Episode 7: The Vegetable Garden (2)
‘What should I do?’
I’d thought cutting the grass with the brush cutter would be convenient, but no matter how many times I tried to start it, it wouldn’t work.
I knew that weeds only took a long time to grow back if you pulled them out by the roots.
My plan had been to cut the taller grass down to size with the brush cutter and then pull it out roots and all to clear the field, but the brush cutter broke and my plan went awry.
‘Should I work with a sickle?’
As I was worrying, my eyes caught the sickle in the storage shed. It was a bit rusty, but if I sharpened the blade on a whetstone, there shouldn’t be any major problems.
No, come to think of it, the sickle had plenty of problems too.
Using a sickle would require an enormous amount of labor.
I’d dreamed of growing crops in the vegetable garden and harvesting them for delicious meals, but before my dream could come true, I might collapse from exhaustion swinging a sickle.
‘Let’s get the brush cutter repaired.’
I loaded the broken brush cutter into the car and headed for the town center.
Since there was no hardware store that did repairs at the township center, I had to go all the way to the downtown commercial area of the town.
It took about twenty-five minutes by car from home to reach Maeil Market in the town, and while it was the busiest area with the most people in Haenam, there weren’t many people walking around—probably because it wasn’t a market day.
Come to think of it, the population of Haenam County had dropped a lot compared to when I was in elementary school.
When I was young, it had been one of the few counties with a population over one hundred thousand, but I’d heard it had steadily declined since 2010 and now collapsed to seventy thousand.
I’d heard they gave out a lot of money for having children to slow the falling population, and they were doing many rural resettlement programs to encourage migration.
But looking at the heavily aged buildings compared to decades ago, I couldn’t help but wonder if young people would really want to come live in a place like this.
Then I suddenly laughed. Because I was, in a way, a young person too.
I had never dreamed of returning to farming, yet here I was, wearing rubber boots and coming into town to fix a brush cutter.
‘Well, there might be others like me.’
I went into the hardware store that repaired various machines and showed the owner the broken brush cutter. He opened up the machine and made a grave expression.
“Is it in bad shape?”
“First, I think we’ll need to replace the carburetor, and we’ll probably have to swap out the spark plug and nozzle completely too.”
“I see. But it is repairable, right?”
“Hmm... if I have the matching parts, it might be possible, but it’s such an old model that I’m not sure if they’ll be available.”
The brush cutter was something my father had used for a long time.
Most of the things at the country house were old and well-used, so I had thought it wouldn’t be strange if anything broke down at any time, and it seemed the brush cutter was the first to go.
“If we do repair it, the cost is probably going to be pretty high... honestly, I think you’d be better off just buying a new one.”
“Is that so?”
“These days they make much lighter and more powerful ones instead of these heavy old things. Shall I show you?”
I’d planned to get it repaired and keep using it if possible.
But looking inside the open brush cutter, even I could tell the condition was bad.
A brush cutter was one of the absolutely necessary machines for living in the countryside.
Because there were far more occasions to cut grass than I had imagined.
‘Yeah, I’ll need to clear the ancestral graves later too, so I definitely need a brush cutter. Let’s take this opportunity to buy a new one.’
“Boss, which one is good?”
****
Vrooom.
With a loud sound, the engine fired up.
I’d disposed of the broken brush cutter and bought a new one from the hardware store, and I liked the robust sound.
They’d given me safety goggles as a service too. Putting on the glasses, I lifted the brush cutter.
‘Oh, it’s really light.’
Back in the army, I had used an extremely heavy brush cutter.
If I worked for even an hour, my arms would shake so much that even when I stood still, they trembled like electricity was running through them, but this one felt much lighter from the moment I put it on my back.
With the brush cutter on my back, I headed toward the vegetable garden.
For a moment, I even had the illusion that the grass had grown taller in the short time I’d been gone, but now that I was equipped with new gear, there was nothing to fear.
I took my position and began working.
Pressing the spinning, loudly humming blade of the brush cutter against the grass, it cut cleanly and the grass fell.
Moving my arms right and left, I cut the grass, and when doing this kind of work, it was more comfortable to go from left to right.
Because the fallen grass wouldn’t get in the way of the remaining work.
It was a pro tip my seniors had taught me right after I’d started using the brush cutter in the army. I’d thanked them for teaching me, but it had really just been training so they could make me do more work.
The vegetable garden wasn’t that big, but even so, it took some time, and if I had tried to do the work with a sickle, I really would have been in trouble.
Had I been working for about an hour?
I’d cleanly cut even the grass on the slope, and now the field was starting to take proper shape.
I turned off the brush cutter, put it away in the storage shed, and came back with a rake.
I was planning to gather the fallen grass and throw it away, but there was so much that it seemed like this would take some time too.
“It’s boring just working like this...”
I wasn’t the type to get lonely even when alone, but silently gathering grass with a rake made me feel a bit bored.
“I should put on some work songs.”
Thinking that listening to music would be better than working in silence, I turned on some songs.
I usually listened to whatever was high on the charts these days, and when I pressed play and the music started, the work atmosphere definitely improved.
