When coming to Nan'ao Natural Farm, you will be provided with accommodation and 3 meals a day, but you will have to join your hands to work and help with things around 4 to 5 hours a day. Don't worry about that, what you have to do is quite simple and interesting, giving you new experiences and joy. I already did introduce about one of the thing you need to do is "cooking", so this blog is all about the rest of the works that we do during 3 weeks staying in Nan'an Natural Farm.
If you want to make somgthing, you need to get the ingredients first... Harvesting is the way.
Nan'ao Natural Farm is an organic farming and their pursuit in green sustainable farming and products. And one of their special is they make their special products is just by using ingredient that they have just by their house and on their farm:
-Harvesting the Chinese Toon Sprouts (Xiang Chun) 香椿芽 grows in their place.
Pikcing the Perillae Folium (Zĭ sū yè) 紫苏叶, also right in front of the house.
To the farm, digging the ginger.
Digging ginger is quite simple, but still take time, after pull up the ginger from the ground, we need to cut off the tree part and take away all the small roots and earth from the ginger.
After all the process, we have the ginger ready to be wash and use.
To the farm again, harvesting Roselle, Luo Shen Hua, 洛神花. This year, A Jiang Ge grows mostly Luo Shen Hua, and he can harvest to make the flower into jams, syrup and drinking.
And we also have to cut off the top of the Luo Shen Hua tree, to make sure it won't grow too high, and the tree will be able to spend more nutrition for the flowers, increasing quality.
And you got the lovely Roselle flowers.
"When you got the ingredients, time to make the products."
After all the harvesting and having all the ingredients we need, it's time to start making the product. With each of the main ingredient, we were able to made in to different products, such as Xiang Chun sauce, Zi xu sauce, Luo Shen Hua syrup and jam. The recipe of making is belong to the Nan'ao Natural Farm so i couldn't show too much about the making process. So i will just show some general photos and the most simple product and how to make.
The first and main product is Xiang Chun sauce.
And the finish final product that ready to be sold and used.
The next one will be making the Roselle syrup and jam with the Roselle. This is very simple and everyone can make it at home. First we need to peel the Roselle pedals out by pieces and throw away the seed inside, then bring the pedal to wash. Next, prepare boiling water and cook the pedals real fast in 3 seconds then take them out. After that we add an certain amount of sugar and let the mixture stay still over 6 hours. Then we can collect the syrup by separate the pedal and the liquid, and we also have the yummy sweat and sour Roselle jam.
Packing.
Beside of making sauces, we also need to pack the rice into every pack with a certain amount of weight. To have the rice, A Jiang Ge drove us to Yilan city to get the rice from other rice farm and then bring back to Nan'ao Natural Farm for packing.
There are many kind of rice so we need to be careful when weighting and dividing each type of rice.
Because it was almost Mid-Autumn Festival, we also help packing the gift box from Nan'ao Natural Farm to send to their friends and frequent customers.
We labeled all the product and then pack them into boxes with various product inside each box. Then load all the boxes onto A Jiang Ge's car and sent to the post office for delivery.
Me and Mia have been staying in Nan'ao Natural Farm for more then 3 weeks and we kind of busy in the last week, preparing for the Mid-Autumn gifting. But we both feel happy and hard working because we were able to do and experienced things that we didn't do before, enjoying the atmosphere of the countryside and farming work.
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