Apocalyptic Hoarding Diary

Chapter 563 Cement Pit

She gritted her teeth, counted all the remaining money in her account, and finally gave a number: "18 bags of cement and 40 bags of sand. Do you have any? Can you deliver them tomorrow morning?"

The man on the other end of the phone was silent for a few seconds, probably doing some calculations, before replying, "You have to pay first. The situation is special right now. If you want it delivered, there will be an extra five yuan delivery fee. I happen to be free, so I can make the trip for you."

"No problem," Xu Xiaoyan readily agreed, transferred the money according to the price quoted by the other party, and then gave her home address.

The other party said they could deliver it the next morning and asked her to leave the gate open. His son dropped off the things and left, and both parties tried to avoid contact.

After putting down her phone, she lay in bed and couldn't sleep for a long time.

I kept thinking about the size and layout of those cement troughs, whether to make them into narrow strips and line them up against the wall, or to make them into large squares and scatter them around the yard.

As I was vaguely thinking, a sliver of grayish-white light appeared on the horizon.

The next morning around nine o'clock, the sound of a tricycle sputtering and loading cargo came from outside the gate.

Xu Xiaoyan opened the door a crack, and a middle-aged man in his forties was unloading cement bags from the truck bed. The grayish-white bags were neatly stacked, and there were dozens of bags of sand next to them, piled up in a small mound.

The boss unloaded the goods and drove away. She stood at the door looking at the pile of cement and sand, resignedly carrying them into the yard herself.

The weather was unusually clear, and those cement troughs needed to be cured for a few days after being poured before they could be used.

Xu Xiaoyan dared not delay and seized this brief window of opportunity to get to work quickly, trying to complete all the planting troughs, fill them with soil, and transplant the plants before the groundwater problem occurred.

She took out the discarded cardboard boxes and a roll of unused thick plastic film from her storage space, and squatted in the yard to start making molds.

The cardboard box was disassembled and laid flat. The bottom and side panels were cut into long strips and then glued together with tape to form an open rectangular container that was about one meter long, forty centimeters wide, and thirty centimeters deep.

A layer of plastic film is placed on the inner wall to prevent cement from sticking to the cardboard and making it impossible to demold.

After making the first mold, she placed it on the ground and examined it for a while. She felt that the size was just right, not too big or too small, and that one person could move it.

So they made five or six more identical molds and lined them up in the middle of the yard.

Cement and sand are poured into an iron basin in a 1:3 ratio, along with an appropriate amount of water, and stirred back and forth with a shovel to form a uniform mortar.

Wearing thick gloves, she shoveled mortar into the mold, smoothed the surface with a wooden board, and then poked several drainage holes in the bottom with a thin bamboo stick.

After each one is finished, cover the surface with plastic film to prevent moisture from evaporating too quickly and causing cracks, and wait for the cement to slowly solidify and harden.

After the first batch of cement flower pots were made, Xu Xiaoyan did not rush to move them, but left them directly on the exposed land in the middle of the yard that had been soaked by rainwater.

The soil has been contaminated and can no longer be used directly for planting, but it's fine to place the cement flowerpot on top as an isolation layer, as long as the pot is filled with clean soil.

As for the soil for the pots, she had already decided on the source: the humus soil from the first greenhouse!

She dug out the mixed humus, poured it into the dried cement flowerpots, filled them, tamped it down, and then sprinkled a thin layer of fine soil on the surface to keep the soil moderately loose.

The first batch of flowerpots were successfully planted with vegetable seedlings and bean vines transplanted from the greenhouse.

But after doing all that, Xu Xiaoyan stood in the yard looking at the humus in the greenhouse, and the worry in her heart did not completely disappear.

She is currently using a mixture of humus soil dug up from the mountain, but this soil is limited. If even planting soil becomes scarce in the future, she will have to find other solutions.

Xu Xiaoyan turned around and went back into the first greenhouse, picked up an entrenching tool, and started digging down from the inside of the greenhouse, near the wall.

When I first shoveled the soil, it was still relatively soft, after all, it was an improved mixed soil. But when I dug to a depth of half a meter, the soil became noticeably harder, and the color changed from dark brown to light brown native soil.

She didn't stop, and continued digging down, shovel by shovel.

Half a meter, one meter, one and a half meters, two meters—the deeper you dig, the denser the soil becomes. You have to press down hard with an entrenching tool, and each clod of soil you shovel up is much heavier than the ones above.

Sweat dripped down her forehead and into the soil. She pursed her lips and continued digging silently. The entrenching tool made a dull sound as it struck the soil, echoing repeatedly in the quiet greenhouse.

Fortunately, there was space. She could directly store the excavated soil into her space with a thought, without having to carry it out basket by basket, saving at least half of her effort and time.

She dug underground all by herself, taking a break when she got tired, drinking some water, and then continuing to work. She shoveled the soil into the space and piled it up, and slowly a square pit appeared underneath.

By the evening of the following day, she had dug a huge pit about three meters deep along the inner wall of the greenhouse, covering the entire area of ​​the greenhouse.

Xu Xiaoyan stood at the bottom of the pit and looked up. It felt like she was standing in a square, deep well. Above her head was a hazy halo of light coming through a white plastic sheet greenhouse, and all around her were earthen walls condensed with moisture.

She climbed out of the pit, dragged her aching legs to the pile of materials in the yard, mixed all the remaining cement and sand, carried bucket by bucket back to the greenhouse, and began pouring cement layers along the bottom and walls of the pit.

A thin layer was laid at the bottom, smoothed and polished with wooden boards, and the four walls were also covered with cement mortar, turning the entire inner surface of the pit into a sealed cement square pool.

After the cement pool dried completely, the excavated soil that had been piled up in the space was filled back into the large pit.

This time, however, the soil was no longer in contact with the original strata outside. The bottom of the pit was isolated by a cement layer, and the four walls were sealed with cement walls. The soil that was filled back in would no longer have any contact with the polluted water source underground.

After filling the pit, she covered it with a new layer of humus, restoring it to its original state.

The first greenhouse was completely transformed from "ground planting" to "independent cement pool planting," completely isolating it from the outside world.

She reorganized the greenhouse in the yard into two areas, one built on top of a large cement pit, used to grow deep-rooted vegetables and fruits.

Another one was placed on top of those long, narrow cement flowerpots to grow shallow-rooted leafy vegetables and herbs.