the horse thief did not escape, stick here, it will cost a lot of energy and cost to attack, in addition, the food here is also sufficient, next to the stream, are clean water, it is simply a standard bag to move in, they don't have to spend any price, even the horses are their own accommodation and food, such a unique condition, how can Lao Guo miss it? Moreover, the military camp is located here, which can deter horse thieves in the mountains more closely, and the benefits are needless to say.

In addition, if you don't set up a military camp here, in order to prevent the horse thieves from coming back again, you must burn down this huge horse thief's nest, so it will be a waste of resources, so many houses and facilities, if you rebuild one, it will cost a lot of money and time, Lao Guo is really reluctant to such a good ready-made facility, and the horse thieves have not all been eliminated, and it is also necessary to garrison troops in the mountains, so it is natural to use the ready-made horse thief's nest, this horse thief's nest, It can be said that it has solved Lao Guo's big problem, and he is very satisfied with this nest.

"That's right! Garrisoning an army here can better deter the surrounding area, and the horse thieves will definitely be angry to death if they know it, haha! ”

Ang Lee said with a smile and took a few steps forward.

The space inside the cave is very large, but it is not round, but in the shape of a long strip, with a ratio of at least ten to one, an average width of ten meters, and a length of 100 meters, with a total area of 1,000 square meters, and the area of ten houses in the later generations, which can store a large amount of grain.

The most important thing is that the cave is not damp, on the contrary, it seems to be a little dry, otherwise, the stored grain will easily rot, and the reason for the dryness is naturally because this cave is a north-south transparent structure, the exit is not one, but there are outlets at both ends, in this way, the dry air outside the cave can be brought out by the moisture produced in the cave from the inside, in this way, the air in the cave will naturally be relatively dry, which is the main reason why the cave can preserve food.

Of course, there is another reason is temperature, you know, whether it is high temperature or low temperature, it is not good for the preservation of food, high temperature is easy to make food rot, and low temperature will also freeze food, such as sweet potatoes, potatoes These foods will be frozen at low temperatures.

The temperature in the cave is relatively stable, in the summer, the weather outside is hot, and the temperature inside the cave is very cool, in winter, the outside is cold, and the interior is warm, at least, it will never freeze the sweet potatoes and potatoes.

More than half of the grain accumulated in the horse thief's nest is food that can be stored for a long time, but there are also foods that do not have a long shelf life, such as vegetable foods, and they are also fresh vegetables, such as garlic, radish, etc., the shelf life of these foods is less than a month, and the radish will change its taste after being stored for a long time, and it will become difficult to eat, and the garlic will be poisonous if it deteriorates.

Of course, there are some dried vegetables in the cave that have been preserved for more than half a year, that is, fresh vegetables that are dried in the summer and autumn, and after these vegetables are dried, they can be stored for a long time, as long as they do not return to moisture, there is no big problem in preserving them for a few years.

Li An took a look, the vegetables in the cave include plum beans, daylilies and other sun-dried vegetables, and there are still a lot of them, so much inventory, even if each horse thief eats half a catty every day, it is enough to consume half a year, it can be seen how shrewd these horse thieves are, they are planning to be permanent, once the officers and soldiers seal the mountain, they can last for a long time with the food stored in the cave.

Walking further in, Li An smelled a salty smell, yes, this is the place where pickled products are stored, there are a large number of cured meats hanging on the shelves on the high places, including pork, donkey and horse meat, these cured meats have a long shelf life, and the taste is also very good, it is easier to eat than fresh meat, and people can eat a lot of food unconsciously.

The amount of these salted meats is also very large, enough for horse thieves to consume for half a year, and these salted meats are all marinated after cooking, and they can be eaten directly without any processing.

Lao Guo took a piece of salted meat, put it in his mouth and took a bite, and said that it was delicious.

Li An also took a piece of salted meat, gently tore off a small piece, put it in his mouth and chewed, the taste was really good, it could be seen that among the horse thieves, there were also people with good cooking skills.

The salted meat is hung on a high place, and there are a lot of pickles in the tank below, mainly radish pickles, and some leafy vegetables are also made into pickles, although the number of these pickles is not too much, but the pickles cannot be eaten too much, so this is also a large amount, and it is no problem to eat for three or five years.

There is a small door in the innermost part of the cave, this door shines with light, it can be seen that this is another exit, Li An opened the small door, and walked out of the cave with Lao Guo.

The sun outside is very good, the environment is also very good, and this is actually a grain production area, which is the land reclaimed by horse thieves, which is hundreds of acres.

There is also a lot of food planted, and from the traces, you can see a lot of crops, such as a field closest to the entrance of the cave, planted with pumpkins, and the fruits of the pumpkins were naturally all picked, but the pumpkin vines were left in place, making people see at a glance that this was once a pumpkin field.

