Northerners like to store Chinese cabbage for winter. Do you know in which solar term people store Chinese cabbage?

Cabbage is easy to preserve, and it can also be processed into sauerkraut with unique flavor, which is the most important vegetable eaten by northerners in winter.

In the north, before the severe winter comes, every household will buy hundreds of pounds of cabbage, and the day when people snap up cabbage is just the "light snow" season. There are agricultural proverbs as evidence: "Snow is coming, Chinese cabbage is coming", "Snow is drifting, and Chinese cabbage is busy" and "beginning of winter radish and cabbage".

Why do people store cabbage when it snows lightly? This is because "frostbite is inevitable in snowy days". If we don't take the time to "harvest" and store cabbage when it rains, we may be suddenly attacked by a cold wave of ice and snow when the harvest is late, and there will be no food for a winter.

From this, we can also see some characteristics of Xiaoxue solar terms. Gregorian calendar 165438+ every year1October 22 or 23, when the sun reaches 240 degrees of the longitude of the Yellow River, it is light snow. Because of the cold weather, it stopped raining and snowed instead. But because the ground is not cold at this time and the amount of snow is not enough, it is called light snow.

Because the temperature is not low enough at this time, the snow is often in a semi-frozen and semi-melted state, and will soon melt after falling to the ground, which is called "wet snow" in meteorology; Sometimes it rains and snows together, which is called "sleet"; Sometimes white ice particles as big as rice grains fall, which is called "rice snow".

In ancient China, light snow was divided into three periods: "When the rainbow disappears, when the weather rises and the earth falls, when it is blocked, it becomes winter." It means that when there is light snow, the rainbow disappears, the sun in the sky rises, and the shade on the ground drops, which leads to the impassability of heaven and earth, the non-intersection of yin and yang, the loss of vitality of everything, the obstruction of heaven and earth and the turning into winter.

The first snow in the light snow season is in North China and the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Although it began to snow at this time, the amount of snow was generally small. It snowed at night and melted during the day.

Of course, if the cold air is strong and the warm and humid airflow is active, it may snow heavily. It is a big taboo for farmers not to snow lightly. There is an agricultural proverb: "Little snow doesn't see snow, and long work breaks in the coming year." It means that if it doesn't snow in the light snow solar term, winter wheat in northern China will be short of water and drought, and pests and diseases will easily overwinter, which will affect the growth and development of wheat and lead to insufficient yield, so there is no need to hire long-term workers.

Summary: When there is light snow, the temperature drops suddenly and the weather becomes dry, which is also a good time to process bacon, so there is a folk custom of "curing in winter and storing it for the winter". After the light snow festival, some farmers began to make sausages and bacon for the Spring Festival.

Some places in the south have the custom of eating Ciba before and after the light snow. Ciba, also known as rice cake, is a traditional food that has been circulated in rural areas for thousands of years. It was originally used by farmers to worship the cow god. Ciba is made by steaming glutinous rice and stamping it with a special stone trough. It takes a lot of effort to make Ciba by hand, but it is soft and delicate and tastes excellent.