I’d liked music from the start, and I’d even heard people say I was pretty good at singing when we went to noraebang during company dinners.
“Hmm, hmm, hmm.”
Humming along to the flowing melody, my work efficiency seemed to improve too. I began neatly piling the cut grass in appropriate spots to throw away.
After doing that a few times, the dirt ground started to become visible.
But the work wasn’t over yet. While the stems had been cut away, the weed roots were still embedded in the earth.
Pulling all of these out was what it took to finish the basic preparations for tending the vegetable garden, and honestly, this too would be over quickly if I used a machine.
In the gardening videos I’d seen online, they often used tillers or tractors for the work.
But unfortunately, our house didn’t have such machines.
My father hadn’t owned a tiller to begin with, and though we had one old tractor, it had broken down before my father passed away last year and had been scrapped.
He’d planned to buy a new tractor after seeing how things went this year, but he couldn’t because of the sudden liver cancer.
Agricultural machines like tractors or cultivators didn’t require separate licenses, so even I, who only knew how to drive, could use them without issue.
The agricultural technology center taught basic operating methods for beginner farmers, and these days everything was on YouTube too, so if the scale of my farming grew later, I was thinking of considering using a tiller or tractor.
But that was something to think about later; for now, I had to clear the grass with the farming tools at home.
I took out my phone and checked the time, and somehow it was already past three in the afternoon. I’d come out to work since morning, but going to town and running the brush cutter had taken quite a lot of time.
“I need to hurry.”
****
“Whew... refreshing.”
I was a bit tired from working in the vegetable garden since morning.
Still, I felt refreshed after taking a shower.
‘I’ve cleared all the grass, and tomorrow I’ll spread compost and till the field over.’
I’d immediately challenged myself to tending the vegetable garden after hearing what Uncle Yeonggil said, but there was much more to do than I’d easily assumed.
Still, I felt good.
Most of all, perhaps because I’d focused on the work without thinking about anything else, my stress had decreased and the anxiety that occasionally surged over me as if I were dying had disappeared.
Though my condition had improved, the doctor’s words telling me not to skip my medication came to mind.
I took out water from the refrigerator and took my medicine, and after drinking the water, my appetite started to return.
‘What should I eat for dinner?’
Since coming to the countryside, I often worried about what to eat. If I were in the city, I would have ordered delivery because I was tired, but that wasn’t possible here.
I was so far from the town center that even if I opened a delivery app, no restaurants that delivered would show up.
Thanks to that, I had to cook every day, but that was fine. I liked cooking.
At first, I’d opened the freezer thinking of eating dumplings, but the leftover pork belly from eating with the uncles a while back caught my eye.
‘Tonight is pork belly kimchi stew.’
It was easy to make and delicious, so it felt perfect for dinner.
I took out a pot and drizzled cooking oil evenly in the pan.
Then I started grilling the pork belly on top. The meat began to cook up golden brown, but I had to cook it completely so the raw meat smell wouldn’t remain.
I cut the fully cooked pork belly into bite-sized pieces, added red pepper powder, and began stir-frying it together with the pork fat.
It would be more delicious with green onions stir-fried in as well, but I didn’t have any now, so I reluctantly skipped that.
‘Next I need to add the kimchi.’
Next I took out some aged kimchi, cut it up, stir-fried it once with the pork belly, then added kimchi brine and water and began boiling it vigorously.
Once it came to a quick boil, a delicious smell rose, and I added a little minced garlic.
After boiling it once more, I tasted it, and I unconsciously frowned.
“Ugh... it’s sour.”
The kimchi was more fermented than I thought, so it tasted quite sour.
I took out sugar and added a spoonful to the kimchi stew. This would reduce the sourness and make it tasty.
Adding sugar, I also added a spoonful of soy sauce and tasted it. For something thrown together quickly, the taste was excellent.
Hunger is the best sauce, they say, and being hungry made it taste even better. I set the table and prepared to eat.
I took out the seasoned beans and stir-fried anchovies I’d bought as side dishes from the refrigerator and set the table, completing a rather nice dinner spread.
Now all that was left was to eat well.
“I’ll eat well.”
****
After finishing my meal and the dishes, I came outside to throw away the food scraps.
In the city, you use food waste bins, but unfortunately that isn’t possible in the countryside.
Of course, some villages use food waste bags to throw it away, but in places where the garbage truck doesn’t come, they deal with food waste on their own in various ways.
Some places put it in food waste bags and dispose of it, and others make their own compost bins to recycle food waste, but our family had simply buried food waste in a nearby field since long ago.
Since it would become compost and naturally disappear over time, we used this method, and the fact that the vegetable garden was right behind the house was precisely for this reason too.
I went back to the vegetable garden behind the house with the round stainless steel bowl full of food scraps.
Taking the shovel I’d used and left during the day, I went to one corner, dug the earth, and poured the food waste there.
Covering it back up nicely with dirt, I suddenly started hearing a sound.
Rustle, rustle.
It was the sound of something brushing through the grass, but it was dark and I couldn’t see what it was.
“What is that?”