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"Oh dear, my girl, you guessed it just by a glance. Something’s fishy, must have been your aunt who told you secretly," Old Lady Feng was pondering inwardly. Her daughter-in-law had been married to her son but, due to certain reasons, had yet to visit their hometown. If she could really mention Feng Xing’s hometown, that would indeed be a rare thing.
Technically speaking, Feng Xing’s hometown is not exactly Guan County in the administrative division, but it is in the western part of Shandong Province where Jilu and Yu provinces meet. Saying it’s Guan County is somewhat accurate.
"Grandma, you gotta believe me, I haven’t finished yet. The reason why the apples from your place taste so good is because of the local water and soil. With great mountains and rivers, naturally the scenery is also beautiful, and another thing – don’t you have a flock of chickens at home, Grandma? The apples taste way better than the ones found in Jing City, obviously they’re grown using chicken manure, definitely a pure green and pollution-free food product," Xiao Xian blinked again, surely this should impress the old lady.
Old Lady Feng paused her seed-spitting, presumably these things were not known to Zhuo Feng. It must have been her son chatting with his wife when there was nothing else to do.
Old Lady Feng had grown more than a dozen mu of apple trees in the village, as well as some rapeseed flowers, and also raised some chickens and ducks. When ing to Beijing, she wanted to bring some eggs too, but considering the bumpy journey and the risk of them breaking, she decided to leave them behind.
Being educated really shows – able to talk so much just about a few apples. Old Lady Feng glanced at Zhuo Feng, who was silently washing dishes in the kitchen, and she kept quiet.
Xiao Xian bit into the apple core and felt a bitterness in her mouth. A perfectly good apple, with a beautiful exterior, it’s a pity about the rotten core.
"Ah, even after picking carefully, there are still some rotten ones," seeing this, Old Lady Feng hurriedly told Xiao Xian to throw the apple away. It seems the apples really can’t stand being praised. The lesson from last time when she brought apples that turned out rotten hasn’t been forgotten. This time she had selected them carefully, but it proved ineffective.
This year, there was a bumper harvest of apples back home, but still, money was lost, mainly due to these rotten cores. Apples that looked fine on the outside were unexpectedly prone to rotting at the core. Some that were shipped out rotted along the way, having to be discarded by the truckload. The farmers didn’t make any money and even lost the cost of the seeds.
"Auntie, e and take a look," Xiao Xian beckoned, and Zhuo Feng, with her hands dried, stepped out of the kitchen. Seeing her mother-in-law alternating between smiling and frowning, she was not sure what was going on. Wasn’t it agreed that Xiao Xian would be responsible for cheering up the old lady? The plan hadn’t even begun, and now it seemed they needed reinforcements again.
As soon as Zhuo Feng settled in, Xiao Xian picked up another apple, "Auntie, didn’t you teach me how to pick fruit a while back? Take a look, is this apple good? If not, what’s the problem with it?"
When it es to selecting fruit, Zhuo Feng is quite skillful. Next to her family’s home is the largest fruit wholesale market in the city, and she’s measured the fruit she’s eaten since childhood in truckloads rather than individual pieces.
"It looks pretty on the outside, but there are mottled brownish spots on the surface." Mom? Did the apple trees at home have a disease this year?" Zhuo Feng had also attended greenhouse classes at the university several times and had seen a few mon apple diseases, so she had some familiarity with the symptoms. As for the specific disease of the apple in her hand, she honestly couldn’t quite remember. Old Lady Feng never accepted the money sent back by her son, and never mentioned whether the harvest was good or bad, so both Feng Xing and Zhuo Feng were unaware of the actual conditions back in the countryside.
"Is it called apple rot disease?" Xiao Xian chimed in with a reminder.
"Ah, um, yes, it’s quite similar," Zhuo Feng recalled the symptoms of such fruit tree diseases, and they were indeed very similar to the apples brought by Old Lady Feng.
"Daughter-in-law, you said, what’s this rot disease called?" Old Lady Feng perked up upon hearing this, stopped eating her seeds, and sat up straight as if she was a student attentively listening in class.
"Apple rot disease, more specifically, it’s trunk rot. It’s when clusters of reddish-brown spots appear on the bark of the apple tree, and some brownish ooze flows from the trunk. Those are just the early symptoms. If those spots are allowed to grow, they will spread from the bark into the inner wood of the tree, and in severe cases, it will cause the branches to wither and die. The apples will then have such spots on the surface, and they’ll rot within a few days if stored," Zhuo Feng explained all in one breath, proud that she had not skipped a beat in her university studies.
Old Lady Feng took her own apple, squinted her slightly farsighted eyes for a closer look, and without observing in detail, only knew that this year’s apples, because of the rotten cores, had been returned quite a bit.
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