A little farther away are sweet potato fields, soybean fields and other land reclaimed by horse thieves, and these reclaimed lands seem to prove that some of these horse thieves are farmers who have lost their land and cannot find a way to live, so they go into the mountains to become horse thieves, and are responsible for growing food for horse thieves.

And horse thieves mainly live by robbery, but with more and more people, it is obviously not enough to rely on robbery, in case the officers and soldiers close the mountain in a large area, can they starve to death, and produce some food by themselves, which can ensure that they will not be trapped to death,

Moreover, Qiwu Mountain is so big, there is land and water sources, and the resources are not used, so planting more crops can also reduce the pressure of robbery and reduce the possibility of exposure.

"What a great place! There are hundreds of acres of land here, and if the horse thieves don't go out to rob, these hundreds of acres of land alone can feed many people. ”

Lao Guo said.

According to the standards of later generations, hundreds of acres of land, it is no problem to feed hundreds of people, however, it is not possible in the era of the Tang Dynasty, there is no industrialized fertilizer in this era, and there is no high-yield hybrid rice, the yield per mu of grain is relatively pitiful, it is good to harvest 200 catties of grain per acre, this is still the yield that can only be possessed by fertile fields, and the land of Qiwu Mountain is relatively poor, and the yield is even lower, and the sweet potato, an alien species, is slightly better, and it can also have a good yield in the barren land, but the sweet potato is not as good as rice and wheatEating too much of this thing will make the stomach reflux acid, it will make people very uncomfortable, and the staple food is not to choose sweet potatoes, which will make people malnourished.

After all, the yield of sweet potatoes is very high, which can better fill the stomachs of the people, so that the people can eat enough.

In the era of hunger in later generations, most of the country's land was planted with sweet potatoes, because only the huge production of sweet potatoes could meet the food needs of ordinary people, and the low yield of grain was definitely not enough.

It was sweet potatoes that fed more people, and if there were no sweet potatoes, I don't know how many people would starve to death in that special era?

There is a row of houses next to hundreds of acres of cultivated land, these houses are built under a few big trees, and when you walk in, you can see that there are some farm tools for work, and even some fertilizer, which is naturally human and animal fertilizer and green manure.

The so-called human fertilizer is human excrement, animal fertilizer is the excrement of animals, and green manure is simpler, that is, burying plants in the soil to ferment, so that plants rot and then become fertilizer, these two fertilizers are pure natural and pollution-free, used to make fertilizer are very good, in ancient society, most of the fertilizer is these kinds, especially human excrement, although it is very disgusting, but it must not be wasted.

In many cities, there will be people who are responsible for collecting dung, and these people not only do not receive salaries, but also have to pay a certain fee, which is the cost of buying dung.

Therefore, in ancient times, it was also quite interesting, human feces could be sold for money, and the same was true for animal feces, so you definitely don't have to worry about too many animals in the city, the roads will be covered with animal feces, this situation will never happen, even if there are no cleaners, because there will be many people who will take the initiative to pick up the feces excreted by these animals at will, and even reach the point of snatching.

In the special era of later generations, there are often people of the older generation who tell about the hardships of their youth, and the hardships experienced by these old people in their childhood are unimaginable to later generations.

For example, when they are five or six years old, they need to get up early to pick up dung, that is, when the sky is not yet bright, they have to carry a small dung basket on their backs to pick up chicken manure outside, and there are no tools that can be used to pick up chicken manure, that is, to pick up it with their own hands, pick it up in their own hands and smell it, and then put it in the small dung basket after confirming that it is chicken manure.

As for why you want to smell it, it is naturally because the light is too dark in the early morning, and it is not clear whether it is chicken manure or not, if it is a piece of mud, it is not for nothing, and it is safer to smell it.

Since you can't see clearly, why not wait until dawn before going outside to pick up chicken manure? This naturally involves the problem of competition, in that era of the invasion of China, there are too many poor people, whose land needs chicken manure, in order to improve the production of food, therefore, there are a lot of people who pick up chicken manure, every household has the need to pick up chicken manure, if you go to pick up chicken manure after dawn, you may not be able to pick up anything, in order to be able to pick up the most chicken manure, you can only get up earlier than others, only people who get up early to pick up chicken manure can pick up chicken manure, which is also the most efficient way.

Because during the day, there are a lot of children who have nothing to do all the time picking up chicken manure, and the chicken manure under other people's big trees is pulled by other people's chickens, and if you pick it up in broad daylight, it will definitely cause contradictions, and these chickens pull the poop at night, if you go to pick it up in the early hours of the morning, it will not be discovered, and it will not be easy to cause conflicts, is this a kind of theft?

At that time, chickens spent the night on the tree in front of their house, and later, some people felt that their chickens had picked up the poop pulled by others, and some suffered losses, so they built chicken coops, so that no one could steal their chicken manure.

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